From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds

by Daniel C. Dennett

How did we come to have minds? For centuries, poets, philosophers, psychologists, and physicists have wondered how the human mind developed its unrivaled abilities. Disciples of Darwin have explained how natural selection produced plants, but what about the human mind?

In From Bacteria to Bach and Back, Daniel C. Dennett builds on recent discoveries from biology and computer science to show, step by step, how a comprehending mind could in fact have arisen from a mindless process of natural selection. A crucial shift occurred when humans developed the ability to share memes, or ways of doing things not based in genetic instinct. Competition among memes produced thinking tools powerful enough that our minds don’t just perceive and react, they create and comprehend.

An agenda-setting book for a new generation of philosophers and scientists, From Bacteria to Bach and Back will delight and entertain all those curious about how the mind works.

Genres: Science, Philosophy, Nonfiction, Psychology, Evolution, Biology, Neuroscience

477 pages, Paperback

First published February 7, 2017

About the author

Daniel Clement Dennett III was a prominent philosopher whose research centered on philosophy of mind, science, and biology, particularly as they relate to evolutionary biology and cognitive science. He was the co-director of the Center for Cognitive Studies and the Austin B. Fletcher Professor of Philosophy at Tufts University. Dennett was a noted atheist, avid sailor, and advocate of the Brights movement.

Dennett received his B.A. in philosophy from Harvard University in 1963, where he was a student of W.V.O. Quine. In 1965, he received his D.Phil. from Christ Church, Oxford, where he studied under the ordinary language philosopher Gilbert Ryle.

Dennett gave the John Locke lectures at the University of Oxford in 1983, the Gavin David Young Lectures at Adelaide, Australia, in 1985, and the Tanner Lecture at Michigan in 1986, among many others. In 2001 he was awarded the Jean Nicod Prize, giving the Jean Nicod Lectures in Paris. He has received two Guggenheim Fellowships, a Fulbright Fellowship, and a Fellowship at the Center for Advanced Studies in Behavioral Science. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1987. He was the co-founder (1985) and co-director of the Curricular Software Studio at Tufts University, and has helped to design museum exhibits on computers for the Smithsonian Institution, the Museum of Science in Boston, and the Computer Museum in Boston. He was a Humanist Laureate of the International Academy of Humanism and a Fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry.

Reviews

[Charlene · Rating 2 out of 5]

Every time I read Dennett, I wonder why I have put myself through such an ordeal. Aside from wanting to yell at Dennett, who isn't even in the room, I get the urge to throw things and yell, "No, no, and just NO!".

Skillfully, Dennett gives the impression that he is a deep and critical thinker. He does this by filling his many books and many long, long articles with some of the best arguments against his own work, and then addressing the criticisms. That gives the reader the false impression that he has a deep understanding of those counter arguments. At the end of the day, he does not. I took 4 pages of notes on this book, with the intention of including it all in this review. Instead of including the many (so, so many!) examples I collected of why his arguments are bad, I will try to give just one example that will hopefully illustrate how his thinking in general is limited and lacks an essential critical component.

My example will focus on Dennett's assertion that while some living things know why they do what they do (they have purpose), other living things do not (they are less complex and act without knowing, and thus humans have an agency and purpose that other animals, plants, and microbes lack. While I love discussions about how local rules (do what your neighbor is doing, even if you don't know why) can give rise to global patterns (e.g. the termite following local rules but building global structure of complex termite mound), I found Dennett's discussions on the topic to be lacking.

Early on Dennett described the non-agency of termites. (For an author who always uses far more words than needed to deliver his every argument, he did a shockingly brief and poor job of providing the mind-blowing details about termites and their mounds). Dennett makes it clear that termites have no conscious purpose. They don't know why they carry out the actions they do. Yet, they build a termite mound that is the equivalent of a breathing lung! Super complex structure from the agency-lacking termites. Much later in the book, Dennett discussed how some humans hadn't a clue what they were building when they took actions to build the atomic bomb. However, other humans did know what actions they were taking and served as master intelligent designers. There are so many things wrong with his understanding of termites and humans, it's hard to know where to start when making a counter argument.

First, we could consider the queen termite as the master intelligent designer, since she orchestrates a pheromone-driven symphony of building complex mounds in her colony. Termites follow local rules (they don't know why they put a bit of dirt in a particular spot; they just follow what their neighbors are doing) but create global patterns (like a mound that is air conditioned, thanks to its lung like capabilities). Dennett failed to explain any of this to his reader. Second, even if we want to suggest the queen termite is not the same as the top clearance leader who worked on the atomic bomb, Dennett still fails to understand the lack of human agency. So what if some individuals knew why they built *that* bomb? So what if a human architect knows why s/he built a *particular* house or building? Dennett should be asking why human build in the first place, why they fight with bombs and other weapons, and why they do the many things that all humans do.

Thirdly, and I think most important, Dennett seems to understand the argument that unless we are microbes, we can't actually understand what microbes know or don't know. Yet, he demonstrates that he actually doesn't understand that vital counter argument. Dennett is really sticking to his humans are special stance. For example: Humans know why they do what they do (or at least a subset of them know); AI will never be as smart as humans because human brains are too special for top-down evolution; plants are *obviously* not intelligent, it's just a matter of where we draw the line; non-human animals are less intelligent than humans, and so on). However, microbes built us. When we can make a huge entity that we can ride around inside and control (by making a brain, organs, skin, gut microbe communication systems, etc), then I might agree that we are as smart as microbes. Dennett doesn't know what microbes know. Yet, his confidence about their lack or agency and our possession of agency are steadfast. Every time humans have thought they were special, every time Dennett, *every* time, it turned out they were wrong.

Another bothersome thing about this book is that Dennett is extremely aware of what outdated Dawkins has to say on the topic but he doesn't seem to be aware of the work of better scientists like Jeremy England or anyone working in the field of thermodynamics. When Dennett was spouting about how complex humans are, I kept thinking, "Are you going to mention that complexity is the natural consequence of thermodynamics and illustrate for your reader what that means?" Sure enough, a few sentences later, he actually did mention thermodynamics but it had nothing to do with thermodynamics and the emergence of complexity. So frustrating. He needs to start reading new people.

My main motivation for reading this book was because Sean Carroll (physicist) plugged it on FB. I thought that maybe Dennett had really gone through some sort of change and really came to understand the Big Picture. While he is sometimes good about updating his thinking (unlike Dawkins), he continues to hold on to too many old ideas.

So, while I appreciate that Dennett is able to point out the problems with Dawkins' arguments (arguments that end up hurting atheist arguments and not helping them), and while I appreciate that he is trying to update our concept of intelligent design (I think we do indeed need to update our understanding) he is just too old-school to do an effective job.

[Stamatios Mantzouranis · Rating 2 out of 5]

With every respect to Dennett's considerable intellect, this was a mess of a book. I guess it was partly my fault for thinking that I was about to read a scientific textbook on the origin and evolution of intelligence. Instead, it felt like I was trapped in a dull cocktail party with a group of warring philosophers arguing on abstract issues such as the sense of one's self, cultural memetics, the nature of competence etc. Note that it's not these topics per se that I find dull, but the fact that, without any scientific means to test and measure their theories, philosophers have to resort to endless refutation and rhetorics - which is what Bennet spends a lot of his time doing in this book. While I enjoy reading philosophical texts on life and morality, and like to debate the various stances myself, I don't appreciate philosophy getting in the way of studying actual phenomena and tangible objects such as language and the brain.

The book is also unnecessarily long, mostly for the reason I gave above. Rather than getting straight to the point, Dennet does a disservice to his readers by doing the rounds and debunking past theories or conflicting opinions, before returning to his own and trying to convince us through very lengthy and meandering examples why it's the right one. Ironically, if he hadn't taken the time to examine those different viewpoints, not only I would have enjoyed this book more, but I would also have found him more persuasive. Now however, I feel like I've heard only one, very biased, side of the argument and will reserve my judgement for when I've heard more on these topics.

Despite all these glaring problems with this book, I can't honestly say that I hated it. Dennett has a knack for coining catchy expressions (I guess his study of memetics came in handy here) and I found many of his thought experiments genuinely ingenious. And even though his arguments were too long, and he uses too many words to say one simple thing, I admit that I enjoyed his prose - especially in the audio book format that I listened to. Does all that make up for the downsides however? Sadly no. I can't recommend this book to anyone but perhaps loyal fans of Dennett's, who may have a greater interest in his subject and have developed a tolerance to his style.

[Dan Graser · Rating 5 out of 5]

Surveying Dennett's huge output, this is perhaps his most ambitious and accessible work. The criticisms below that there isn't much in the way of new thinking on several areas is valid and I don't think that proposing many grand new ideas was his intention for this work. As he states toward the beginning of the book:

"Undaunted, I am trying once again and going for the whole story this time. I think we have made tremendous scientific progress in the last 20 years; many of the impressionistic hunches of yore can now be replaced with well-researched details. And second, I think I now have a better sense of the various undercurrents of resistance that shackle our imaginations, and I plan to expose and disarm them as we go, so that, for the first time, the doubters can take seriously the prospect of a scientific, materialist theory of their own minds."

On this level I certainly think he succeeds and this book is much more accessible than the at times impenetrable, "Consciousness Explained," and, "Freedom Evolves," both of which were quite interesting and provocative but at times maddeningly convoluted. This is a sweeping work and a unique one in the field of philosophy as Dennett's approach is a purely Darwinian, memeticist take on the development and functioning of the mind. Particularly interesting sections are his staunch disagreements with Noam Chomsky and his subtly different take on the mind with Steven Pinker. A very rewarding read, particularly if you haven't read much of Dennett's previous work.

[Xander · Rating 4 out of 5]

In 2017 philosopher of biology and neuroscience Daniel Dennett published a book that one could call his magnum opus. Dennett has dedicated his career to understanding the implications of the theory of evolution - which he sees as a set of algorithms - and applying the developments in neuroscience to philosophical debates on consciousness and free will.

In From Bacteria to Bach and Back, Dennett explores his entire career and updates his arguments - which he developed over more than three decades with the latest scientific insights. In a sense, this is his grand historical statement about the human mind. No need to read his other books? Well, I doubt if a novice reader could understand Dennett's line of argument if he or she is unfamiliar with his earlier works - especially Consciousness Explained (1991), Darwin's Dangerous Idea (1995) and Freedom Evolves (2003). This makes it an invaluable book (for insiders) and at the same time a completely useless one (for introducees). This is a serious drawback, which hinders me from giving this book a higher score.

Another serious drawback is Dennett's writing style - nothing new: all his books have this issue. He uses loads of philosophical jargon and terms and seems to make it a sport to offer the reader as many philosophical thought experiments as possible. Presumably to make difficult concepts easier to grasp for novices, but for me it works counterproductive: I get lost in details and have a hard time connecting the abstract pieces to the bigger picture. I'd rather have someone like Richard Dawkins, who is able to explain highly technical scientific insights in plain language without treating his audience as morons.

But besides these two points, the book is a marvel and contains the most consistent, complete and persuasive, scientific worldview on the human mind - in all its complexity - that I know of. This is definitely an amazing achievement of Dennett: the domains of evolution, consciousness, free will, language are flooded with obscure and inconsistent books, in which the authors (almost always) set out to prove their ideological premiss and now - in advance - what conclusions they want to offer the public. This fact alone makes From Bacteria to Bach and Back one of the most important books on science of the 21st century (on par with Lawrence Krauss's A Universe from Nothing).

So what's the book about? This can be explained best - as Dennett does in his book - in three parts.

1. In part 1, Dennett explains the theory of evolution. He explains this as the Blind Watchmaker (a term that Dawkins once coined). Natural selection puts pressure on organisms to adapt themselves to their (continuously shifting) environments or perish. Dennett emphasizes that we should think in populations, gene pools, instead of in terms of individuals (or even genes).

Dennett calls this process, which really spanned billions of years (up to now), Darwin's Strange Inversion of Reasoning. Before Darwin, it was assumed that Design was necessary to create the design we see in nature. All the complexities in nature - for example all the intricacies of an ant-eater that make it fit a particular biological niche- were designed by an Intelligent Designer. Ever since Darwin, we know it's the other way around: the design in nature is the product of infinitesimal small steps in an unconscious process (i.e. natural selection).

After this, Alan Turing came along and showed us how to build computers that can do anything without knowing what they're doing. A human being can program a computer by using algorithmic subroutines and split a very complex task into such tiny, simplicistic steps that it works! This Dennett calls Turing's Strange Inversion of Reasoning.

Dennett, throughout the book, calls this process competence without comprehension. We assume that comprehension comes first (hence our ideas of an Intelligent Designer) but it's really the other way around. Unconscious processes build design, which might - in the end (from our perspective, that is) - become comprehending creatures which can then Intelligently Design things.

It is important to note that Dennett sees comprehension as a gradual process, there is no difference in kind between bears and humans, or bacteria for that matter - all the difference is in degree. Dennett distinguishes four types of organisms (he borrows this from his 1995 book):

1. Darwinian creatures, which are pre-programmed to respond to stimuli in their environment in certain determined ways (simple stimulus-response type organisms like clamps).
2. Skinnerian creatures, which come equipped with the possiblity of (reflexive) reinforcement of certain stimulus-response types - based on the seeking rewards and avoiding pain.
3. Popperian creatures, which can form internal hypotheses and test them mentally to see what works. This is the first step towards reflection.
4. Gregorian creatures, which can reflect on their own behaviour and hence use thinking tools to manipulate their environment.

This is a gradual scale and we humans belong to the fourth type - we are able to reflect on our thoughts and on our sensual perceptions and hence to reason. To reason, we use important thinking tools: words. Which brings me to the second part of the book.

In part 2 of the book, Dennett zooms in on human beings and tries to explain how cultural evolution led to the world as we know it today (including our minds). This part is very speculative, in the sense that the origin of language is still an open question: where, when and how did it start? There is a plethora of scientific hypotheses and who knows what theory might be accepted in the (near?) future?

Dennett basically says that genetic evolution led to our ancestors developing language skills. These skills are, ultimately, founded in physical developments in the brain. Once people were able to communicatie with each other - which likely was a gradual process, like almost anything in nature (and which, for us, is very hard to imagine) there was a genetic basis for culture. In other words, memes (mostly words, but memes can take many different forms) were software that could start to flourish once the hardware (linguistic modules) was in place. In still other words: genetic evolution leads to cultural evolution.

But this was just the start. As Dennett explains, cultural evolution started to shape the world of our ancestors and was itself a driving force for genetic evolution. This is one type of Baldwin-effect, in which a random trait spreads in a population - by pure coincide - and then forces genetic evolution to fixate around this trait (by 'punishing' individuals who lack this trait). So we see here a process of synanthropic evolution, in which memes and humans develop in a reciprocal and interactive relationship.

As in part 1, Dennett stresses that this co-evolution of genes and memes followed his 'competence without comprehension'. A frog that shoots its tongue towards a particular spot because a particular area on his retina spots a fly doesn't need to know what, or even why, it's doing - it just does (i.e. competence). In the same vein, a human being that uttered words doesn't need to know what he or she is doing, he or she just does. Over time, the mind that was build by genes, was shaped by memes.

This sounds counterintuitive, but Dennett illustrates this by the comparison between a termite mount and Gaudi's cathedral. Termites build huge mounts - similar in structure to Gaudi's cathedral - by following local rules and without knowing consciously (i.e. comprehending) what they do. Only when creatures comprehend what they're doing can they intelligently design a thing like a cathedral - and we humans are the only ones (so far known) that intelligently design.

All of Dennett's theory stands or falls with the origin and development of language. Together with the origin of life, this is the most controversial topic in science. It's controversial due to lack of evidence: how, apart from physiological hints like the human larynx/voice box, would rudimentary language fossilize? But this doesn't mean that we should be pessimists: there are so many possible theories that there's actually a surplus of explanations. Now science will have to decide which one fits the (scarce) facts best.

Dennett puts his money on a combination of Noam Chomsky's linguistic theories. Once language started in a rudimentary fashion (proto-language), humans likely evolved something similar to Chomsky's (2008) Merger which allows humans to use recursion in language (allowing sentences to refer back to sentences to refer back to sentences......and so on). This Merger (Chomsky's term) then gradually evolved into Chomsky's (1975) Language Acquisition Device, which allows human babies to use the cues from their surroundings to evolve the language that is spoken in their environment and learn this particular language. Children learn too much words in too short a time to be physically able to learn all their words by imitation and explicit instruction. According to Chomsky, humans are born with an innate language module - universal grammar - which is very flexible in its syntactic and semantic structure.

(Curiously Chomsky started off (in 1975) advocating this innate language module, but since he is a staunch denier of evolution - one suspects because he feels uneasy with the (misguided) social implications of this theory - he struggled his entire career with the innateness of this module. In 2008 he came up with this 'Merger', which can be seen as a proto-Linguistic Acquisition Device, that doesn't need evolution. Ironically Dennett can combine both of Chomsky's theories to explain - evolutionarily! - the innate linguistic capacity of humans. This is something that Chomsky wouldn't have expected!)

To sum up: Dennett claims that language modules (hardware) allowed words and other memes (software) to spread and infect other brains. Reflection of individual humans on these memes led to new memes: meta-memes. In this view, words and ideas are viruses that spread throughout human populations and compete with other memes for memory and attention. This is what Dennett means when he says memes shaped our minds; the explosion of memes put genetic pressure on increasing our capacity for attention and memory. It is only at the end of this (long) process, partly under the influence of meta-memes, that reasoning became an option for humans, leading - for the first time! - to comprehending organisms.

Comprehension comes with a cost, though. Since we use reasons to comprehend the world around us (namely, we project a reason on everything we perceive), we have the illusion that everything has a reason. Dennett calls this the intentional stance, the notion that everything and everyone that we see acting does this for a particular reason. We attribute intentionality to everything, including everything about ourselves. Which leads me to the last part Dennett's book, in which this idea is worked out more fully - with an amazing ending.

In part 3, Dennett postulates that consciousness is an evolved user-illusion. His theory of consciousness (and consequently of free will) is a very strange one at first, yet I haven't seen any refutation of it - anywhere - and when one ponders Dennett's idea it sort of 'clicks all into place'.

Dennett explains how software programmers build a smartphone application by building a hierarchy of subroutines (of subroutine on subroutine on subroutine......and so on). Yet we, as users of the application, use a specially designed interface to manoeuve through the application. We are presented with information that is relevant to us - as users - in a way that suits our needs - as users. In other words, while the programmers know and are familiar with the entire scaffolding behind the application, they treat us users on a need-to-know basis: we - as users - should not be bothered with all the subroutines and algorithms.

Now, the step Dennett takes is to apply the same concept to the human mind. Our mind consists of countless of local subroutines, all emerging from neural activity (the dynamics of electrochemical impulses within our central nervous system). All these subroutines are controlled by higher-level subroutines. And these subroutines are yet again controlled by even higher lvel subroutines. And so on. Our mind is build up, bottom-up, out of a hierachy of subroutines on a need-to-know basis - just like the smartphone application.

The crucial step in Dennett's argument is the introduction of communication. As soon as language evolves (which is itself a hierarchy of subroutines in the human brain), there arises a problem. We communicate with others, but if we don't make a distinction between ourselves and others, we would communicate everything to everybody. This is not an evolutionary stable strategy, since this is bound to make us vulnerable to exploiters (cheaters, in the language of game theory). Hence, there's an evolutionary pressure to (1) distinguish 'I' from others and (2) to create some form of communication control in order to guide deception. This second part is important, since we humans, just like any organism on this planet, are 'built' by our genes to manipulate our environment to survive and reproduce. This environment includes other humans, so there's evolutionary pressure to manipulate others with the new tool (i.e. communication). This puts the premium on control and deception, including deceiving ourselves.

According to Dennett, consciousness is exactly this control centre - without a controller. It operates on a need-to-know basis and it is nothing more than a user-interface that is built (by the unconscious, step-by-step programmer Mother Nature), to let us manipulate our environment. Our notion of 'I' or 'Self' is just the product of the need to distinguish between us as organism and our environment; the idea of consciousness is, so to speak, an illusion.

[i]"We can see human consciousness as a user-illusion, not rendered in the Cartesian Theatre [the notion of a place in the mind where 'I' view all the trains of thought and 'decide' what to do] (which does not exist) but constituted by the representational activities of the brain coupled with the appropriate reactions to those acitivities." (p. 412)[/i]

Interesting to note here, is how Dennett explains things like 'caring'. According to Dennett our mind continuously generates Bayesian predictions, which is a philosopher's way of saying that our mind seems to use our past experiences in order to make predictions about new events. The Bayesian predictions are hierarchically orderd and are about objects outside us (if I walk around a solid object I will see the back of the object) as well as about us ourselves (what should I do, think, expect now).

When we see a baby we find the baby cute. There's nothing cute about the baby: there's no such thing as cuteness. We just have the prediction that we predict to find the baby cute, and when this happens, the absence of prediction-error signals is interpreted as confirmation that the world we interact with has (indeed) the properties that we expect. The same with sugar: there's no such thing as sweetness, we just predict that we predict the sugar to 'taste sweet' and when it (indeed) does taste like predicted, this confirms our expectations. Yet the predictions themselves are mostly based on experience and partly inherited.

Now what is 'caring'? Our perception of properties in the world, like cuteness and sweetness, depend on properties of the central nervous system, which have been evolved to make something from this. These properties have a privileged role in our control systems and this is what we call 'caring'.

(This, very conveniently, does away with more than two millennia of the war in philosophy between objectivists - who claim that perceptions derive from properties of objects in the world - and subjectivists - who claim that we create our own perceptions independently of the world around is; it might as well not exist.)

Dennett ends his book by venturing into the (near) future. His whole book has been a long explanation of how unconscious natural selection, step by step, builds competent, designed creatures. These creatures are all good at doing something, while they're bad at doing other things, without having any notice of what they do and why. Reason without reasoners; competence without comprehension; design without a Designer. We are the first species to have developed comprehension, via cultural evolution through memes, which use our brains (like software uses hardware); hence we are the first ones to Intelligently Design things: cathedrals, computers, even intelligence itself. This huge adaptation comes with some flaws - the illusion of consciousness and free will, for example - but it is amazing.

In the recent past, scientists and engineers tried to build new systems and programs via the top-down road; this proved to be a dead-end (since this assumes that the system in question has to have all the data beforehand!) Currently we are applying (bottom-up) evolutionary algorithms in such wide areas as artifical intelligence (to build self-learning systems that can beat the best Chess and Go players), genetics (to build nanorobots for medical and genetic purposes) and music (to create new Bachian or Mozartian music without the original composers). For the first time in this universe, human beings are able to let intelligence develop itself, by using and applying the exact same (unconscious) process that built us! I love this idea, it is really beautiful.

Dennett distances himself from the alarm calls coming from (self-proclaimed) intellectuals like Elon Musk or scientists like Stephen Hawking and Martin Rees. He doesn't think AI is able to comprehend - like human beings - but is just extremely competent. We might not be able to follow the program, so to speak, but it cannot comprehend what it's doing. So there's no problem. The main problem Dennett sees is that we (already) decide to put our own competences in the hands of AI, leading to the situation that once flaws emerge, we will not be able to do anything about it anymore, and civilization as we know it might collapse.

This is a serious problem, and we can see it developing even now. Science, technology, economics, and politics have become so specialized that there are almost no persons left who have a view of the totality. This might seem abstract, but we should remind ourselves of the Australians who, thousands of years ago, drifted to New Zealand and gradually lost all technology. They could hunt the abundance of animals on the island, so there was no reason anymore to build fishing or hunting tools, or to build ships for that matter. These skills and this knowledge weren't passed on to next generations, and once the animals were all hunted they all died.

If we continue in the way we are developing the world - and AI is just the latest devlopment - the most important technological, scientific and political techniques will be known by a smaller and smaller group of specialists. If something happens, there's no one who can drive the car.

But let's not end the review with such a dire prediction. This book is truly amazing. It offers a worldview, well thought-out and consistent with everything we know and care about. Even if you disagree with Dennett on some points (or all), it's still a pleasure to follow his trains of thought and see the story unfolding before your eyes - I had the same experience with his Darwin's Dangerous Idea. Unfortunately, I doubt most people will be able to understand him completely - you need a lot of background knowledge (on philosophy, biology, neuroscience, etc.); without this one drowns in details and abstractness.

[Dan · Rating 1 out of 5]

Repetitive, self-congratulatory, unoriginal, without coherence, popular instead of scientific or philosophic, without any depth, changing the topic constantly, and so on. Dennett, like his master Dawkins, is popularizing a vulgar materialistic and scientific worldview. Unlike Dawkins who explicitly and centrally is popularizing this worldview, Dennett is doing this instead of staying with the stated topic of his book - that is of explaining mind and conscience in view of the “recent scientific discoveries”. The explanation of conscience is deferred until the end of the book when we are told that there is no such a thing; while the mind is equated with a Bayesian hierarchical model. One of the multiple topics of this book is the materialist and Darwinist explanation of culture in terms of “memes” (it can be a word, a trend, or other unexpected entity). Dawkins proposed such “memes” and Dennett appropriated them in his theory of culture - as the equivalent of genes in Darwin's theory of living entities. Most of the arguments in this book are presented in the context of information theory while using countless analogies with computers, phones, software, algorithms, applications, and finally with artificial intelligence. Dennett starts by using such analogies as metaphors to help explain his concepts, but almost all end as essences in his ontology (as for example when he concludes that the mind is a Bayesian hierarchical model). The main and underlying assumption at work here is that whatever does not belong to this vulgar materialistic ontology and explained scientifically does not exist; thus this worldview explains “everything” - since “everything” was dramatically reduced and impoverished in the first place. Dennett's vehemence against Chomsky convinced me to read Chomsky's theory of language – and this is pretty much the only good thing about this book.

[Kevin · Rating 3 out of 5]

As a cognitive scientist, Daniel Dennett is second to none. His expositions on the developmental evolution of the human mind are the stuff of legend. But as a science popularist (a person who takes complex scientific concepts and makes them pleasing and palatable for schmucks like me) he leaves a lot to be desired. Don’t get me wrong, I respect and admire Dr. Dennett to the moon and back but I would never recommend this book to a layperson. It’s just too deep.

Exhibit A: I am convinced that Professor D never uses a short explanation when a twenty two page dissertation will do. Does he get paid by the word? And to make matters worse he coins phrases and invents analogies which, in theory, should help clarify his concepts but, in reality, they too need explanations (e.g. skyhooks and intuition pumps). It is a vortex intent on pulling us all down a rabbit hole.

Exhibit B: Dennett assumes his readers have a high level of familiarity with other theorists which is fine if one is teaching grad students at Tufts U but it is problematic if one is aiming for a wider demographic. For me, an armchair anthropologist who makes his living in I.T., this was hit & miss (yes I am familiar with Richard Dawkins’ meme, no I am not familiar with Noam Chomsky’s merge).

I know this sounds like a Down-with-Dennett rant but it’s not. I love the guy. I’m just weary from searching for a toehold on this Mensa Mountain climb.

[Beauregard Bottomley · Rating 3 out of 5]

There is intelligent design. It's just not what the creationist think it is. Nature gives us competencies without comprehension. Comprehension means full understanding. Dennett gives the example of how the computer can do arithmetic without understanding as explained by Turing. His holy trinity within this book are Turing, Hume and Darwin. Each thinker provides an inversion to our 'manifest' knowledge by allowing an opening to the window to scientific knowledge. He'll explain in detail how each thinker allowed us to see the world differently but in an 'inverted way'. They all gave us an 'ontology' (his word) of the world for which we live in. Ontologies can be thought of as the furniture that makes up the world, the pieces of the things that we use to explain the world under consideration, the structure, the foundation, the ground, or the first principles.

Dennett is never afraid to talk down to his reader. Pernicious teleology is how we think naturally as humans. We always impute a reason for the way things are. We accidentally assume a 'why' for the way things are, because that's how we think because we always assume meaning. "Teleology is never free" as he says in the book. We use science to redirect us back to the 'how' things are. There is no over all meaning for the way things became the way they are (at least I don't know the reason). Dennett is really big on emphasizing that 'free will' is an illusion in as much as that cause will always precede effect within the human realm (yes, there is an exception at the quantum level, but we don't control that, and it is not at our mercy), and if there was a great Judge in the sky or any where else, he would not be able to judge us knowing that we are the way we are because we were made that way and time and chance determined who we are. And as Dennett goes on to explain in this book, we still must be held accountable for our actions on earth, but, again, a great Judge in the sky can't hold us responsible for our actions because we don't happen in a vacuum we are a result of the world we are thrown into. Dennett doesn't say it but St. Augustine created the concept of free will as to be the analogous power that God had when he freely created the universe and that similarly resides in us in order that God can judge us. Yes, I know Aristotle uses the word 'free will' but he meant something different and closer to Dennett's compatibilitist definition.

There's a template to the story that he's telling within this book that could be found in another book that I've read, "Master Algorithm". My mind kept referring back to that book as I was listening to this book and in the last chapter or so he tells you about that book in detail. I really loved that book but only rated it three stars because of two reasons 1) I didn't like its conclusions and 2) it was concise but overly complex in its presentation. I don't mind complexity in my books but I would not really recommend it to others because it could be very hard to follow. But, all the themes that were in that book are in this book. He called them tribes in the book "Master Algorithm".

One of the tribes was Bayesian statistics. Our expectations based on prior experiences shape how we accept the present. That's what Bayesian statistics do for us. There is a really formal definition but it would involve probability functions, but at the heart that is what it is. Dennett relies on the heuristic to explain this. So I will too. The "Master Algorithm" shows how we are currently taking 'the inverse of the program and using machine learning' to solve complex problems through the aid of the computer. Dennett talks about Google and its language translation program which has done that brilliantly. It's a bottom up approach instead of a top down approach. Our mind and evolution both seem to work from the bottom up also. Cool stuff. But, Dennett only saved this stuff for the last chapter.

Dennett definitely has a mind set that I tended to disagree with in this book. His very long section on the meme and culture over looked the reality of epigenetics and just briefly noted it and that was only to tacitly ignore it. Epigenetics are real. Just read Science News or check up on the Belgium babies born at the very end of WW II (June 1944 to May 1945) under the needlessly cruel Nazi occupation and see the analysis which is explained by epigenetics. Dennett takes TOM (theory of mind) and mirror neurons more seriously than I think should be warranted. He's trying to explain that our consciousness comes about through by the shaping of our environment by our behaviors. It's one way of looking at the problem, but maybe not the best. Popper (logical positivist) and Skinner (behaviorism) are probably not the right way to frame the extremes (imo) as he seems to do within the text. There just seems to be a another story that could be told.

I really love Dennett. I've read four of his other books, and three of them are in my favorites list. I was little bit disappointed in this book because most of it was review for me, and I don't really agree with his behaviorism point of view in the development of consciousness, and I didn't really agree with his development of language as he presented it. Also, one can argue there is no proper ontology to the world (see Wittgenstein for details, e.g.), and embracing Hume (who is my favorite philosopher) leads to 'facon de parler' (Dennets phrase, means 'convenient fiction'), which doesn't bother me, but needs to be reckoned with in the context of the philosophy of science. I don't mind reading some one who I disagree with but I do mind not learning much more than what I've read in other books on the same topic.

[D.L. Morrese · Rating 3 out of 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.

[Mehrsa · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love the way Dennett thinks and reasons. He is the king of finding good analogies to explain difficult concepts. It's just a joy to hear him think through problems and offer counter arguments and reason his way through problems. I loved his other books and a friend recommended I read this one after I was over the moon about The Human Instinct by Miller. And perhaps if I had read this one first, I would love loved it, but the Miller book was so much more profound than this one. The promise of this book is incredibly ambitious--how does conscious come about? but the answer is sort of flat and predictable--just evolution and in the same way as other animals. I mean, yes, I agree with the answer, but he seems to evade or dismiss most claims of human superiority as just thinking we're special. Miller goes much further in explaining consciousness while never straying from a strictly evolutionary standpoint. So I would say read that one.

[Jenna ❤ ❀ ❤ · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5 stars I had high hopes for this book, but -- *YAWN* Dennet's main ideas are interesting enough but there's not much new in this book. One gets the sense he is being paid per word, because he is extremely repetitive, the book just goes on and on and on; it is incredibly tedious and dull much of the time. 400+ pages that could be condensed into under 100. I forced myself to stay with the book, simply because this is Daniel C. Dennett, but had it been just about anyone else, I would have ditched the book after the first couple of chapters.

[Steve · Rating 4 out of 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.

[Nick Klagge · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is one of those books that I really liked, wanted to write a great review for, and consequently put off writing the review for way too long! I am remedying that now, not by writing a great review, but by writing a review.

Dennett's purpose in the book is to sketch an outline of how consciousness as humans experience it could have grown out of a purely mechanistic process. This has been a focus of much of his work for decades, but he says in this book that he wants to attempt a summation, and that recent research can provide further support for things he has talked about in the past.

The book is certainly too rich for me to summarize adequately here, but I will mention a few things. First, the concept of "memes" plays a huge role, and if you think memes are cat pictures, UR DOIN IT RONG. This was the first extended serious treatment of memetic theory that I've read, and I felt pretty amenable to it. More or less the idea is that there are patterns of thought that can reproduce themselves in other minds via communication, that there is some type of mutation that goes on when such a pattern is translated from one mind to another, and that these patterns have differential success in durably reproducing themselves in other minds. These patterns, or memes, can be a really wide range of things, from songs that get stuck in your head to big concepts like agriculture. The three characteristics I listed above are the same ones that Darwin describes regarding genes, and themselves are sufficient to produce natural selection effects. It's a little harder to think about memes than genes, but I'd be hard-pressed to argue against the premises and conclusion that memes reproduce and are subject to natural selection just like genes.

Second, I'll mention the three "strange inversions" that Dennett kind of structures the book around. These are conceptual breakthroughs that he sees as paving the way for a theory of the evolution of minds. First is Darwin's own inversion, which says that you can have "reasons without reasoners." The concept of natural selection allows us to say that a certain type of bird has a long beak "so that" it can drink nectar from a certain flower, without ascribing that reasoning to any conscious actor. Second is Turing's inversion, which says that you can have "competence without comprehension." A Turing machine shows us that it is possible for an entity to do arithmetic (and much more complex tasks!) while demonstrably just following a deterministic set of instructions. Finally, and maybe most interestingly, is Hume's inversion. I don't think Dennett gave a catchy description of this one like the other two. But this inversion is the understanding that many things that we feel we "perceive in the outside world" are really only internal to us, including the perception of causation, sexiness, cuteness, sweetness, etc.

Anyway, if you want to get a deeper sense of the argument, read the book! Last, I want to mention a few interesting quotes from the end, where Dennett is talking about the implications of "thinking" technology, particularly modern advancements such as deep learning.

"The real danger, I think, is not that machines more intelligent than we are will usurp our role as captains of our destinies, but that we will over-estimate the comprehension of our latest thinking tools, prematurely ceding authority to them far beyond their competence." (402)

"Systems that deliberately conceal their shortcuts and gaps of incompetence should be deemed fraudulent, and their creators should go to jail for the crime of creating or using an artificial intelligence that impersonates a human being." (403) - This is astonishingly close to the commandment of the Butlerian Jihad in Dune, "Thou shalt not create a machine in the likeness of a human mind"!

[Walter Schutjens · Rating 5 out of 5]

1.0 Events during the reading of 'From Bacteria to Bach and Back'-

1. Meeting Daniel C. Dennett!
I was lucky enough to find Dennett giving a lecture at the Psycholinguistics Institute of Nijmegen on Oct. 17th, a mere 3 hours by train from my native the Hague. This of course was an opportunity I could not afford to miss, and so I attended the lecture along with my good friend and fellow pseudo-philosopher Leon Grant. The lecture was specifically regarding this book, and so while reading it I had a nice overview given for a public audience already making the relevant neural connections and Bayesian inference in my brain. I had the honour of talking to Dennett while he was signing my copy of 'Consciousness Explained', and asked him about my dilemma between studying either Neuroscience or Philosophy. His reply was, "I have many students that have finished their PhD's and are now looking into studying Philosophy as they did not find the answers to their questions in Neuroscience".

2. A family dilemma...-
I had just finished reading the section of the book pertaining the nature of human consciousness, and for those unbeknownst of the work of Dennett he is quite the physicalist, specifically when it comes to questions on free-will and our conscious perception. Currently staying at my religious grandparents, I was asked at the breakfast table to tell about the book I was currently reading. To further ground my personal understanding of the concepts in the book, I gave a thorough explanation on the evolution of their minds, along with the cultural evolution of thoughts and "memes" or abstract symbionts of information. Stating that the brain is no more than a biological mass that has been hijacked by informational parasites that seek to be spread, that created our cognitive architecture, creating a manifest view of the world, allow us to be "competent with comprehension". Eventually concluding that consciousness is no more than an oversimplified user illusion of the output of the unimaginably complex nature of our cognition. Free-will being something that is not allowed for through our consciousness as it has no causal link to the informational processing of our brains.
Later that afternoon my grandmother approached me with two books, one of a pastor, and one of the Dalai Lama, stating that it would be better for my future if I had read these books first...

2.0 The Book

I am in no regards an expert on this topic, and so cannot say much on the validity of the arguments presented in this book. I am aware that there is an academic war going on between thinkers such as Dennett and Harris, or Chalmers, something he often hinted at in both his talks and his books, and I am looking forward to reading the argumentation on the other side of the aisle. I can however review this books in terms of how it reads for a Philosophy of Mind beginner, in terms of how well the concepts are explained and being a semi-'popular science' book, how enjoyable it was to read.

The concepts investigated in this book are definitely challenging, it starts off easy, explaining basic evolutionary theory, with small intrusions of philosophy regarding the definition of a 'reason' or the darwinian inversion of reasoning. The book progresses into the notion of cultural evolution, and how the recent endosymbiotic relation of Homo sapien and 'memes' allowed for complex thought and a method for introspection. This contains fairly complex philosophical reasoning but nothing that cant be understood with careful and critical reading (the average reading time of a page was 1 min. 20 sec. an all time high). In the conclusion of the book there is no answer provided as to how exactly a phenomenal experience arises from our perception of the manifest reality (what we think to see). But the reasons that we do have a conscious perception of the manifest reality, in the sense that it is an abstraction of the scientific reality is explained in a satisfactory manner. I specifically found the parts of the book that regard our communication as a beneficiary and need of our conscious perception to be especially interesting. Eventually giving this book 5/5 stars because of its bearing of light on truths that are reasoned against my own intuition of belief.

Why read a Franz Kafka to be unsettled when you can read a Dennett and be violently dethroned from our human superiority complex in terms of the nature of your very perception of reality, our being.

[Ken Rideout · Rating 2 out of 5]

Although I agree with the author and he is clearly a smart guy, I found this book to be fairly self-indulgent and meandering (lots of take-down of others in the field who think differently or who have attacked his ideas in the past).

In the end, I didn't feel that much new was brought to the idea of consciousness-is-some-kind-of-illusion argument (which I totally buy!).

Here are some of his key ideas:
-Humans are special in our meta-cognition but not that special (we know bacteria exist but they don't know they exist!)
-Evolution gives us "reasons without reasoners" (think of the fine-tuned mechanism of cellular respiration)
-Natural selection gives us "competence without comprehension" (think birds building nests)
-Information and words are memes that compete via natural selection in cultural evolution which is now (for the first time) intelligently designed as we are self-aware and make active choices in what gets passed down to the next generation.
-Consciousness is a user-illusion that helps us navigate the world we live in by virtue of the "representational activities of the brain coupled with [projected outcomes]"

-Bayesian computer algorithms can do amazing things (think IBM's Watson) but are unlikely to produce strong AI because, although their 'competence without comprehension' amazes us, without the recursion of projecting causes-and-effects that humans do, that hallmark self-awareness of human consciousness will be lacking...

I think the premise of the book is the following (although the writing is convoluted enough this was never made clear to me!):
Just like the eukaryotic cells came from an unlikely synergy of two separate simpler cells, human consciousness is the unlikely synergy of words/memes and the Bayesian processing that brains do to sort things out.

[Gendou · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book explores the evolution of the human mind.

Dennett isn't an evolutionary biologist. He too foten digresses into obsolete philosophical questions, which ultimately go unanswered, despite the fact that satisfactory answers were known to science at the time he wrote the book. This is frustrating because due diligence research was not performed.

This one isn't as well organized as other his books. It reuses a lot of material we've seen before in his other books.

I'd only recommend this one for readers who aren't yet convinced that the human mind evolved.

[Jules Findlay · Rating 2 out of 5]

There is very little about Bacteria, even less about Bach. Dennett revisits his arguments to date, combining them into a fairly long-winded and non-essential worldview. It’s the same reductive materialist ontology that permeates all of his work.

He attempts to explain away the problem of consciousness, accusing us of being faillible to ‘Cartesian gravity’. In other words there is no such things as ‘I’. Our minds are thousands of tiny robots dancing and self-control is an illusion. The mind isn’t composed, as Descartes argued, of something other than matter, but matter itself. Our inventions and societies are top down intelligent design from bottom-up evolution; only now are we beginning to understand that our competence can be comprehended. The designed have become the designers, and it is physical processes that give rise to phenomenal character, nothing else.

Honestly I would give this one a miss and try some of his other books. Cue the haters.

[Todd · Rating 2 out of 5]

There are great ideas in here, but they are not presented in a clear or convincing way. Some people may find Dennett's (somewhat subversive) writing style enjoyable, but I find it tedious and meandering. It is more of a clearinghouse of the author's scholarly knowledge than any organized idea or thesis. Try the first chapter and see if it works for you. I expected the intro to be a bit more scattered than the rest of the book, but unfortunately it never gets any better.
That said, some of his metaphors make more and more sense as the book progresses such as the computer desktop interface model of higher thought process.

[JL · Rating 2 out of 5]

Way too much "I/Me"; the author obviously likes to "hear" himself write. Frequently incomprehensibly didactic, and purposefully pedantic. Sample sentence: "We won't have a complete science of consciousness until we can align our manifest-image identifications of mental states by their contents with scientific-image identifications of the subpersonal information structures and events that are causally responsible for generating the details of the user-illusion we take ourselves to operate in." Riiiiiight.

[Phyllis · Rating 3 out of 5]

First of all, dense and hard to read.

Second, a little too much academic squabbling.

But, third, very interesting.

[Bruce · Rating 4 out of 5]

On Reading Daniel Dennett

I lay on my bed this morning feeling rather despondent. From my blog's reading of From Bacteria and Bach and Back Dennett has almost convinced me: God is a user illusion; perhaps a beneficial one, but one of the answers my mind provides to account for certain vague intimations I experience in living my life. I know, however, that when I start praying (as I was doing then), and when I go to church next Sunday, I will be likewise convinced that God and his plan for me and the rest of humanity is a vital reality. I ask myself, will I be constantly going back and forth between these two views, depending on what I’m reading and who I’m listening to?

I must try to decide for myself . . . I must think, introspect – which Dennett claims is not necessarily the best way to learn about one’s own mind. With a second person observing you are not as susceptible to the weight of one’s user illusions. (Dennett’s Cartesian gravity). But I still must ultimately be convinced myself. So I started to introspect then and there, laying on my bed, looking at the sunlight seeping through tree branches outside my window, encased by, amongst many other random objects, a messy pile of books and a laptop jutting out from my bureau.

What is my experience, I asked. What exactly can I conclude about my conclusions about reality—the reality of the universe and my place in it? Dennett lists some of the relevant items: “colors, opportunities, dollars, promises, and love . . .” (p. 368). These are “a few valuable examples from a large set of affordances.” They are, he points out, like the icons on our computer screen that help us navigate on our computer, completely ignorant of what’s really going on within.

Back to my experience. The sunlight through the trees is beautiful and gives me a sense of hope. From that hope I extrapolate a validation of my life—but not just a life lived in any old way. Only a life in which I’m confident of having a purpose consonant with the intimations of that sunlight through the trees can validate that hope. That sunlight through the trees, then, is a kind of user icon to navigate through life, trying to figure out how best to live it. And, like the screen icon, it covers an incredibly complex underlying system that I can’t begin to imagine or manipulate.

So far I’m following Dennett’s model which on completion he claims we will be able to “align our manifest-image identifications of mental states . . . with scientific-image identifications of the subpersonal information structures . . .” (p. 367). This is a model for scientists. The ordinary lay person will continue contentedly with his own manifest-image and the user icons with which he wends his way through it.

However, my conjecture about the “subpersonal information structures” underlying my hope are quite different. They are, first of all, structures in the universe, not simply my mind (e.g., the sunlight through the trees), and in the center of that structure is God. I hastily concede the concept of God (not God Himself!) is a kind of user icon. But, in order to properly align this all-important element of my manifest-image with what’s really going on out there, I find I must include a genuine, a real, reason for hope that comes from living a certain kind of life (i.e., a purposeful, moral life). Dennett might reply that I’m experiencing an illusion, albeit a useful illusion of a hope and purpose validated by some structure in the universe. But, alas, realizing something is useful only to make life more bearable and pleasant, completely empties it of worth—like discovering someone you thought loved you is only interested in your money.

In Dennett’s view we’re all analogous to church-goers who, it’s been claimed, enjoy greater longevity from living in a faith community. But of course this is only the case if they sincerely believe the dogma of their creed, just as the taker of a placebo must be confident it will alleviate his ailment. It seems, then, that the basis of their lives is a very precarious ignorance which, as Lady Bracknell points out, is “like a delicate exotic fruit; touch it and the bloom is gone.” According to Dennett, we all navigate reality with the help of similar user illusions of hope, love, friendship, virtue, etc., giving our lives a sense of consequence that suggests our efforts to live a good life are not simply in alignment with bottom-down evolutionary forces, but in some way make a difference. For instance, when we resist the temptation to act dishonestly or meanly, are we simply following ‘best practices’ for a reasonably pleasant life, so that honesty has value solely as a “user-illusion of the manifest image”?

Sometimes Dennett's conjectures are the basis for a rebuttal to his views, as when he cites “[t]he incessant torrent of self-probing and reflection that we engage in during waking life” as a potent evolutionary force. But surely such self-probing can bring one to realize the existence of forces that transcend blind evolution.

At one point Dennett seems to come close to recognizing the imperative our existence affords to believe in God:

“We tend to overlook the importance of the fact that we have voluminous experience of many people independently coming up with the same answer . . . but if that were not our experience, no amount of analytic reflection in the intrinsic necessity of mathematics--or the existence of a benign God--would convince us to trust our calculations.” (p. 378)

This voluminous experience we share with “many people independently” is a certain depth of feeling for which the word ‘feeling’ is far too weak. Such feelings are the basis for institutions that develop and explicate that ‘feeling.’ Examples are the feeling of danger (institution: police), romantic love (institution: marriage), and the apprehension of a world that cries out for an entity responsible for the rich significance of life (institution: religion). These ‘feelings’ do indeed create for us an imperative that cannot be ignored.

[Jim · Rating 4 out of 5]

All told, it was interesting & very well narrated. It never really grabbed me, though. I've never cared too much for the short pieces of Dennett's that I've run across before because I just found them bewildering. A GR friend (Nancy?) told me she really enjoyed him, so I decided to try this book & it was much better. He explained & defined terms as he went. Still, his analysis & arguments were long & looping. I often lost the main point on the road to making it, so I'm glad I had the ebook to back up the audio.

I really appreciated his view of memes. I agree that it is an often misunderstood & somewhat maligned concept. I'm not sure I buy into all of Dennett's views on it, but I find it certainly does get us asking different & perhaps better questions even if folks can't agree on the somewhat hazy term. It was created by Dawkins in The Selfish Gene, a book I'm planning to reread soon.

The idea of competency without comprehension was well explored & explained. I see his example of the termite mound wasn't accepted well by some, but most of them seem to miss the point, IMO. He could have done a better job delving into the different world views other organisms have compared to ours when they have any comprehension at all, but perhaps that's too much to ask. I've read entire books on a particular sense & it's amazing how much it changes our brain & thinking. He did pretty well showing comprehension as a scale & divorcing it from competency, though.

Table of Contents
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 would-be 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

[Vilis · Rating 4 out of 5]

Grāmata ir polemiska, ne skaidrojoša, jo autors tajā apraksta savu hipotēzi par prāta un apziņas izcelsmi un attīstību (un cīnās ar tās pretiniekiem). Bet ideja interesanta un izklāsts visnotaļ pārliecinošs - ja pareizi sapratu, pamatdoma ir tāda, ka cilvēku prāts evolūcijas ceļā bija izveidojies īpaši uzņēmīgs pret dažādām mēmēm (pamatā vārdiem un uzvedības paradumiem), kuru savaldīšanai bija nepieciešams evolucionēt arī kontroles mehānismam. To mēs tad arī uztveram kā savu apziņu.

[Simon Robs · Rating 4 out of 5]

'Evolution is cleverer than you are.' Memes & Genes, baby!

[Sopyka]

This book feels it's made only of Prefaces. Every chapters so far is explaining why he's writing the book and asking readers not to be angry with him for what he's writing.

Write something of substance and let me decide if I want to be angry!

And I'm getting sick of authors explaining why they've chosen a guy (ie. Bach) over a woman. I am looking for a book on the brain, I don't care if it's male or female.

Have some balls and state your opinion.

[Kayson Fakhar · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great overview of mind and evolution of it. sometimes you need to pause and think and read the whole page again so I think it's because of the complexity of the subject and not a problem of the writer.

[Jan vanTilburg · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very interesting ideas and theories! Although it took way too long to get Back from Bach!
Much of the book is leading up to the concluding chapers. As interesting as the preceding were, they could have been much shorter.
My main reason to read this book was the sub tittle: The Evolution of Minds.
And to some degree the book delivered! There are explanations given where consciousness comes from and how understanding evolves.
Although Dennett does admit: ..”the goal of delineating and explaining our stack of competences via bottom-up neuroscience alone is remote”.
A degree of speculation does exist.

For me the revelation was that consciousness comes gradually upon mastering language.
“The arrival of language sets the stage for a great moment in evolutionary history: the origin of comprehension”.
Dennett then states that Comprehension is only made possible by the arrival of a new kind of evolutionary replicator:
culturally transmitted informational entities: memes.
Words are the basic memes.
And that in turn also affects the neurological pathways in the brain. Language evolved to fit the brain before the brain evolved to better accommodate language.
For Dennett no “spark” that originates consciousness. It is a gradual process upon learning a language. All there is, is the material brain. Consciousness explained!
The practise of sharing information in communicative action with others, giving and demanding reasons, is what creates our personal user-illusions.
Communication makes our manifest image manifest to us! The self becomes apparent.

Dennett used the concept of the computer throughout the book as a comparison to the brain. And it does help to clarify how our brain works.
An intriguing thought came up then.
About the soul (suppose it exist). If an AI becomes sentient, able to perceive or feel things, does it have a soul then?
This is no issue for materialists but I wonder what dualists would make of it?
(am now reading the book “Do Androids dream of Electric Sheeps” by Philip K. Dick written in 1968) in which androids can be detected because of their lack of empathy. Empathy is stated as one of the defining qualities of humans)

From Bacteria => Competence without Comprehension, Natural Selection via Evolution to Bach => Comprehension, Top Down Design and Back => much of humanities current tools (computers et.al.) are not understood anymore. Research is done by multidisciplinary teams. One can not understand all of science anymore.

Some concepts:
Carthesian: means of or relating to the French philosopher René Descartes—from his Latinized name Cartesius.
Descartes said: “I think, therefore I am”. Dualistic.
The Carthesian wound is then materialism. There is no separate soul.
From this Dennetts Carthesian Gravity is derived. The pull that humans feel towards dualism. This concept keeps on coming back in this book. And I had difficulty grasping it. Now I understand.

Also to keep in mind, this is not a why narrative but a “how come”. The book is not about morality.

[Ben Zimmerman · Rating 1 out of 5]

Daniel Dennett, as a philosopher, is known for engaging a bit more with cognitive scientists and evolutionary biologists in forming his ideas, which made this work look interesting to me. I've read some of his work in the past, and my understanding is that he takes a stance that consciousness is an illusion, which has always been a contentious position and one that is difficult for me personally to understand (an illusion for whom? aren't illusions something?). I decided to read this book to see if I could get a better handle on it. I couldn't.

Because he wants to explain human consciousness through a naturalistic account, he spends a lot of the book talking about the process of evolution. He starts with discussing the process of evolution, and then its application to biology and intelligent life in the early chapters, and then moves on to the idea of memes and cultural evolution in the middle chapters, which is the meat of the book. Then the climax is his discussion about the emergence and comprehension of consciousness and speculations on the "post-intelligent design" world.

My opinion is that most of the good parts of this book have been done better by other authors - e.g. Dawkins with natural selection, memes also by Dawkins, and also Jonnie Hughes in the "On the Origin of Teepees." The "post-intellient design" world by a vast array of science fiction writers and Kurzweil.

There was some good stuff about relating meaning and intention, which I haven't been exposed to in pop science and I also really liked the idea of the process of meme evolution co-evolving with our brains which harbor them. This is a really cool insight, although I'm unclear about if this is Dennett's original idea.

The speculation that consciousness arises out of the need for an intentional stance is interesting, but I still can't understand the jump to using this to explain away conscious phenomena instead of just explaining conscious phenomena. I think my problem is just that I want to start from the phenomenon itself and Dennett doesn't. If a physicist explained gravity by saying, "gravity is an illusion", it wouldn't be very helpful. Instead they explain gravity through mathematical patterns that seem to explain the phenomenon, and in the end are left with something fundamental that is much more mysterious (e.g. a set of field equations that seem to be part of space for some reason). Explaining why these exist seems to be the "hard question" of physics, or if it turns out have some mathematical explanation, then the "hard question" is why does physical law follow mathematics. My feeling is that the "hard question" of consciousness is really similar! Even if I completely explain the mechanism behind my "user illusion", why does my "user illusion" of red appear red to me instead of blue?

I was left unsatisfied with the conclusion of the book, and it took a long time to get there, with many side roads, which were only moderately interesting. It is a difficult book, requiring a lot of attention, and, in my opinion, with little pay-off.

[Rick Wilson · Rating 2 out of 5]

OK so this book was mostly a miss for me. And I don’t know if I’m the jerk here, or if this book is just way overhyped. It’s possible that the author is the OG and originator of the ideas that I rolled my eyes at. If that’s the case, if he’s been talking about this stuff since the 70s, and so many of the trite cliches I scoffed at are actually his, then I’ll let my words here beat me about the head as they rightfully should.

Daniel Dennet is a consciousness researcher for the last forever and this is an accumulation and writing of his best ideas about human consciousness. The problem is that a lot of the ideas proposed are not novel. He talks a lot about a lot of really cool and interesting ideas that I don’t think get us any closer to understanding consciousness. Things from Clyde Shannon‘s information theory to the importance of Alan Turing. If you notice the parallel between those two is that they’re both heavily computationally-based.

And I think this is where Daniel Dennet worldview is flawed. He’s obviously very computationally savvy, likely a significantly better programmer than I will ever be, but I don’t think that this application of computing principles to consciousness is a particularly valid one. Things like information theory and descriptions of top down programming, while taking up a significant portion of the book, don’t get us any closer to understanding consciousness, and I’m not sure they’re particularly great as descriptions in their own right. How would you quantify the number of bits of information your brain intakes every day as we can’t reasonably measure what your subconscious does. It also overvalues individual contributions at the expense of how science and understanding actually develops.

This misattribution continues for most of the book. He consistently says things that seem smart but when you take a step back, you realize they’re fucking nonsense. Saying things like, “you can know the value of gold coins, but knowing their value doesn’t help you if you’re not a strong swimmer and they’re filling your pockets“ it’s the same shit Jordan Peterson pulls. Make statements, use complicated language, have vague evidence or proof that doesn’t really prove anything, and then come to weird psychobabble conclusions. At one point this dude used Aesop to justify how false signaling was detrimental to organisms. The boy who cried mate selection. I hate this type of writing.

As an entertaining pseudo-educational read I’d put it on par with Yuval Noah Harari’s Homo Deus. I also think it has about as much accuracy. That is to say, little. Avoid this book as a source of truth.

[Angie Boyter]

I have enjoyed many of Dennett's books, but I DID NOT LAST LONG AT ALL in this one )which is why I decided not to give it a star rating. MAYBE it got better.)! It seems everything in his writing that has annoyed me at all is here in spades. One is his EXTENDED use of what he considers clever metaphors that he is so proud of he grinds them into the ground and that I too often do not find very apt, like his term "Cartesian gravity", which I initially had trouble understanding and then decided was not worth the trouble after I figured it out!
A part of my annoyance is that the book was poorly edited. There are too many editorial errors of the sort I might see in an ARC but not in a finished work. For example, I looked for Cartesian gravity in the index, and it said it began on page 15. It actually began on page 16, not a big deal, but no excuse in today's electronic world. Other errors may have been harder to spot and just made it harder to follow his thoughts. In addition to mechanical issues, though, he does things like using a puzzle about crossing a bridge as an example of a puzzle that has a retrospectively obvious solution. He gives the full problem---and then never provides the solution (Fortunately, Wikipedia did.). Using the puzzle at all and the retrospectively obvious solution was a digression not relevant to his subject, and the frequency of his digressions made the book all that much harder to follow.
My bottom line is that I felt I was listening to the rambling musings of a very smart man who has a bit too much age on him to attempt a book like this without more editorial intervention than he apparently received.

[Stephen Palmer · Rating 2 out of 5]

I wanted to like this. I should have liked it. I didn't much like it.

I've enjoyed this brilliant author's previous work, not least the groundbreaking 'Consciousness Explained,' but this... this has great substance, yet the writing is terrible. Every paragraph is broken up with digressions, stuff in brackets - even a single question mark in one instance - and more utterly unnecessary stuff that any editor would ordinarily have excised. But Dennett's editor didn't. As a result, the book reads mostly like the half-assed ramblings of a doddery old professor.

I'll say it again - the substance is great. The middle section didn't seem that important, but the opening and concluding chapters in particular were important and good. Dennett's thesis is that all explanations which posit a dividing line between mind stuff and brain stuff, as with Decartes' original concept, are misleading. He thinks the so-called Hard Question only appears if you take such positions. He also agrees with Nicholas Humphrey that the point of conscious, the reason for its existence, is that it makes things matter in human life. When you're in love with somebody, that person's highs and lows mean so much to you for exactly the same reason. You therefore make an effort for them, regardless of the circumstances. Similarly, the fact that consciousness is a user-illusion is no contradiction to the fact that we human beings matter to each other. For this insight, I applaud the author.

In a nutshell: good substance, dire writing.