Day 2 Darwin's Dangerous Idea

Quotes of the Day
“Love it or hate it, phenomena like this exhibit the heart of power of the Darwinian idea. An impersonal, unreflective, robotic, mindless little scrap of molecular machinery is the ultimate basis of all the agency and hence meaning, and hence consciousness in the universe.” -Dennett

“ Call it what you like-and your own genuine, fully fledged intentionallity is in fact the product of the activities if all the semi-minded and mindless bits that make you up” -Dennett

Great section I covered today “Original Sin and the Birth of Meaning”. Original Sin in the section represents the inability for genetic copying to make perfect copies; creating the conditions for mutations and evolutions. He explores the idea that we can never really draw line were meaning begins, but there is no doubt that it began somewhere in macromolecules no different from a virus or a bacteria. The birth of meaning is fluid entangled in what he calls quasi-meaning. Just like what we can call life is fluid the replication of virus versus bacteria. The section concludes with the Universal Acid(Darwinian Idea) burning the concept that the mind is separate and immune to science.