Philosophy Now Forum

From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds
by Daniel C. Dennett. Amazon

How did we come to have minds?

For centuries, this question has intrigued psychologists, physicists, poets, and philosophers, who have wondered how the human mind developed its unrivaled ability to create, imagine, and explain. Disciples of Darwin have long aspired to explain how consciousness, language, and culture could have appeared through natural selection, blazing promising trails that tend, however, to end in confusion and controversy. Even though our understanding of the inner workings of proteins, neurons, and DNA is deeper than ever before, the matter of how our minds came to be has largely remained a mystery.

That is now changing, says Daniel C. Dennett. In From Bacteria to Bach and Back, his most comprehensive exploration of evolutionary thinking yet, he builds on ideas from computer science and biology to show how a comprehending mind could in fact have arisen from a mindless process of natural selection. Part philosophical whodunit, part bold scientific conjecture, this landmark work enlarges themes that have sustained Dennett’s legendary career at the forefront of philosophical thought.

In his inimitable style―laced with wit and arresting thought experiments―Dennett explains that a crucial shift occurred when humans developed the ability to share memes, or ways of doing things not based in genetic instinct. Language, itself composed of memes, turbocharged this interplay. Competition among memes―a form of natural selection―produced thinking tools so well-designed that they gave us the power to design our own memes. The result, a mind that not only perceives and controls but can create and comprehend, was thus largely shaped by the process of cultural evolution.

An agenda-setting book for a new generation of philosophers, scientists, and thinkers, From Bacteria to Bach and Back will delight and entertain anyone eager to make sense of how the mind works and how it came about.

Feeling & Knowing: Making Minds Conscious
Antonio Damasio Amazon

From one of the world’s leading neuroscientists: a succinct, illuminating, wholly engaging investigation of how biology, neuroscience, psychology, and artificial intelligence have given us the tools to unlock the mysteries of human consciousness

“One thrilling insight after another ... Damasio has succeeded brilliantly in narrowing the gap between body and mind.” —The New York Times Book Review

In recent decades, many philosophers and cognitive scientists have declared the problem of consciousness unsolvable, but Antonio Damasio is convinced that recent findings acrossmultiple scientific disciplines have given us a way to understand consciousness and its significance for human life.

In the forty-eight brief chapters of Feeling & Knowing, and in writing that remains faithful to our intuitive sense of what feeling and experiencing are about, Damasio helps us understand why being conscious is not the same as sensing, why nervous systems are essential for the development of feelings, and why feeling opens the way to consciousness writ large. He combines the latest discoveries in various sciences with philosophy and discusses his original research, which has transformed our understanding of the brain and human behavior.

Here is an indispensable guide to understand­ing how we experience the world within and around us and find our place in the universe.

• Big Bang 13.5 billon years
  Protocells 4 billion years
  First cells, (or prokaryotes, such as bacteria),
  without a nucleus 3.8 billion years
  Photosynthesis 3.5 billion years
  First single cells with a nucleus (or eukaryotes) 2 billion years
  First multicellular organisms 700–600 million years
  First nervous cells 500 million years
  Fish 500–400 million years
  Plants 470 million years
  Mammals 200 million years
  Primates 75 million years
  Birds 60 million years
  Hominids 14–12 million years
  Homo sapiens 300 thousand years

Veritas Aequitas wrote: ↑Sun Jun 11, 2023 8:25 amHow?

Veritas Aequitas wrote: ↑Sun Jun 11, 2023 8:25 am The evolution of moral progress has to be related to the evolution of the human mind.

While the mind is said to be embodied, i.e. intricately linked to the physical brain, I believe the mind is an additional emergent that supervene the physical brain like an Operating System represented by software in a physical computer.

The Operating System of a computer are represented by programmed codes and only works when there is electricity activating it.
Similarly, the mind is not the physical brain, but is represented by neural coding that works only when there are life forces, the entity must be alive with sufficient life forces.

The mind [analogically the OS] is supported by other [neural programs] software] to enable the mind to work like what we have at present.

Without the life-forces of a person alive, there would be no mind but merely a physical brain of a corpse; if a person is in severe coma, there is no life forces to manifest a typical human mind.
Sometimes if the brain is damaged, but if the parts that sustain the mind are not, a person may be fully aware but unable to control and move or activate certain parts of the brain.

Therefore while the brain and the mind are intricately combined, they are in a way separate entities, analogical, one is hardware and the other software.
The critical point here is there is no mind if there is no brain while there can be a brain but there is no mind.

The critical difference between the brain and mind is the 'softwares' and life-forces that enable the mind to emerge.

Evolutionary wise the physical brain began to evolve first with basic operations and the mind subsequently emerged at some point in the evolutionary calendar.
How?

Atla wrote: ↑Sun Jun 11, 2023 8:40 am Ugh this again. There is no literal hardware-software distinction. Software isn't activated by electricity, software is literally made of electrons and is a part of the hardware. Or in other words the hardware is the extended software.

Veritas Aequitas wrote: ↑Sun Jun 11, 2023 8:45 am How can the OS works if there is no electricity to activate the computer.
There is no mind if there is no life-force in the brain to enable the mind to emerge.

Veritas Aequitas wrote: ↑Sun Jun 11, 2023 8:25 am The evolution of moral progress has to be related to the evolution of the human mind.

While the mind is said to be embodied, i.e. intricately linked to the physical brain, I believe the mind is an additional emergent that supervene the physical brain like an Operating System represented by software in a physical computer.

The Operating System of a computer are represented by programmed codes and only works when there is electricity activating it.
Similarly, the mind is not the physical brain, but is represented by neural coding that works only when there are life forces, the entity must be alive with sufficient life forces.

The mind [analogically the OS] is supported by other [neural programs] software] to enable the mind to work like what we have at present.