From Bacteria to Bach and Back

Dennett's late synthesis of his work on evolution, culture and consciousness, explaining how minds like ours could come from mindless matter. Its guiding idea is Darwin's 'strange inversion of reasoning': design can arise without a designer, and competence can come before comprehension. Bacteria, termites and many machines show competence without comprehension, acting on 'free-floating rationales' that no one has represented. Dennett contrasts a termite mound with Gaudí's Sagrada Família to show how bottom-up and top-down design can produce similar results. Comprehension, he argues, arrived late and largely through culture: words and other memes are cultural replicators that spread and evolve, and they turned human brains into minds equipped with thinking tools. He then argues that consciousness is a 'user illusion', like the icons on a computer screen, and resists what he calls Cartesian gravity, the pull towards treating it as a mystery. The book closes by considering intelligent machines that have competence without comprehension.

It brings together decades of Dennett's thinking in one readable argument and is a strong statement of the view that minds, meaning and consciousness can be explained by evolution.