496 pages
Published Feb. 7, 2017 by W. W. Norton & Company.
Dennett has written for the laity about evolution, free will, and consciousness before. His thoughts continue to evolve, and in this book, he gives us a patient and entertaining explanation of his idea that consciousness, as the virtual construct he's described before, analogous to a graphic user interface, has evolved both genetically and memetically. Very satisfying.
This book is the capstone to a fifty-year career in trying to understand the mind and consciousness, and how they came to be. As such, expect this to be more of a 30,000-foot overview of a big subject, than a detailed description. Many of the details will be found in Dennett's other books, such as [b:Consciousness Explained|2069|Consciousness Explained|Daniel C. Dennett|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1386924714s/2069.jpg|1860288], [b:Darwin's Dangerous Idea|2068|Darwin's Dangerous Idea Evolution and the Meanings of Life|Daniel C. Dennett|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1412689162s/2068.jpg|1835], [b:Freedom Evolves|2071|Freedom Evolves|Daniel C. Dennett|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1312345547s/2071.jpg|2767774], and others.
One fundamental problem is explaining how consciousness can be built up from the ground up, without requiring any gifts to be bestowed from the heavens. To that end, Dennett presents several "inversions of reasoning": Darwin's idea that organisms can be bred without anyone doing the breeding; Turing's machine, which allows math to be done without a mind; and Hume's notion that causality is a feature of the …
This book is the capstone to a fifty-year career in trying to understand the mind and consciousness, and how they came to be. As such, expect this to be more of a 30,000-foot overview of a big subject, than a detailed description. Many of the details will be found in Dennett's other books, such as [b:Consciousness Explained|2069|Consciousness Explained|Daniel C. Dennett|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1386924714s/2069.jpg|1860288], [b:Darwin's Dangerous Idea|2068|Darwin's Dangerous Idea Evolution and the Meanings of Life|Daniel C. Dennett|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1412689162s/2068.jpg|1835], [b:Freedom Evolves|2071|Freedom Evolves|Daniel C. Dennett|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1312345547s/2071.jpg|2767774], and others.
One fundamental problem is explaining how consciousness can be built up from the ground up, without requiring any gifts to be bestowed from the heavens. To that end, Dennett presents several "inversions of reasoning": Darwin's idea that organisms can be bred without anyone doing the breeding; Turing's machine, which allows math to be done without a mind; and Hume's notion that causality is a feature of the mind rather than of the outside world (that is, if you watch a video of events in the world, you need a video track and an audio track, but you don't need a causality track to help you understand why dropping a glass makes it shatter).
The end result is not, of course, a fully developed theory of mind. But it does map out what looks like fruitful areas of research. I will be interested to see which of Dennett's ideas pan out in the future.
There is one false note in the book: at the end, when Dennett is speculating about the future of minds assisted by software and AI, he seems to turn into a cranky luddite, criticizing software tools like, I believe, Clippy the Microsoft Word assistant, that try too hard to appear human, even going so far as to say that, "[software] Systems that deliberately conceal their shortcuts and gaps of incompetence should be deemed fraudulent, and their creators should go to jail for committing the crime of creating or using an artificial intelligence that impersonates a human being." Nobody likes Clippy, but jail seems excessive.
