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    From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds
    From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds
    From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds
    Audiobook15 hours

    From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds

    Written by Daniel C. Dennett

    Narrated by Tom Perkins

    4/5

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    About this audiobook

    What is human consciousness and how is it possible? This question fascinates thinking people from poets and painters to physicists, psychologists, and philosophers. From Bacteria to Bach and Back is Daniel C. Dennett's brilliant answer, extending perspectives from his earlier work in surprising directions, exploring the deep interactions of evolution, brains, and human culture. 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 shows how culture enables reflection by installing a bounty of thinking tools, or memes, in our brains. Language, itself composed of memes, turbocharged this interplay. The result, a mind that can comprehend the questions it poses, emerges from a process of cultural evolution.

    An agenda-setting book for a new generation of philosophers and other researchers, From Bacteria to Bach and Back will delight and entertain anyone who hopes to understand human creativity in all its wondrous applications.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHighbridge Company
    Release dateFeb 7, 2017
    ISBN9781681684406
    From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds
    Author

    Daniel C. Dennett

    Daniel C. Dennett is University Professor Codirector of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University. He is the author of Brainchildren: Essays on Designing Minds; Sweet Dreams: Philosophical Obstacles to a Science of Consciousness; Elbow Room: The Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting; Sweet Dreams: Philosophical Obstacles to a Science of Consciousness (all published by the MIT Press), From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Mind, and other books.

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    Reviews for From Bacteria to Bach and Back

    4/5

    137 ratings10 reviews

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    • 5/5
      Incredible exploration of minds and brains, where they started and where they could be going. Dennett is a brilliant thinker and his approach to consciousness and the hard problem is enlightening.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      I love Dennett and I think he's brilliant. At the same time he's quirky and cranky and I don't know what else. A few bits in the book flew past me, but not so much - I think he was trying to reach a big audience. But I think the reason why I understood maybe 90% of this instead of 60% is because I've read other books of his and it's all beginning to sink in. So anyway, I liked it a lot, but I'm not sure I'd recommend it to someone who hasn't already read and enjoyed Dennett.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      Dennett has written for the laity about evolution, free will, and consciousness before. His thoughts continue to evolve, and in this book, he gives us a patient and entertaining explanation of his idea that consciousness, as the virtual construct he's described before, analogous to a graphic user interface, has evolved both genetically and memetically. Very satisfying.
    • 3/5
      A philosopher of/on evolution, surveying his takes on consciousness (what is it good for? What does it mean to say you can picture something in your mind?) and what it means to say evolution “designs” something. Much of his argument hangs on the idea that memes—in the pre-internet sense—drove human brain evolution and now compete with each other to colonize new minds, making classic evolutionary selection less important.
    • 3/5
      There's a lot of great information in this book, however there is a certain amount of arrogance in his approach. He knows what consciousness is, you don't, and the point of the book is to convince you with his arguments. He isn't the greatest of writers, because he's always referring back to other books he's written. Therefore he doesn't explain everything. His knowledge in some areas like computing isn't great. On the other hand, there are some excellent points being made in the book, especially his theory of 'competence without comprehension' being used to describe evolution. I would recommend this book with the understanding that his atheism informs his attitude.
    • 5/5
      This is an interesting summary of some current thinking about what consciousness is, how it got to be, and what it might become. Daniel Dennett writes this philosophy book from the point of view of a generalist, giving his opinions, considering his critics, and mentioning the work of any number of other people from various fields of study. For Dennett, the mind is the way the brain works, and it came to be what it is through natural selection much in the way bacteria came to be over time. He makes much of how our neurons arranged themselves through random mutations that worked long enough to be carried on to future generations, and that were helpful to the brains that carried them. Further, he discusses how society might have come about partly by bottom-up natural selection, and partly by top-down intelligent design. He usefully contrasts lower-case "intelligent design", by intelligent people, with the upper-case "Intelligent Design" advocated by creationists.This all makes a lot of sense, even though the 500 page path to explaining it all can get a bit confusing at times. Consciousness is a big subject and no one book can cover everything about how we are what we are. This book is a great start, though - gave me much to think about.
    • 3/5
      Very interesting but i don't like Dennett's style of writing. He elates and references himself a few times too many and seems to be proving something against other scientists rather than just bring the topics for what they are.
    • 3/5
      The title of this book implies a journey, and that's what it feels like...a long, twisty one with diversions to view the scenery, most of which, frankly, is rather dull. Along the way we're supposed to have learned something about 'the evolution of minds', and perhaps we do, a bit, but not much, honestly, and after reading this, I'm not sure what it was. There is a long diversion to look at words as memes, and a lengthy stopover to take a few kicks at the dead horse of Descartes' mind/body dualism, but I'm not sure either of these required the number of pages devoted to them. My issues aren't so much that I disagree strongly with the things Dennett is saying, they're more to do with how long he takes to say them. There seems to be a lot of belaboring the obvious going on. I suppose I was hoping for a succinct presentation of Dennett's views on the nature of consciousness, and although it is frequently mentioned, we never get a clear, unobstructed look at it. Maybe it's here and I simply missed it. I may have allowed my attention to be diverted by the diversions.
    • 3/5
      There are excellent insights and ideas in this book, sometimes obscured by the author's meandering style and academic presentation. At one point, he laments the current lack of inspired communicators who, like Hawking and Bernstein, were able to communicate complicated subject matter to a general audience. If he has it in him, he's named his next project -- remove the jargon, the arguments with those who disagree with him, the redundancies, the irrelevant digressions, and present a clear message about how both genetic evolution and cultural evolution have created our minds. This volume has all the material, but reads like a textbook.
    • 5/5
      Dennett, again. Unknowing to knowing from the bottom up. The Nagel review in NY Review is an embarrassment, the entire argument hinging on - 'Dennett asks us to turn our backs on what is glaringly obvious - that in consciousness we are immediately aware of real subjective experiences of color, flavor, sound, touch, etc. that cannot be fully described in neural terms even though they have a neural cause'WTF - beg the question much? assertion upon assertion upon assertion. None of those are obvious, nor subjective. The closing chapter includes this sobering paragraph, more so in light of Nov 2016:'Our civilization has been running smoothly - with some serious disruptions - for thousands of years, growing in complexity and power, could it break down? Yes, it could, and to whom could we then turn to help us get on the road? You can't buy a new civilization if yours collapses, so we had better keep the civilization we have running in good repair. Who, though, are the reliable mechanics? The politicians, the judges, the bankers, the industrialists, the journalists, the professors - the leaders of our society, in short - are much more like the average motorist than you might like to think: doing their local bit to steer their part of the whole contraption, while blissfully ignorant of the complexities on which the whole system depends. According to the economist and evolutionary thinker Paul Seabright, the optimistic tunnel vision with which they operate is not a deplorable and correctable flaw in the system but an enabling condition. This distribution of partial comprehension is not optional. The edifices of social construction that shape our lives in so many regards depends in our myopic confidence that their structure is sound and needs no attention from us."See also, the USSR.