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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... intentional systems: the emergence of comprehension Comprehension comes in degrees Part II FROM EVOLUTION TO INTELLIGENT DESIGN 6. What Is Information? Welcome to the Information Age How can we characterize semantic information? Trade ...
Daniel C. Dennett. Hume's strange inversion of reasoning A red stripe as an intentional object What is Cartesian gravity and why does it persist? 15. The Age of Post-Intelligent Design What are the limits of our comprehension? “Look Ma ...
... trying to understand, explain, and predict phenomena: the physical stance, the design stance, and the intentional stance (Dennett 1971, 1981, 1983, 1987, and elsewhere). The physical stance is the least risky but also the most difficult;
... intentional stance works primarily for things that are designed to use information to accomplish their functions. It works by treating the thing as a rational agent, attributing “beliefs” and “desires” and “rationality” to the thing ...
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From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds Daniel Clement Dennett,Daniel C. Dennett No preview available - 2017 |