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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... answer this question? The short answer is that minds evolved and created thinking tools that eventually enabled minds to know how minds evolved, and even to know how these tools enabled them to know what minds are. What thinking tools ...
... answers, which then sets the stage for the hardest inversion of all: seeing what consciousness looks like from the new perspective. It's a challenging route, but there are stretches where I review familiar material to make sure ...
... answer the question! I mention that because some people marvel at the question and then “answer” it by saying, “It's an impenetrable mystery!” or “God did it!” They may in the end be right, of course, but given the fabulous bounty of ...
... answers are that they have a very hard time making themselves actually consider the candidate answers objectively. For instance, some readers may already be silently shaking their heads over a claim I just made: Our human minds are ...
... answer, but not right now, except in briefest outline: While the processes that gave rise to this caring go back thousands of years, and in some regards millions or even billions of years, they first became a topic—an object to think ...
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From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds Daniel Clement Dennett,Daniel C. Dennett No preview available - 2017 |