From Bacteria to Bach and Back The Evolution of Minds
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"A supremely enjoyable, intoxicating work." —Nature 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.
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I loved the book, I definitely recommend it to any one interested in mind and conscience.
I think it has a lot of information and good references, even for books that the author has not yet read but might be interesting. I don't think the reader should agree with anything stated on the book to profit from it, it is mentioned several times that some things in the field are just recently being discovered.
I had a few eureka moments while reading the book, one of them was about the path to result usually not being the shortest path, considered being the result of two independent quests, let's say you want to go from A to C, not caring about traversing B, paths from A to B and B to C are optimized independently and use the shortest path, but then there is a shortest path from A to C, but it is more efficient, in terms of effort, to take what you already have and do A to B then B to C than to invest a lot of resources in the more efficient A to C.
It offers some interesting categorizations, not all of them attributed to the author, the two I remember are:
- Creatures by kinds of intelligences: Darwinian, Skinnearian, Popperian and Gregorian.
- Pedro Domingos' five tribes of ML: Symbolists, Connectionists, Evolutionaries, Bayesians and Analogizers.
By the end of the book I had two important disagreements, more of the kind of misunderstandings. He mentions that even if he believes in hard AI he does not think is feasible for now, I think it is feasible, although I partially agree with him on not being appealing (I think it is a matter of perspectives and marketing, not effort). Then he compares termites and humans and say it is obvious that humans are superior, I think we are superior, by some criteria, but he felt in the trap he described along the book about taking an anthropocentric perspective, not a big deal but can be misleading for people only reading the conclusions or taking that from the book.
Molt bo, idees, que per la meva humil falta d'experiència, son molt trencadores.
Això si tot i que la majoria del argument no pressuposa bagatge filosòfic ni de ciències cognitives hi ha extenses enzarzades amb altres postures del camp.
