Table Of Content

FROM BACTERIA TO BACH AND BACK THE EVOLUTION OF MINDS Daniel C. Dennett TO BRANDON, SAMUEL, ABIGAIL, AND ARIA CONTENTS List of Illustrations Preface Part I TURNING OUR WORLD UPSIDE DOWN 1.Introduction Welcome to the jungle A bird’s-eye view of the journey The Cartesian wound Cartesian gravity 2.Before Bacteria and Bach Why Bach? How investigating the prebiotic world is like playing chess 3.On the Origin of Reasons The death or rebirth of teleology? Different senses of “why” The evolution of “why”: from how come to what for Go forth and multiply 4.Two Strange Inversions of Reasoning How Darwin and Turing broke a spell Ontology and the manifest image Automating the elevator The intelligent designers of Oak Ridge and GOFAI 5.The Evolution of 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 the Information Age How can we characterize semantic information? Trade secrets, patents, copyright, and Bird’s influence on bebop 7.Darwinian Spaces: An Interlude A new tool for thinking about evolution Cultural evolution: inverting a Darwinian Space 8.Brains Made of Brains Top-down computers and bottom-up brains Competition and coalition in the brain Neurons, mules, and termites How do brains pick up affordances? Feral neurons? 9.The Role of Words in Cultural Evolution The evolution of words Looking more closely at words How do words reproduce? 10.The Meme’s-Eye Point of View Words and other memes What’s good about memes? 11.What’s Wrong with Memes? Objections and Replies Memes don’t exist! Memes are described as “discrete” and “faithfully transmitted,” but much in cultural change is neither Memes, unlike genes, don’t have competing alleles at a locus Memes add nothing to what we already know about culture The wouldbe science of memetics is not predictive Memes can’t explain cultural features, while traditional social sciences can Cultural evolution is Lamarckian 12.The Origins of Language The chicken-egg problem Winding paths to human language 13.The Evolution of Cultural Evolution Darwinian beginnings The free-floating rationales of human communication Using our tools to think The age of intelligent design Pinker, Wilde, Edison, and Frankenstein Bach as a landmark of intelligent design The evolution of the selective environment for human culture Part III TURNING OUR MINDS INSIDE OUT 14.Consciousness as an Evolved User-Illusion Keeping an open mind about minds How do human brains achieve “global” comprehension using “local” competences? How did our manifest image become manifest to us? Why do we experience things the way we do? Hume’s strange inversion of reasoning A red stripe as an intentional object What is Cartesian gravity and why does it persist? 15.The Age of Post-Intelligent Design What are the limits of our comprehension? “Look Ma, no hands!” The structure of an intelligent agent What will happen to us? Home at last Appendix: The Background References Index LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Figure 1.1: Duck-rabbit Figure 1.2: Necker cube Figure 3.1: Kessler and Werner, stone circles Figure 3.2: Kessler and Werner’s stone-sorting algorithm at work Figure 4.1: Elevator operator manual page Figure 5.1: Clam rake Figure 7.1: Darwinian space Figure 7.2: Darwinian space with other dimensions Figure 7.3: Darwinian space for origin of life Figure 7.4: Darwinian space with religions Figure 7.5: Inverted Darwinian space with Darwinian phenomena at (0,0,0) and intelligent design at (1,1,1) Figure 9.2: Glossogenetic 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 castle Figure 3.4: Gaudí, La Sagrada Familia Figure 9.1: The Great Tree of Life 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 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 days philosophers weren’t expected to know about science, and even the most illustrious philosophers of mind were largely ignorant of work in psychology, neuroanatomy, and neurophysiology (the terms cognitive science and neuroscience would not be coined for more than a decade). The fledgling enterprise dubbed Artificial Intelligence by John McCarthy in 1956 was attracting attention, but few philosophers had ever touched a computer, whirring mysteriously in an air-conditioned prison guarded by technicians. So it was the perfect time for an utterly untrained amateur like me to get an education in all these fields. A philosopher who asked good questions about what they were doing (instead of telling them why, in principle, their projects were impossible) was apparently such a refreshing novelty that a sterling cadre of pioneering researchers took me in, gave me informal tutorials, and sent me alerts about whom to take seriously and what to read, all the while being more forgiving of my naïve misunderstandings than they would have been had I been one of their colleagues or graduate students. Today there are dozens, hundreds, of young philosophers who do have solid interdisciplinary training in cognitive science, neuroscience, and computer science, and they are rightly held to much higher standards than I was. Some of them are my students, and even grandstudents, but other philosophers of my generation jumped into the deep end (often with more training than I) and have their own distinguished flocks of students making progress on the cutting edge, either as interdisciplinary philosophers or as philosophically trained scientists with labs of their own. They are professionals, and I am still an amateur, but by

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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 t