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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... task is cyclical, we have to begin somewhere in the middle and go around several times. The task is made difficult by a feature it doesn't share with other scientific investigations of processes (in cosmology, geology, biology, and ...
... through a smattering of math. When the topic of consciousness arises, the difficult task is to keep a lid on the anxieties and suspicions that seduce people— including many scientists—into distorting what we know and aiming preemptive.
... task ahead and looking at the external universe from the “first-person point of view.” From this vantage point, she relies on all the familiar furniture of her mind to keep her bearings, and Cartesian gravity is the force that locks her ...
... task can be done, the game can be won. There may actually be many ways life could possibly have arisen out of nonlife, but finding just one that deserves scientific allegiance (until a better alternative is discovered) would.
... task so daunting that it has fueled the conviction among researchers that even though the processes that must be invoked to create the end product are utterly blind and purposeless, the product itself is not just intricate but ...
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From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds Daniel Clement Dennett,Daniel C. Dennett No preview available - 2017 |