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      ABSTRACT
       
      Daniel Dennett's book, Darwin's Dangerous Idea, is presented
      as an historical account and explication of evolutionary theory,
      and a demonstration of how Darwin's "dangerous idea"
      provides an explanation of the psychological or epistemic dimension
      of the world (or of "mind" in nature). Its real agenda
      is to present Dennett's own theory of the origin of "mind"
      in nature, a kind of computer age, neo-Pythagoreanism, which
      seeks to legitimize the claims of Artificial Intelligence by
      locating the source of all agency, meaning, or "mind",
      in an otherwise "dead" world of physics in algorithms.
      This approach continues the dominant tradition in modern science
      of radically separating the psychological and physical into two
      incommensurable parts, and it is this, the paradigmatic dualism
      at its core, and the erroneous and outdated empirical assumptions
      on which it is based, that are the book's undoing. By correcting
      these assumptions a principled basis is provided for grounding
      a commensurable theory that dissolves the anomalies inherent
      in such Cartesian accounts.
    
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