Why Are There Minds?

Arts and Sciences

Daniel Dennett has dedicated the last 50 years of his life to methodically stripping the magic, mystery and God from the world. Now the Austin B. Fletcher Professor of Philosophy is out to answer once and for all two questions that have been perplexing him—and others—for decades: How come there are minds? And how is it possible for minds to ask and answer this question?That’s the subject of his latest book, From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds (W.W. Norton), a dense opus drawing up the many disparate topics Dennett has debated for decades, bolstered with evidence from neuroscience, linguistics, natural history, technology—even chess and French literature.
“Over the years, I’ve encountered not just skepticism about the nature of mind, but a sort of antagonism—‘I don’t want to think about that, I don’t want to think that way,’” said Dennett, co-director of the Center for Cognitive Studies. “And so I’ve come up with various ways of cajoling, almost seducing people into turning things around in their heads. I’ve got a whole lot of pieces that fit together now, and the idea is to get people to see that.”
The dominant theme of the book will be a familiar one for the Dennett faithful. Beginning billions of years ago with non-living molecules floating in primordial soup, through to the evolution of modern man, Dennett argues a purely Darwinian trajectory. The world’s creatures are all a simple product of natural selection’s brute force trial-and-error approach, constructed one meager reproductive advantage atop another.
Most of the time, these creatures are ignorant as to what they do or why—“competence without comprehension.” The Australian cathedral termite, a favorite example of Dennett’s, builds elaborate structures that regulate temperature and gases in its underground colonies. But the termites don’ ...

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