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Index
Cover
Title
Contents
List of Illustrations
Preface
Part 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 designed to deal with affordances
Higher animals as intentional systems: the emergence of comprehension
Comprehension comes in degrees
Part 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 locus
Memes add nothing to what we already know about culture
The would-be science of memetics is not predictive
Memes 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
Part 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” com prehension using “local” competences?
How did our manifest image become manifest to us?
Why do we experience things 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
Illustrations
Appendix: The Background
References
Index
About the Author
Also by Daniel C. Dennett
Copyright
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