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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... living things were relatively simple single-celled entities— bacteria, or their cousins, archaea: the prokaryotes. Then an amazing thing happened: two different prokaryotes, each with its own competences and habits due to its billions ...
... living thing big enough to be visible to the naked eye is a multicellular eukaryote. We are eukaryotes, and so are sharks, birds, trees, mushrooms, insects, worms, and all the other plants and animals, all direct descendants of the ...
... living organisms. He was by no means the first to put forward this denial of dualism; it has been the prevailing—but not unanimous—opinion of both scientists and philosophers for the better part of a century. In fact, many of us in the ...
... living bodies. It is not all that hard these days to imagine how respiration works even if you're ignorant of the details: you breathe in the air, which we know is a combination of different gases, and we breathe out what we can't use ...
... living thing. (What this means will gradually become clear, I hope—and then we can set this metaphorical way of speaking aside, as a ladder we have climbed and no longer need to rely on.) The idea of Cartesian gravity, as so far ...
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From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds Daniel Clement Dennett,Daniel C. Dennett No preview available - 2017 |