From Bacteria to Bach and Back

In Darwin’s Dangerous Idea (1995), I argued that natural selection is an algorithmic process, a collection of sorting algorithms that are themselves composed of generate-and-test algorithms that exploit randomness (pseudo-randomness, chaos) in the generation phase, and some sort of mindless quality-control testing phase, with the winners advancing

ADCs

If competence without comprehension is so wonderfully fecund—capable of designing nightingales, after all—why do we need comprehension—capable of designing odes to nightingales and computers?

Reasons existed long before there were reasoners.

Can your children read road maps as easily as you do or have they become dependent on GPS to guide them? How concerned should we be that we are dumbing ourselves down by our growing reliance on intelligent machines?

Semantic information, the concept of information that we must start with, is remarkably independent of encodings, in the following sense: two or more observers can acquire the same semantic information from encounters that share no channel.24 Here is a somewhat contrived example: Jacques shoots his uncle dead in Trafalgar Square and is apprehended

creationists ask, rhetorically, “where does all the information in the DNA come from?” and Darwin’s answer is simple: it comes from the gradual, purposeless, nonmiraculous transformation of noise into signal, over billions of years.

That’s what it is like to be us. We learn about others from hearing or reading what they say to us, and that’s how we learn about ourselves as well. This is not a new idea, but keeps being rediscovered apparently. The great neurologist John Hughlings Jackson once said, “We speak, not only to tell others what we think, but to tell ourselves what we

The first two sentences of this book are “How come there are minds? And how is it possible for minds to ask and answer this question?” It is asking for a process narrative, and that is what I am going to provide.