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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... 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? The simplest, on which all the others depend in various ways, are ...
... created the technology (including agriculture) that then permitted the population boom, but as we shall see, evolution is typically an interwoven fabric of coevolutionary loops and twists: in surprising ways, our so-called native ...
... creating exuberant reactions to reflections to reminders to reevaluations that generate novel structures: ideas, fantasies, theories, and, yes, thinking tools to create still more. Read it; it will take your imagination on a roller ...
... creates art, writes poetry, devises scientific theories, builds spaceships, navigates the oceans, or even tames fire. This provokes the retort: What about the elegantly decorated bowers built by bowerbirds, the political subtlety of ...
... create the end product are utterly blind and purposeless, the product itself is not just intricate but stunningly effective at what it does—a brilliant design. It takes all the ingenuity human reverse engineers can muster to figure out ...
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From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds Daniel Clement Dennett,Daniel C. Dennett No preview available - 2017 |