Understanding Others: Other Minds; Strangers

I’ve recently finished three nonfiction books, and without particularly planning this, I realised that they complement each other very nicely:

• Strangers — Essays on the Human and Non-human, by Rebecca Tamás
• Other Minds — The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness, by Peter Godfrey-Smith
• Understanding Others in a Neurodiverse World — A Radical Perspective on Communication and Shared Meaning, by Gemma Williams

The three of them are all concerned in different ways with the problem of the other, which I suppose has occupied me to a greater or lesser extent for almost as long as I’ve been conscious.

I was maybe six years old when my brother, Leo, decided to become vegetarian (well, pescetarian) after watching King Kong and Tarka the Otter: two films in which humans treat other creatures with unspeakable cruelty, as if their feelings, their pain, were of no consequence at all. My own vegetarianism followed not far behind, along with a concern for the wellbeing of other animals that has never left me. It seemed obvious to me that it was not only humans who suffer, and I was never clear why human suffering was the only kind that most people seemed to care about.

Decades later, I realised I was autistic; I suspect that my own early experiences of being othered played a part in this early conversion to the vegetarian cause. I knew what it was like to have people act as if you were incomprehensible, and therefore your distress wasn’t important, was not to be taken seriously. I haven’t been able to find any research on this, but anecdotally, there seems to be a strong correlation between vegetarianism, perhaps especially veganism, and autism. My guess is that this relates to those early experiences of being othered and dismissed, combined with a tendency to scrupulously follow rules like ‘reduce suffering where possible’ through to their logical conclusions, when the rules make sense to us.

Strangers is a short, beautiful and fairly eccentric collection of essays on ethics, otherness and coexistence, by a writer better known as a poet, published in a physically pleasing edition by Makina Books. As the subtitle suggests, the essays are about the human as much as the non-human, and partly about the edges of who or what is seen to qualify. If I say that it takes in politics, history, cultural criticism and psychology, I’m probably making it sound less coherent and more pretentious than it really is.

Other Minds is pretty solidly about non-humans, although at least part of its motivation is to think about what other kinds of minds can tell us about ourselves. Written by a scuba-diving philosopher of science and the mind, it orbits around the octopus: the closest thing we can get to a truly alien intelligence on Earth, with a good chunk of its smarts distributed between its tentacles, and such a short lifespan that it is baffling that it is able to learn so much in so little time.

On its way, Other Minds dives into the evolution of life, with a focus on the development of forms of organisation which allow something approaching sentience, and ultimately consciousness. It explores the ways that cephalopods behave, sense and process the world in some depth, and discusses what this all might mean for how we think about our own minds, but I found it surprisingly light on actual philosophy. I would have appreciated more exploration of what such incomprehensible intelligences imply for humanity, particularly from an ethical perspective; but this is not really a criticism, just a personal perspective. For a book of only 200 pages, it already covers a lot of ground, without feeling unduly dense.

It’s very clearly and engagingly written, which is more than I can say for a lot of philosophy texts; and the audiobook I listened to was very well read by Peter Noble, although something bugs me slightly about an Australian writer being narrated with an English accent. I look forward to Metazoa and Living on Earth, although I may end up reading more of his very good introduction to the philosophy of science, Theory and Reality, first.

The third book, by autistic linguist and autism researcher Gemma Williams, explores what the diversity of human minds means for communication and coexistence. Like the other writers mentioned here, she explores deep questions and difficult ideas with a clear eye and an impressively readable style. Her exposition of academic linguistics is lightened with humour and well-grounded in personal stories.

While her focus is very much on human communication, she describes herself as a ‘recovering beekeeper’, and the ways that bees communicate and cooperate provide a sweet narrative frame for much of the book.

Her favoured angle on linguistics is Relevance Theory — a school of thought which aims to make sense of how we make sense, looking at what it takes to make communication work, despite its inevitable ambiguities. The more that two people share a cognitive landscape, the easier it is for the listener to resolve those ambiguities, and for the speaker to avoid them.

Applying this fact to communication between people whose brains work quite differently, Williams deepens Damian Milton’s ‘double empathy problem’ to explore broader failures of cross-neurotype communication, and to look at strategies for improving it.

On the way, she provides a very accessible introduction to theories of autism (including Monotropism, which itself was originally born out of thoughts around relevance theory) and draws useful lessons from various approaches to communicating across divides, like the use of English as a Lingua Franca in cross-cultural exchanges. This book provides a valuable contribution to how we think about and work with different ways of thinking and communicating. It does all this in a way that carefully avoids jargon (or clearly explains it, where necessary).

I found all of these books charming and thought-provoking; all have vital lessons for people existing in a world where they cannot hope to fully understand the experiences of others, but where the wellbeing of all depends on us making the effort to try.

I bring them all together here because I think that there is a lot of scope for learning about related problems from people who approch them very differently. The study of animal minds and human neurodiversity can be seen as part of the same project: of recognising and respecting different ways of being, and learning how to live together. The use of philosophy and literature or storytelling, alongside scientific understanding, seems to me absolutely indispensable in all of this. It is satisfying to see how these approaches surface and interact across all three books.