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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... depend in various ways, are spoken words, followed by reading, writing, and arithmetic, followed by navigation and mapmaking, apprenticeship practices, and all the concrete devices for extracting and manipulating information that we ...
... depends on amplifying things that almost never happen. For instance, mutation in DNA almost never occurs—not once in a billion copyings—but evolution depends on it. Moreover, the vast majority of mutations are either deleterious or ...
... depends on both our technology and our numbers. Our human minds are strikingly different from the minds of all other species, many times more powerful and more versatile. The long answer of how we came to have such remarkable minds is ...
... depend on the audience not imagining the ridiculously extravagant lengths magicians will go to in order to achieve a baffling effect. If you want to reverse engineer magicians, you should always remind yourself that they have no shame ...
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From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds Daniel Clement Dennett,Daniel C. Dennett No preview available - 2017 |