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. |
From inside the book
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... journey The Cartesian wound Cartesian gravity 2. Before Bacteria and Bach Why Bach? How investigating the prebiotic world is like playing chess 3. On the Origin of Reasons The death or rebirth of teleology? Different senses of “why”
... Darwin's strange inversion of reasoning Reasons without reasoners Competence without comprehension 1. 2. 3. 4. Turing's strange inversion of reasoning 5. Information as design worth stealing 6. Darwinism about Darwinism.
... 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 own mind, Descartes did. He was undoubtedly one of the ...
... a dynamic imagination-distorter that has arisen for good reasons, we can learn how to traverse it safely or—what may amount to the same thing—make it vanish. FIGURE 1.1: Duck-rabbit. Cartesian gravity, unlike the gravity of physics,
... reasons. Is there design in Nature or only apparent design? If we consider evolutionary biology to be a species of reverse engineering, does this imply that there are reasons for the arrangements of the parts of living things? Whose reasons ...
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From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds Daniel Clement Dennett,Daniel C. Dennett No preview available - 2017 |