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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... Understanding Animals designed to deal with affordances Higher animals as intentional systems: the emergence of comprehension Comprehension comes in degrees Part II FROM EVOLUTION TO INTELLIGENT DESIGN 6. What Is Information? Welcome to ...
... understanding of our conscious minds. The path is strewn with difficulties, both empirical and conceptual, and there are plenty of experts who vigorously disagree on how to handle these problems. I have been struggling through these ...
... understanding or experience. The problem with dualism, ever since Descartes, is that nobody has ever been able to offer a convincing account of how these postulated interactive transactions between mind and body could occur without ...
... understanding of what is happening. Suppose the would-be mind-explainer starts with her own mind. She stands at Home, on Planet Descartes, meditating on the task ahead and looking at the external universe from the “first-person point of ...
... understanding human culture fills some people, even wise and thoughtful people, with loathing. They see human culture as something transcendent, the miraculous endowment that distinguishes us human beings from the beasts, 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 |