Don’t be fooled by the title; there is little about bacteria, only a brief digression about Bach, and no “back” in philosopher Daniel Dennett’s latest Big Bravura Book about consciousness. But, as he confesses, he is an Author who Adores Alliteration. And Capitals. And Neologisms. He has also written several books about mind, consciousness and evolution, so it is fair to ask whether he has anything new to say in what the blurb claims is his “masterwork”. If my answer is “well, sort of”, it is important to be upfront about the fact that Dennett and I have not always seen eye-to-eye. Indeed, a German magazine once digitally edited together pictures of us sparring as bare-knuckle boxers. Despite this, and although he may well not thank me for it, there is much here that I agree with.
Dennett is one of those American philosophers of mind, so unlike most of their British counterparts, who is comfortable conversing with and responding to the work of evolutionary biologists and cognitive scientists. His heroes, cited frequently here, are Charles Darwin and Richard Dawkins in biology, Alan Turing and Claude Shannon in artificial intelligence and information theory. His enemies are creationists and mysterians in general, philosopher John Searle, polymath linguist Noam Chomsky, and biologists Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin. His aim is to provide a materialist account of the evolutionary origins of the human mind and consciousness by way of an extension of gene-based natural selection into human culture through the invocation of memes, that seductive Dawkinsian concept of which more below.
This is an infuriating book – too long and self-referential – but underlying it all is an interesting argument
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