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COGNITIVE SCIENCE Dennett rides again Dan Jones relishes the philosopher’s latest exploration of and .

n Joel and Ethan Coen’s 2009 film A ask questions about our own minds. Serious Man, physics professor Larry Perhaps none are bigger than the problem Gopnik is in the middle of an existen- of . Dennett reprises his long- Itial crisis. In a dream, he gives a lecture held counter-intuitive that conscious- on Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle; ness is a ‘user ’ similar to the interface Sy Ableman, the older man with whom of an app, through which people interact Gopnik’s wife is having an affair, stays on with the program without understanding after the students disperse. In a condescend- how it works. Memetic apps in our brains, VICKMARK/NYT/EYEVINE BRYCE ing drawl, he addresses Gopnik and his Dennett argues, create a ‘user interface’ that equation-covered chalkboard: “I’ll concede “renders the memes ‘visible’ to the ‘self’”, that it’s subtle, clever — but at the end of the authoring “both words and deeds”. day, is it convincing?” Critics often quip that Dennett doesn’t Philosopher and cognitive scientist Daniel explain consciousness so much as explain it Dennett has been hearing variants of this away, or duck the challenge entirely, and this riposte for decades. If history is a guide, his chapter is unlikely to bring them around. latest book, From Bacteria to Bach and Back, When it comes to plugging the hole of sub- will elicit similar responses. It is a supremely jective , sceptics are likely to see his enjoyable, intoxicating work, tying together solution as barely touching the sides. Dennett 50 years of thinking about where minds might well reply that a lack of imagination come from and how they work. Dennett’s prevents them from seeing how his theory path from the origins of life to symphonies supports a version of consciousness devoid is long and winding, but you couldn’t hope of over-inflation. For the philosophical back- for a better guide. Walk with him and you’ll ground to these hard-to-swallow , see learn a lot. Cognitive scientist in 2013. Dennett’s (Little, The book’s backbone is ’s Brown, 1991). theory of . That replaced our species. At first, he writes, words evolved Although From Bacteria to Bach and Back the idea of top-down intelligent design with to better fit the brains they had to colonize. covers territory that Dennett has explored a mindless, mechanical, bottom-up process Only later did brains start evolving geneti- before, it is no mere rehash. Over the past that guides organisms along evolutionary tra- cally to better accommodate words, begin- couple of decades, many psychologists, jectories into ever more complex regions of ning a co-evolutionary process that turned linguists and philosophers have developed design space. Dennett also draws heavily on us into voluble creatures. ideas that extend and deepen Dennett’s con- the idea of ‘competence without comprehen- More generally, Dennett sees memetic tributions, and he draws on these in consoli- sion’, best illustrated by mathematician Alan as akin to how software has co- dating and refining his arguments. Turing’s proof that a mechanical device could evolved with hardware. Memes are like Dennett has earned his reputation as do anything computational. Natural selec- apps that “add a talent, a bit of know-how”, one of today’s most readable, intellectually tion has created, through genetic evolution, slowly building up the repertoire of human nimble and scientifically literate philoso- a world rich in competence without compre- competences and ever-greater degrees of phers, as this subtle, clever book shows. But hension — the bacteria, trees and termites comprehension. This, he avers, kicked off at the end of the day, is it convincing? It’s not that make up so much of Earth’s biomass. an incremental process that led to self- an open-and-shut case, as he acknowledges. Yet, as Dennett and others argue, genetic monitoring, reflection and the emergence Many may find the earlier chapters more evolution is not enough to explain the skills, of “new things to think about: words and persuasive than the later ones, in which power and versatility of the human . other memes”. shoulders so much weight and Over the past 10,000 years, human behaviour Later, inventions from writing to clocks human consciousness looms large. Even and our ability to manipulate the planet have gave us “memorable scholars who embrace Dennett’s account changed too quickly for biological evolution things to do things of how Darwinian processes fashion cul- to have been the driving force. In Dennett’s with”. Step by small tural design may stop short of hitching their view, our brains turned into fully fledged step, he argues, we wagon to his claims. But a virtue of his broad modern minds thanks to cultural memes: moved away from perspective is that it can tolerate disagree- ‘ways of behaving’ — pronouncing a word bottom-up cultural ments over fine details while still hewing to this way, dancing like so — that can be copied, evolution towards the spirit of his vision. remembered and passed on. consciously directed, Dennett’s is not the only game in town, as Some memes are better than others at top-down explora- he well knows, but it is immensely instruc- getting passed on. This drives natural selec- tions, giving birth to tive and pleasurable to see this game played tion, fashioning memetic design without a From Bacteria to genuinely intelligent with such skill, verve and wit. ■ Bach and Back: designer. The first memes, Dennett argues, The Evolution of design. This has ena- were words, “the lifeblood of cultural evolu- Minds bled us to wipe out Dan Jones is a freelance writer in Brighton, tion”, which act as virtual DNA for the richly DANIEL C. DENNETT smallpox, put people UK. cumulative that marks out W. W. Norton: 2017. on the Moon — and e-mail: [email protected]

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