From Bacteria to Bach and Back

Classic Dennett; maybe not for beginners!

If you're a Dennett fan you'll love it. But it's really dense; I had to listen to entire chapters over again before moving on just to make sure I'd "gotten" it. But it was totally worth it and I enjoyed every bit of it.

I wouldn't start out with this book if you're new to Dennett. It makes me want to go back and reread "Darwin's Dangerous Idea" and I think that is a good sort of "prequel" to this, as is "Consciousness Evolves." If you read and enjoy this book and haven't given those a listen, you really should. (I've also read and really loved "Breaking the Spell" and "Freedom Evolves," but they don't connect as much to this one as the others.)

I found it difficult to focus on if I was trying to multitask. It takes a lot of attention. Best for listening to while driving, washing the dishes, or going for a walk.

How come there is a 'me'?

Consciousness has always been the greatest mystery to me. I fully believe in the idea that human beings are mammals evolved in accordance with the principles of Darwinian natural selection. I’m an atheist and I love the writing of people like Dawkins, Pinker and Hume, who are referred to often in this book.

It seems clear to me that there are also other animals who experience consciousness. By that I don’t mean that they are intelligent, although the ones I’m thinking of do have above average intelligence in the animal kingdom (dogs, cats, seals, dolphins, etc) but that they are aware of their experiences. They see and feel what is happening to them. They feel pain, hunger, fear – there’s more to it than just behaviouristic responses to environmental stimuli. I just don’t understand where this consciousness in humans and other animals came from.

I understand how the presence of the nervous system and painful stimuli will serve the Darwinian purpose of preventing you from doing damage to yourself, but I’ve never understood where the ‘me’ comes from who really feels the pain when I stub my toe. How do you get a ‘me’ from the movement of electricity through the central nervous system? If you built a computer as complicated as the human brain would it develop a ‘me’ and be ‘aware’? – I don’t think so (but I really don’t know that for sure).

This book addresses this question. Does it provide the answer? Sadly, no, not for me. It provides lots of interesting and helpful insights into the evolution of intelligence, but, unless I just didn’t get it, it doesn’t explain for me the emergent property of consciousness.

I’d still highly recommend it. I enjoyed every bit of it. I think I might listen to it again. But it didn’t answer the question for me. Maybe the question is unanswerable. Maybe it is beyond our understanding. Maybe we just have to accept that consciousness is just another of the many emergent properties that we see all around us in the natural and cultural world. I still don’t know.

Interesting but difficult listening

Very interesting subject, views and insights but be prepared for a lot of pausing and rewinding to give yourself time to grasp the special terms and rather deep concepts It is written rather defensively with lots of references to his own and other contemporary work which meant that it took some time to deliver the message. I did enjoy listening to it but feel I need to listen to a lot of it again to be able to better comprehend it.

amazing dense and eye opening

this is the first book I actually had to listen to twice back to back before I actually understood what dennet was trying to communicate. darwinism about darwinism? memes as the viruses of culture? darwinian spaces? consciousness and understanding evolving out of competence? all of these things are incredibly confusing the first time around, but then incredibly obvious once it clicks. Dennett's book the second time around really did this for me. truly recommended to read them re read

Showboats writing style, then muses on the mind

This book was a struggle to finish, since Dennet seemed to me to talk himself in circles gratuitously, if only to wind up (too late) at a pretty way of summarizing an argument that could be presented far more concisely.

The only other review was so bad that I wrote this

Any additional comments?

Anyone who has read any other work by Dennett knows what to expect. You're in for 15 hours of lucid, thought provoking prose guiding you through some of the deepest questions out there. There is no need to give any credence to the only other review so far which seems to be motivated solely by jealousy.

Wordy, wordy, wordy

You’ll need a lot of patience with this book if you’re hoping to learn something. Dennett just goes on and on and on and on, and every few pages mentions a scientific bit. Ugh.

Fascinating but very dense book.

This is one of those rare books that I will reread several times to understand better.

Consciousness explained and expanded

Would you recommend this audiobook to a friend? If so, why?

Daniel Dennett has an amazing brain and is a wordsmith of the 1st rank. It is astounding how much of Consciousness Explained's foresight is brought to fruition. Anyone thinking of artificial intelligence and what it might mean for society would do well to read this book. And anybody not thinking of it should.

Was there a moment in the book that particularly moved you?

1001 words is worth more than a picture. Great line, though his best remains, I think, "he's fighting a strawman and the strawman is winning."

spaghetti is a meme that sticks

reminds me of Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance... with all the meanderings and babbling ... but without an interesting sub plot.
there are hints of science and theory dispersed throughout, such as the three dimensions that describe the evolvability of a system. everything can be put into the context of a competitive, and thus evolving, system. some of these systems acquire inherent knowledge of their environment, and develop real-time if/then responses. the more complex, and faster to react, that an entity's compute system is, the better its fitness. these entities compete and naturally get into an computational arms race. at some point, the entities store knowledge and tools (affordances) in the environment. those groups which excel at this, prevail over less adroit groups. then, of course, the entities evolve incrementally more advanced cognitive abilities, and with it, higher levels of understanding. at some point, the understanding includes comprehension of how the brain/mind binding works, and how this mind connects a massive distributed fuzzy network of memes, many of them being nothing but cultural fables. finally, he gets to the idea of artificial computation manipulating memes and directly melding the reality (memes) seen by wetware brains. this artificial computation is itself without comprehension, but most of it is driven by the intentionality of cognizant beings. as it increases its competence across domains, it also increases its influence on everything, and becomes the essence of the overall system. at this point, humans become less important, and more of just cogs in a vast complexity engine.
I think Daniel Dennet might have said this, but with a huge layering of philosophy and arguments meandering through all of history, time and stotting space.