From Bacteria to Bach and Back

While Daniel Dennett’s writing always addresses big questions, the reach of From Bacteria to Bach is audacious. His goal—to explain the emergence of mind as a biological (and post-biological) phenomenon, beginning from the first principles, i.e., protolife. In this work, Dennett is to be commended for his combination of broad scholarly reach combined with readability. Dennett has no need to awe and obfuscate with neologisms or obscure terminology. A thoughtful high school student could get most of this. While humanists have sneered at his scientism, from this reviewer’s point of view, he negotiates the hoary old twoculture problem with generosity and finesse. Throughout, Dennett maintains a (qualified) posthumanist stance. He argues, quite reasonably, for human exceptionalism in terms of our mental capabilities, but human exceptionalist as he is, he is emphatically biologically materialist on the matter of mind and maintains that he is also non-dualist (more in this below). Part one is plain sailing (Dennett likes his maritime metaphors and so do I) an easy argument about evolution where he frames up the book, anchoring (heh heh) his argument in the idea of evolution as ‘mindless’ R + D, searching the design space of possibilities for local optima. A guiding notion throughout the book is that this evolutionary process creates competence without comprehension (refuting creationists along the way). This ‘strange inversion of reason’ in both Darwin and Turing, is a theme to which he returns regularly. Competence without comprehension depends in turn on another key concept ‘free floating rationales’. Dennett expresses some regret at the naming of this idea, and I stumbled on the terminology ‘free floating rationales’ every time, but I get the concept, and I think it is useful. A ‘free floating rationale’ is a ‘reason’ in the logic of evolutionary design that determines a quality or capability of an organism, without the organism knowing it.