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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Daniel C. Dennett. Figure 12.1: Claidière et al., random patterns evolve into memorable tetrominos Figure 14.1: Complementary color afterimage PREFACE I started trying to think seriously about the evolution.
Daniel C. Dennett. PREFACE. I started trying to think seriously about the evolution of the human mind when I was a graduate student in philosophy in Oxford in 1963 and knew almost nothing about either evolution or the human mind. In those ...
... trying out versions of these ideas for the last four years. Others who wrestled with my drafts, changed my mind, noted my errors, and urged me to try for greater clarity include Sue Stafford, Murray Smith, Paul Oppenheim, Dale Peterson ...
... trying to appreciate them without following my convoluted path is likely to be forlorn, as I know from many years of trying, and failing, to persuade people piecemeal. Here is a warning list of some of the hazards (to comfortable ...
... tried their hand at knitting up what one of the best of them, Terrence Deacon, has called “the Cartesian wound that ... trying? Because, first, I think we have made tremendous scientific progress in the last twenty years; many of the ...
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From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds Daniel Clement Dennett,Daniel C. Dennett No preview available - 2017 |