From bacteria to Bach and back

pt. 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 desinged to deal with affordances-- Higher animals as intentional systems : the emergence of comprehension-- Comprehension comes in degrees-- pt. 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 focus-- Memes add nothing to what we already know about culture-- The would-be science of memetics is not predictive-- Mems 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-- pt. 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' competencies?-- How did our manifest image become manifest to us?-- Why do we experience thigs 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.--

'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 explined 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 doiong things not based in genetic instinct. Competition among memes produced thinking tools powerful enough tht our minds don't jsut 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.'--Publisher's description.