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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... exist! Memes are described as “discrete” and “faithfully transmitted,” but much in cultural change is neither Memes, unlike genes, don't have competing alleles at a locus Memes add nothing to what we already know about culture The would ...
... exist. The cascade of processes must make changes that we can see, in retrospect, to be improvements in the design of the emerging systems. (We're on the way to checkmate. Are we making progress?) Until there were systems that could be ...
... exists,9 and many of the scientists who guiltlessly allude to the functions of whatever they are studying still insist that they would never commit the sin of teleology. One of the further forces in operation here is the desire not to ...
... exists.) Different. senses. of. “why”. Perhaps the best way of seeing the reality, indeed the ubiquity in Nature, of reasons is to reflect on the different meanings of “why.” The English word is equivocal, and the main ambiguity is marked ...
... exists now. How come and what for? The Pittsburgh philosophers have not addressed this question, asking how “it got that way,” so we will have to supplement their analysis with some careful speculation of our own on the evolution of the ...
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From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds Daniel Clement Dennett,Daniel C. Dennett No preview available - 2017 |