From Bacteria to Bach and Back

Great book that covers many of the topics that Dan Dennett has worked on, such as cognition, mind, and consciousness, in an accessible and at the same time careful and engaging way. Provides a nice synthesis of his core ideas and contributions to research on those topics.

This is a fairly technical book of philosophy, also of interest to biologists if only because it tells a story that could be a rich source of papers to establish the likelihood of the steps in this sketch of how minds may have evolved.

It also purports to refute several philosophical positions on mind, the self and free will but requires you to follow a fairly detailed argument. It will take me a couple of more careful readings to decide about this, but if nothing else, Dennett provides some useful thinking tools.