Profiles: A Science of the Soul - A philosopher’s quest to understand the making of the mind.

The New Yorker, March 27, 2017

by Joshua Rothman

p. 46-55

A profile of philosopher Daniel Dennett in relation to the publication of his newest book, “From Bacteria to Bach and Back”. The profile begins:

Four billion years ago, Earth was a lifeless place. Nothing struggled, thought, or wanted. Slowly that changed. Seawater leached chemicals from rocks; near thermal vents, those chemicals jostled and combined. Some hit upon the trick of making copies of themselves that, in turn, made more copies. The replicating chains were caught in oily bubbles, which protected them and made replication easier; eventually, they began to venture out into the open sea. A new level of order had been achieved on Earth. Life had begun.

The tree of life grew, its branches stretching toward complexity. Organisms developed systems, subsystems, and sub-subsystems, layered in ever-deepening regression. They used these systems to anticipate their future and to change it. When they looked within, some found that they had selves -constellations of memories, ideas, and purposes that emerged from the systems inside. They experiences being alive and had thoughts about that experience. They developed language and used it to know themselves; they began to ask how they had been made. (p. 46)

What drew me to Rothman’s re-telling of the creation story is the idea of how replication happens-copies copying copies- through a chance occurrence, a ‘jostling’ and a set of circumstances that made replication easier. I don’t really care what precipitated either the jostling or the circumstances that enabled the ease of replication; it is replication described as a ‘trick’ leading to replication, leading to order, leading to layers, and eventually to awareness of the self -formed from all that goes before- and, eventually, leading to the question of ‘how’.