Books podcast: Daniel Dennett and the evolution of minds

In this week’s podcast I’m talking to the philosopher Daniel Dennett — whose new book takes on one of the biggest and most intriguing problems of all: consciousness itself. In From Bacteria to Bach and Back, Prof Dennett makes the case that consciousness itself is a sort of illusion — and that the same evolutionary mechanisms that gave us opposable thumbs can account for our ability to do maths, compose music, wonder what would have happened had Germany won the Second World War, and think about the idea of thinking. This superbly lucid explicator tells us, too, about how “post-truth” is not just a political fad, but a threat to the basis of civilisation itself.

You can listen to our conversation here:

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