#203 – Peter Godfrey-Smith on interfering with wild nature, accepting death, and the origin of complex civilisation

80,000 Hours Podcast

"In the human case, it would be mistaken to give a kind of hour-by-hour accounting. You know, “I had +4 level of experience for this hour, then I had -2 for the next hour, and then I had -1” — and you sort of sum to try to work out the total… And I came to think that something like that will be applicable in some of the animal cases as well… There are achievements, there are experiences, there are things that can be done in the face of difficulty that might be seen as having the same kind of redemptive role, as casting into a different light the difficult events that led up to it.

"The example I use is watching some birds successfully raising some young, fighting off a couple of rather aggressive parrots of another species that wanted to fight them, prevailing against difficult odds — and doing so in a way that was so wholly successful. It seemed to me that if you wanted to do an accounting of how things had gone for those birds, you would not want to do the naive thing of just counting up difficult and less-difficult hours. There’s something special about what’s achieved at the end of that process." —Peter Godfrey-Smith

In today’s episode, host Luisa Rodriguez speaks to Peter Godfrey-Smith — bestselling author and science philosopher — about his new book, Living on Earth: Forests, Corals, Consciousness, and the Making of the World.

Links to learn more, highlights, and full transcript.

They cover:

• Why octopuses and dolphins haven’t developed complex civilisation despite their intelligence.
• How the role of culture has been crucial in enabling human technological progress.
• Why Peter thinks the evolutionary transition from sea to land was key to enabling human-like intelligence — and why we should expect to see that in extraterrestrial life too.
• Whether Peter thinks wild animals’ lives are, on balance, good or bad, and when, if ever, we should intervene in their lives.
• Whether we can and should avoid death by uploading human minds.
• And plenty more.

Chapters:

• Cold open (00:00:00)
• Luisa's intro (00:00:57)
• The interview begins (00:02:12)
• Wild animal suffering and rewilding (00:04:09)
• Thinking about death (00:32:50)
• Uploads of ourselves (00:38:04)
• Culture and how minds make things happen (00:54:05)
• Challenges for water-based animals (01:01:37)
• The importance of sea-to-land transitions in animal life (01:10:09)
• Luisa's outro (01:23:43)

Producer: Keiran Harris
Audio engineering: Ben Cordell, Milo McGuire, Simon Monsour, and Dominic Armstrong
Content editing: Luisa Rodriguez, Katy Moore, and Keiran Harris
Transcriptions: Katy Moore