From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds

by Daniel C. Dennett

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393242072
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	02/07/2017
Pages:	496
Sales rank:	705,897
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.70(d)

About the Author

Daniel C. Dennett is University Professor Emeritus at Tufts University and the author of numerous books, including Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking, Breaking the Spell, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, and Consciousness Explained. He lives with his wife in Cape Elizabeth, Maine.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations xiii

Preface xv

Part I Turning Our World Upside Down

1 Introduction

Welcome to the jungle 3

A bird's-eye view of the journey 6

The Cartesian wound 13

Cartesian gravity 16

2 Before Bacteria and Bach

Why Bach? 23

How investigating the prebiotic world is like playing chess 26

3 On the Origin of Reasons

The death or rebirth of teleology? 33

Different senses of "why" 38

The evolution of "why": from how come to what for 40

Go forth and multiply 43

4 Two Strange Inversions of Reasoning

How Darwin and Turing broke a spell 53

Ontology and the manifest image 60

Automating the elevator 63

The intelligent designers of Oak Ridge and GOFAI 70

5 The Evolution of Understanding

Animals designed to deal with affordances 76

Higher animals as intentional systems: the emergence of comprehension 84

Comprehension comes in degrees 94

Part II From Evolution to Intelligent Design

6 What Is Information?

Welcome to the Information Age 105

How can we characterize semantic information? 113

Trade secrets, patents, copyright, and Bird's influence on bebop 128

7 Darwinian Spaces: An Interlude

A new tool for thinking about evolution 137

Cultural evolution: inverting a Darwinian Space 146

8 Brains Made of Brains

Top-down computers and bottom-up brains 150

Competition and coalition in the brain 154

Neurons, mules, and termites 160

How do brains pick up affordances? 165

Feral neurons? 171

9 The Role of Words in Cultural Evolution

The evolution of words 176

Looking more closely at words 182

How do words reproduce? 190

10 The Meme's-Eye Point of View

Words and other memes 205

What's good about memes? 209

11 What's Wrong with Memes? Objections and Replies

Memes don't exist! 221

Memes are described as "discrete" and "faithfully transmitted", but much in cultural change is neither 224

Memes, unlike genes, don't have competing alleles at a locus 233

Memes add nothing to what we already know about culture 237

The would-be science of memetics is not predictive 241

Memes can't explain cultural features, while traditional social sciences can 242

Cultural evolution is Lamarckian 243

12 The Origins of Language

The chicken-egg problem 248

Winding paths to human language 265

13 The Evolution of Cultural Evolution

Darwinian beginnings 282

The free-floating rationales of human communication 287

Using our tools to think 294

The age of intelligent design 301

Pinker, Wilde, Edison, and Frankenstein 316

Bach as a landmark of intelligent design 324

The evolution of the selective environment for human culture 330

Part III Turning Our Minds Inside Out

14 Consciousness as an Evolved User-Illusion

Keeping an open mind about minds 335

How do human brains achieve "global" comprehension using "local" competences? 340

How did our manifest image become manifest to us? 343

Why do we experience things the way we do? 346

Hume's strange inversion of reasoning 354

A red stripe as an intentional object 358

What is Cartesian gravity and why does it persist? 364

15 The Age of Post-Intelligent Design

What are the limits of our comprehension? 371

"Look Ma, no hands!" 379

The structure of an intelligent agent 388

What will happen to us? 400

Home at last 410

Appendix: The Background 415

References 425

Index 447

Interviews

. . . a supremely enjoyable, intoxicating work, tying together 50 years of thinking about where minds come from and how they work. 

Editorial Reviews

11/14/2016
Dennett (Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking), co-director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University, combines arguments from philosophy, biology, and informatics to explore questions associated with the origin of consciousness. It is an illuminating and insightful, if occasionally difficult, book; Dennett’s two overarching themes concern the philosophical ideas of René Descartes and the biological concepts of Charles Darwin. As he has done before, Dennett argues that Cartesian mind/body dualism, which is still accepted by many today, is incorrect. He makes a convincing case, based on a rapidly growing body of experimental evidence, that a materialist theory of mind is within reach. Dennett also builds on Darwin’s idea of natural selection, explaining how natural systems can create “competence without comprehension”—that is, situations in which sophisticated actions occur without the individual or machine involved understanding the reasons for the actions taken. This type of “bottom-up” design, according to Dennett, can lead to innovative results, including animal brains. He takes the next step to propose that basic language acquisition ability is coupled with the memes of language to yield both consciousness and culture. Though Dennett is sure to once again raise the hackles of certain peers, his ideas demand serious consideration. (Feb.)

Publishers Weekly

"A subtle and interesting argument."

The Guardian - Stephen Rose

"In From Bacteria to Bach and Back, his eighteenth book (thirteenth as sole author), Dennett presents a valuable and typically lucid synthesis of his worldview . . . . Dennett is always good company . . . . he writes with wit and elegance . . . . distinctive."

The New York Review of Books - Thomas Nagel

"Illuminating and insightful. . . . [Dennett] makes a convincing case, based on a rapidly growing body of experimental evidence, that a materialist theory of mind is within reach. . . . His ideas demand serious consideration."

Publishers' Weekly

"If you have not encountered [Dennett’s] work, you surely should . . . very few contemporary thinkers have supplied us with so many ‘thinking tools.’ . . . . Dennett’s book is astonishingly rich and will introduce you to most of the key ideas in the terrain he strides energetically across."

Standpoint - Adam Zeman

"A supremely enjoyable, intoxicating work, tying together 50 years of thinking about where minds come from and how they work. . . . Dennett has earned his reputation as one of today’s most readable, intellectually nimble and scientifically literate philosophers, as this subtle, clever book shows . . . . immensely instructive and pleasurable."

Nature

"A supremely enjoyable, intoxicating work, tying together 50 years of thinking about where minds come from and how they work. . . . Dennett has earned his reputation as one of today’s most readable, intellectually nimble and scientifically literate philosophers, as this subtle, clever book shows . . . . immensely instructive and pleasurable."

Nature Lib

★ 12/01/2016
For five decades, Dennett (cognitive studies, Tufts Univ.; Darwin's Dangerous Idea; Consciousness Explained) has been writing about the implications of Darwinian evolution, the origin of language, and the evolution of the human mind. His main objective here is to show that humans are different from all other species, primarily because memes—in the form of words—transformed our brains into minds. (The term meme was originally coined by Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene and refers to a unit of culturally transmitted information.) Drawing upon research and concepts from the fields of computer science, neuroscience, cognitive science, artificial intelligence, evolutionary biology, theoretical linguistics, and information science, Dennett brilliantly uses analogy, metaphor, and counterintuitive reasoning to construct his arguments. VERDICT This sweeping examination of biological and cultural evolution as seen through a philosopher's lens is highly recommended for academics as well as nonspecialists who enjoy Dawkins, Steven Pinker, and Douglas Hofstadter.—Cynthia Lee Knight, Hunterdon Cty. Historical Soc., Flemington, NJ

Library Journal

2016-12-08
The dean of consciousness-raising consciousness-explaining returns with another cleareyed exploration of the mind. "How come there are minds?" asks Dennett (Philosophy and Cognitive Science/Tufts Univ.; Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking, 2013, etc.), both beguilingly and with just a hint of a challenge. The human brain is both top-down and bottom-up, the latter reflecting automatic, animal impulses, the former the better angels of our nature. How did that top-down control system grow to dominate, producing what we think of as not just brain, but mind? Therein lies a tangled story with many threads, some of which lead into daunting territory: the thought, for instance, that consciousness is really a species of illusion on the part of the "user." After a few hundred pages' tour of an evolutionary theater populated by mirages, "feral neurons," and words that struggle to reproduce and thrive just as living creatures do, such a possibility comes to seem not so strange after all. Dennett defends the human mind as the chief feature distinguishing our kind from other animals; after all, he notes, we are aware of bacteria, whereas other animals are not, and "even bacteria don't know that there are bacteria." Yet that knowledge comes at a formidable cost, and when the author enters into the territory of inversions of reasoning and of reasoning about reasoning, of "the evolution of the evolution of culture" and other seeming circularities, you know that you're in for a bumpy ride: "There are reasons why trees spread their branches, but they are not in any strong sense the trees' reasons." The ride may be bumpy for casual readers, but it's always interesting, as Dennett calls on the likes of Darwin, Descartes, and Gibson—the last the author of a fruitful theory of "affordances"—to explore how we represent and understand representations. Anyone interested in modern theories of the mind and consciousness has to reckon with Dennett. This book, dense but accessible, is as good a place as any to start.

Kirkus Reviews

"This is a book to read and relish and then read again."

Wall Street Journal - Michael S. Gazzaniga

"Brave and bracing."

The Times - Oliver Moody

"Readers will find their minds enriched with many powerful thinking tools."

Economist

"[The] best scientific-philosophical approach to understanding how consciousness evolved…A wonderful book that will shape and drive thinking for years to come."

Times Higher Education - Shane O’Mara

"Encyclopedic knowledge of both the history of and the latest thinking in philosophy, evolutionary biology, psychology, and computer science."

Harper's - Christopher Beha

"Readers will find their minds enriched with many powerful thinking tools."

Economist