Daniel Dennett, who recently passed away, is an inspiration for people like me who love grand ideas that connect many different fields at a deep level (and be rigorous about that; well as rigorous as grand theories can be). His thinking is difficult to categorize: part philosopher, part scientist, he had many good ideas on topics ranging from evolution to consciousness to God. The book From Bacteria To Bach And Back had been lying on my shelf for many years and I recently picked it up because I’ve been thinking a lot about evolutionary constraints on brain and consciousness. The book is hard to summarize because it spans so many topics, but perhaps the central idea is this: competence without comprehension is not only possible, but is the norm; but when comprehension slowly develops, it leads to an explosion of artifacts and culture that we see around us. Dennett argues that there’s a difference between performing a behavior and having a (manipulable) representation in the mind of…
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