From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds by Daniel C Dennett review memes of making you think – The Guardian

Daniel Dennett maintains cheerfully that there is no such thing as I. Photograph: David Levenson/Getty Images

Daniel Dennett thinks of what we think of as mind as a trillion mindless robots dancing. Not one of those robots gives a hoot what we think, but collectively they unwittingly choreograph the illusion that we have a self that is in control. In that respect, Dennetts own personal compendious chorus line has been remarkably in step for the past 50 years of a stellar and pugnacious academic career (in which he has taken on heavy hitters including Stephen Jay Gould, Noam Chomsky and John Searle and always come out swinging). For most of that time, Dennett has been professor of philosophy at Tufts University, Massachusetts, and ever since he determined 40 years ago that his field of study would be the application of evolution Darwins dangerous idea to theories of consciousness, he has strayed from that righteous path only to debunk counter-arguments based on a vestigial sense of mystery or on religious faith.

This latest volume in that thrilling lifelong argument is yet another magnum opus, the latest distillation of all that Dennett holds to be true. As such, it is required reading for anyone remotely curious about how they came to be remotely curious. The title is a reddish herring. Dennett doesnt have much to say about the minds of bacteria, because they have no idea they are bacteria, and Bach only really gets a walk-on part because our brains are seduced by the alliterative play of language in titles. Dennett starts by disarming Ren Descartes, the first great philosopher of modern science. Descartes, in his theory of everything, The World, proposed a model of mind as being composed of something other than matter. He offered the thought that thinking was not the preserve of chemicals and neurons, but some other magic feat that operated outside the bounds of the normal physical world. That theory of Cartesian dualism proved so persuasive that, nearly 400 years on, Dennett is still fighting what feels like a back-to-the-wall battle to say it isnt so. In response to cogito ergo sum, Dennett maintains cheerfully that there is no such thing as I, beyond another cunning Darwinian ruse that has evolved to trick us into preserving our selfish genes. I is a fiction conjured and maintained by the mind, the greatest story we are never told.

Dennett shares with his fellow traveller and friend Richard Dawkins a great gift for communicating abstruse theory in seductive stories. He and Dawkins are, in this sense, among what he calls the pre-eminent memeticists of our times: their minds have made themselves skilled at having ideas that spread to colonise other minds. These viral ideas (memes, Dennett like to call them, although the moniker itself hasnt quite caught on) are the currency of our collective intelligence as a species. They compete constantlyin a survival of the fittest in the arena of culture, a Darwinianspace.

Such is the winning reverse engineered simplicity of natural selection as an idea that there is hardly any subject the philosopher cannot marshal to his cause. Dennetts brilliant career has seen him colonise all aspects of human activity with Darwinian logic. Here he takes the campaign into such diverse fields as linguistics (words themselves become the simplest and most indestructible memes, constantly spreading and mutating in their built-in mission to describe the world) and, most tellingly, into the concepts of artificial intelligence and thinking tools and their products, what he calls ourbrainchildren.

Some of these forays are easier to follow than others. At one point, Dennett takes on Steven Pinkers contention that it is ludicrous to describe human inventions wheelbarrows, Hamlet, iPads in Darwinian terms since they are created by the intelligent designer in the individual brain, with an end in mind. Dennett is having none of it, which leads to conclusions like this one: Pinker is right that the human brain is really a designer but his should not be seen as an alternative to the memetic approach, but as a continuation of the memetic approach into the age of gradually de-Darwinising semi-intelligent design. It is worth persevering through such thickets. More often than not, rereading Dennetts arguments brings them into focus, and you have the pleasure of observing your mind being won over by another of the philosophers seductive memes.

From Bacteria to Bach to Back by Daniel C Dennett is published by Allen Lane (25). To order a copy for 18.75 go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over 10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of 1.99

Read the rest here:

From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds by Daniel C Dennett review memes of making you think - The Guardian