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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... tree of all languages Figure 9.3: Selfridge's automatic CAT Figure 13.1: Darwinian space Figure 13.2: Darwinian space of cultural evolution with intermediate phenomena Color insert following page 238 Figure 3.3: Australian termite ...
... trees, mushrooms, insects, worms, and all the other plants and animals, all direct descendants of the original eukaryotic cell. This Eukaryotic Revolution paved the way for another great transition, the Cambrian “Explosion” more than ...
... trees do, what animals do, and what we do. (And there are colors as well, of course, and yes, Virginia, life really exists.) Different. senses. of. “why”. Perhaps the best way of seeing the reality, indeed the ubiquity in Nature, of 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 |