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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... philosophers weren't expected to know about science, and even the most illustrious philosophers of mind were largely ignorant of work in psychology, neuroanatomy, and neurophysiology (the terms cognitive science and neuroscience would ...
... philosophers or as philosophically trained scientists with labs of their own. They are professionals, and I am still an amateur, but by now a well-informed amateur, who gets invited to give lectures and participate in workshops and ...
... philosophers who agree with at least large portions of my view and have deeply contributed to it, I'd no doubt lose my nerve and decide that I was the one who's terminally confused, and of course it's possible that our bold community of ...
... philosopher, was very impressed with his own mind, for good reason. He called it his res cogitans, or thinking thing, and it struck him, on reflection, as a thing of miraculous competence. If anybody had the right to be in awe of his ...
... philosophers since the seventeenth century. Francis Crick, the recently deceased co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, was another of history's greatest scientists, and his last major piece of writing was The Astonishing Hypothesis ...
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From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds Daniel Clement Dennett,Daniel C. Dennett No preview available - 2017 |