Knowledge Tree
Peter Godfrey-Smith
Also known as: Godfrey-Smith
Facts (15)
Sources
Complexity and the Evolution of Consciousness | Biological Theory link.springer.com Sep 14, 2022 11 facts
claimPeter Godfrey-Smith argues that controlled motion represents a major transition in action and innovation, transforming organisms into a new kind of object.
claimPeter Godfrey-Smith recognizes that the environmental complexity thesis is not driven by environmental complexity itself, but rather by the complexity that is faced by and matters to an organism.
claimThe Cambrian period marked the emergence of a new animal lifestyle characterized by agency and subjectivity, which Peter Godfrey-Smith describes as a 'different mode of being'.
referenceIn the book 'Metazoa', Peter Godfrey-Smith describes action as having to be reinvented at a larger scale with new forms of coordination.
claimPeter Godfrey-Smith emphasizes agency and subjectivity as central to consciousness, though the author notes these do not constitute a single property.
claimGodfrey-Smith (2020) investigates why certain animal lifestyles failed despite gradual increases in sensorimotor capacities, attempting to ground consciousness in the evolution of those capacities.
quoteGodfrey-Smith (2020) describes the Ediacaran period as "quiet and placid," noting that "There are almost no signs of predation—no half-eaten individuals, no sign of the built-in weapons, offensive and defensive, that animals tend to have now."
quotePeter Godfrey-Smith states in 'Metazoa' (2020, p. 53): "Multicellular action involves coordination across vast scales from a cell’s point of view."
claimKeijzer and colleagues popularized an inverse version of Peter Godfrey-Smith’s environmental complexity thesis in a series of publications.
claimPeter Godfrey-Smith acknowledges the influence of Fred Keijzer in his rejection of mainstream externalist representationalist thinking in the philosophy of mind, specifically regarding the emphasis on the shaping of action.
claimPeter Godfrey-Smith’s account of the origins of cognition is influenced by the externalist strategies of behavioral ecologists and evolutionary biologists, fields which have historically treated the internal processes of organisms as a black box.
Consciousness in Artificial Intelligence? A Framework for Classifying ... arxiv.org Nov 20, 2025 2 facts
perspectivePeter Godfrey-Smith argues that the complexity of interactions and oscillatory waves in biological systems extends far beyond the network-like neural connections of neurons.
claimGodfrey-Smith's fine-grained functionalism shares significant commonalities with Thompson's version of enactivism.
AI Sessions #9: The Case Against AI Consciousness (with Anil Seth) conspicuouscognition.com Feb 17, 2026 2 facts
referencePeter Godfrey-Smith has argued for the importance of intracellular and intra-neuronal activity in understanding the brain.
referencePeter Godfrey-Smith, in his book 'Metazoa', suggests that it is easier to conceive of a physical system like a living organism—characterized by billions of biochemical reactions and integrated electromagnetic fields—entailing a basic phenomenal state than it is to conceive of such a state arising from the abstractions of information processing.