
I would like to share a link here:
https://youtu.be/IZefk4gzQt4
Professor Daniel Dennett spends the first few minutes of this Google seminar talking about the tree of life, the exorbitant evolutionary expenditure and anthropic design. 'Evolution may be slow and costly, but it is brilliant,' he says after pointing out that 99% of all the living organisms that have ever existed died 'childless'. He also makes a striking comparison between Gaudi's architecture and a termite castle---noting that the former comes about through 'top-down' intelligent design whilst the latter emerges from 'bottom-up' mindless building. (But a colony of clueless termites does not differ from a conglomerate of mindless neurons as much as we might intuitively think!)
Dennett also touches upon the irony conveyed by Darwin's and Turing's 'strange inversions of reasoning'. (You can get great designs in nature out of complete natural ignorance and a computer can be efficient without knowing how to do arithmetic.) In other words, competence can emerge without comprehension and mind (consciousness, understanding) is the effect, not the cause. Our intuitions, it seems, have been mistaken all along. The professor describes to us how a termite-colony brain can produce a Bach-like mind ...
