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
Results 1-5 of 84
Daniel C. Dennett. people are physical objects, obeying the laws of physics, to an understanding of our conscious minds. The path is strewn with difficulties, both empirical and conceptual, and there are plenty of experts who vigorously ...
Daniel C. Dennett. case of two different sets of competences, honed over eons of independent R&D (research and development), being united into something bigger and better. We read almost every day of Google or Amazon or General Motors ...
Daniel C. Dennett. how continents drift, how hurricanes are born, and much, much more. We know our brains are made of the same ingredients as all the other things we've explained, and we know that we belong to an evolved lineage that can ...
Daniel C. Dennett. The word “reason” is acceptable in all four questions (at least to my ear—how about yours?), but the answers to (1) and (3) don't give reasons (there aren't any reasons); they give causes, or process narratives. In ...
Daniel C. Dennett. both kinds of norms to create the perspective from which reasons are discernible in Nature. Reason-appreciation did not coevolve with reasons the way color vision coevolved with color. Reason-appreciation is a later ...
Other editions - View all
From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds Daniel Clement Dennett,Daniel C. Dennett No preview available - 2017 |