Daniel C. Dennett is a brilliant polemicist, famous for challenging unexamined orthodoxies. Over the last thirty years, he has played a major role in expanding our understanding of consciousness, developmental psychology, and evolutionary theory. And with such groundbreaking, critically acclaimed books as Consciousness Explained and Darwin's Dangerous Idea (a National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize finalist), he has reached a huge general and professional audience. In this new book, Dennett shows that evolution is the key to resolving the ancient problems (...) of moral and political freedom. Like the planet's atmosphere on which life depends, the conditions on which our freedom depends had to evolve, and like the atmosphere, they continue to evolve-and could be extinguished. According to Dennett, biology provides the perspective from which we can distinguish the varieties of freedom that matter. Throughout the history of life on this planet, an interacting web and internal and external conditions have provided the frameworks for the design of agents that are more free than their parts-from the unwitting gropings of the simplest life forms to the more informed activities of animals to the moral dilemmas that confront human beings living in societies. As in his previous books, Dennett weaves a richly detailed narrative enlivened by analogies as entertaining as they are challenging. Here is the story of how we came to be different from all other creatures, how our early ancestors mindlessly created human culture, and then, how culture gave us our minds, our visions, our moral problems-in a nutshell, our freedom. (shrink)

Information theory and statistical mechanics II.

Some real objects show a very particular tendency: that of becomingindependent with regard to the uncertainty of their surroundings. This isachieved by the exchange of three quantities: matter, energy andinformation. A conceptual framework, based on both Non-equilibriumThermodynamic and the Mathematical Theory of Communication is proposedin order to review the concept of change in living individuals. Three mainsituations are discussed in this context: passive independence inconnection with resistant living forms (such as seeds, spores, hibernation,...), active independence in connection with the life (...) span of aliving individual (whether an ant or an ant farm), and the newindependence in connection with the general debate of biological evolution. (shrink)