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. |
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... Animals designed to deal with affordances Higher animals as intentional systems: the emergence of comprehension Comprehension comes in degrees Part II FROM EVOLUTION TO INTELLIGENT DESIGN 6. What Is Information? Welcome to the ...
... animals, all direct descendants of the original eukaryotic cell. This Eukaryotic Revolution paved the way for another great transition, the Cambrian “Explosion” more than half a billion years ago, which saw the “sudden” arrival of a ...
... animal lovers deplore it as an intellectual sin of the worst kind, scientifically ill-informed, an ignoble vestige of the bad old days when people routinely thought that all “dumb” animals were put on this planet for our use and ...
... animals in the wild, the more you appreciate their brilliance. Other thinkers, particularly in the arts and ... animals are not so smart either, and yet both humans and (other) animals are admirably equipped to deal “brilliantly” with ...
... animal could match, feats that were beyond the reach of any imaginable mechanism, however elaborate and complicated. So he concluded that minds like his (and yours) were not material entities, like lungs or brains, but made of some ...
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From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds Daniel Clement Dennett,Daniel C. Dennett No preview available - 2017 |