From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds

429 Pages·2017·6.43 MB·English

by  Daniel C. Dennett

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