From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds"A supremely enjoyable, intoxicating work." —Nature How did we come to have minds? For centuries, poets, philosophers, psychologists, and physicists have wondered how the human mind developed its unrivaled abilities. Disciples of Darwin have explained how natural selection produced plants, but what about the human mind? In From Bacteria to Bach and Back, Daniel C. Dennett builds on recent discoveries from biology and computer science to show, step by step, how a comprehending mind could in fact have arisen from a mindless process of natural selection. A crucial shift occurred when humans developed the ability to share memes, or ways of doing things not based in genetic instinct. Competition among memes produced thinking tools powerful enough that our minds don’t just perceive and react, they create and comprehend. An agenda-setting book for a new generation of philosophers and scientists, From Bacteria to Bach and Back will delight and entertain all those curious about how the mind works. |
From inside the book
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... to the Information Age How can we characterize semantic information? Trade secrets, patents, copyright, and Bird's influence on bebop 7. Darwinian Spaces: An Interlude 10. 11. A new tool for thinking about evolution Cultural.
... Darwinian Space 8. Brains Made of Brains Top-down computers and bottom-up brains Competition and coalition in the brain Neurons, mules, and termites How do brains pick up affordances? Feral neurons? 9. The Role of Words in Cultural ...
... Darwinian beginnings The free-floating rationales of human communication Using our tools to think The age of intelligent design Pinker, Wilde, Edison, and Frankenstein Bach as a landmark of intelligent design The evolution of the ...
... Darwinian space Figure 7.2: Darwinian space with other dimensions Figure 7.3: Darwinian space for origin of life Figure 7.4: Darwinian space with religions Figure 7.5: Inverted Darwinian space with Darwinian phenomena at (0,0,0) and ...
... . (Hang on. Did I not just give aid and comfort to the Intelligent Design crowd? No. But how can a good materialist, atheist Darwinian like me keep a straight How investigating the prebiotic world is like playing chess.
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From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds Daniel Clement Dennett,Daniel C. Dennett No preview available - 2017 |