Published on Feb 12, 2017
Daniel Dennett has been mulling consciousness over for the last 50 years, and he’s ended up where we began: evolution. When this theory was proposed by Darwin, it inverted everything people at the time held to be true – it revealed that we were not created by intelligent design, but rather we evolved into intelligent designers ourselves. The process of evolution worked mindlessly, producing better and better human prototypes, crafting ever-more complex brains until that rhythmic, algorithmic, repetition birthed consciousness. This is what Dennett refers to as ‘competence without comprehension’. Daniel Dennett’s most recent book is From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds
From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds
In an entirely natural world without any supernatural mysteries you can explain the mind, the human mind, consciousness. It’s been my project for 50 years and what I’ve come to realize is that the only way to do it right is you have to take evolution a lot more seriously and really look hard at the question of how evolution could have gotten these wonderful projects up and running that have now lead to people like you and me and all the great artistic geniuses and scientific geniuses, the real intelligent designers that now inhabit the planet instead of the imaginary intelligent designer who never existed.
For millennia people had it in mind that all the wonderful things they saw in the world, all the beautiful design of the animals and plants and living things must be due to a fabulously intelligent designer, a creator. And so it was until Darwin came along and turned that upside down and realized that in principle there could be a process with no intelligence, no comprehension, no foresight, no purpose that would just inexorably grind out algorithmically better and better and better designs of all sorts and create the living world were there had been just lifeless matter before.
One of America’s foremost philosophers offers a major new account of the origins of the conscious mind.
How did we come to have minds?
For centuries, this question has intrigued psychologists, physicists, poets, and philosophers, who have wondered how the human mind developed its unrivaled ability to create, imagine, and explain. Disciples of Darwin have long aspired to explain how consciousness, language, and culture could have appeared through natural selection, blazing promising trails that tend, however, to end in confusion and controversy. Even though our understanding of the inner workings of proteins, neurons, and DNA is deeper than ever before, the matter of how our minds came to be has largely remained a mystery.
That is now changing, says Daniel C. Dennett. In From Bacteria to Bach and Back, his most comprehensive exploration of evolutionary thinking yet, he builds on ideas from computer science and biology to show how a comprehending mind could in fact have arisen from a mindless process of natural selection. Part philosophical whodunit, part bold scientific conjecture, this landmark work enlarges themes that have sustained Dennett’s legendary career at the forefront of philosophical thought.
In his inimitable style?laced with wit and arresting thought experiments?Dennett explains that a crucial shift occurred when humans developed the ability to share memes, or ways of doing things not based in genetic instinct. Language, itself composed of memes, turbocharged this interplay. Competition among memes?a form of natural selection?produced thinking tools so well-designed that they gave us the power to design our own memes. The result, a mind that not only perceives and controls but can create and comprehend, was thus largely shaped by the process of cultural evolution.
An agenda-setting book for a new generation of philosophers, scientists, and thinkers, From Bacteria to Bach and Back will delight and entertain anyone eager to make sense of how the mind works and how it came about.
The Evolution of Minds
