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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... chapters in early drafts: Alicia Armijo, Edward Beuchert, David Blass, Michael Dale, Yufei Du, Brendan Fleig-Goldstein, Laura Friedman, Elyssa Harris, Justis Koon, Runeko Lovell, Robert Mathai, Jonathan Moore, Savannah Pearlman, Nikolai ...
... chapters, if it is to hold our imaginations in place for the second feat. The next eight chapters delve into the empirical details of the evolution of minds and language as they appear from our inverted perspective. This allows us to ...
... chapter I turn briefly to the very beginning of life on the planet and give a preliminary outline of the story to come, with scant detail, and also tackle one of the first objections that (I predict) will occur to the reader while ...
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From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds Daniel Clement Dennett,Daniel C. Dennett No preview available - 2017 |