From Bacteria to Bach and Back

Reasons existed long before there were reasoners.

Why shrink from the pedagogical task of showing that there can be design without a designer?

Shannon’s theory is, at its most fundamental, about the statistical relationship between different states of affairs in the world: What can be gleaned (in principle) about state A from the observation of state B? State A has to be causally related somehow to state B, and the causal relationship can vary in something like richness.

By reconceiving of the gap as a dynamic imagination-distorter that has arisen for good reasons, we can learn how to traverse it safely or—what may amount to the same thing—make it vanish.

Asking better and better questions is the key to refining our search for solutions to our “mysteries,” and this refinement is utterly beyond the powers of any languageless creature. “What is democracy?” A dog will never know the answer, to be sure, but it will never even understand the question. We can understand the questions, which radically chan

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

Good elevators earn their keep. They do this without any neurons, sense organs, dopamine, glutamate, or the other organic components of brains. So it seems fair to say that what they do so “cleverly” is a perfect case of competence without the slightest smidgen of comprehension or consciousness.

But the distinction between comprehension and incomprehension is still important, and we can salvage it by the well-tested Darwinian perspective of gradualism: comprehension comes in degrees. At one extreme we have the bacterium’s sorta comprehension of the quorum-sensing signals it responds to (Miller and Bassler 2001) and the computer’s sorta com

Comprehension is not the source of competence or the active ingredient in competence; comprehension is composed of competences.

it was Descartes who distilled this default assumption into a positive “theory”: The immaterial mind, the conscious thinking thing that we know intimately through introspection, is somehow in communication with the material brain, which provides all the input but none of the understanding or experience. The problem with dualism, ever since Descarte