Daniel Dennett Quotes

101 quotes in 1657 categories

• A child raised on a desert island, alone, without social interaction, without language, and thus lacking empathy, is still a sentient being.
• Human freedom is not an illusion; it is an objective phenomenon, distinct from all other biological conditions and found in only one species - us.
• Words have a genealogy and it's easier to trace the evolution of a single word than the evolution of a language.
• As every scuba diver knows, panic is your worst enemy: when it hits, your mind starts to thrash and you are likely to do something…
• If the history of resistance to Darwinian thinking is a good measure, we can expect that long into the future, long after every triumph of…
• In 50 years - or 20 years, or 200 years - our current epistemic horizon (the Big Bang, roughly) may look as parochial as the…
• In short, we need to recover the courage we celebrate in our heroes, and in particular, the courage to tolerate, for the sake of a…
• Now that mobile phones and the internet have altered the epistemic selective landscape in a revolutionary way, every religious organisation must scramble to evolve defences…
• Some cultural phenomena bear a striking resemblance to the cells of cell biology, actively preserving themselves in their social environments, finding the nutrients they need…
• We should get used to the idea that we'll probably never be able to find - and confirm - a good explanation of the ultimate…
• How good are the best musical imaginations? Can a trained musician, swiftly reading a score, tell just how that voicing of dissonant oboes and flutes…
• Thanks to technology, what almost anybody can do has been multiplied a thousandfold, and our moral understanding about what we ought to do hasn't kept…
• The point of asking questions is to find true answers; the point of measuring is to measure accurately; the point of making maps is to…
• Human consciousness is just about the last surviving mystery... a topic that often leaves even the most sophisticated thinkers tongue-tied and confused. And, as with…
• Moreover, the eye contains a big flaw: the retina is inside out. Why would an almighty designer do such a thing? No intelligent designer, ..…
• Keep Darwinian thinking out of cosmology, out of psychology, out of human culture, out of ethics, politics, and religion!
• The only meaning of life worth caring about is one that can withstand our best efforts to examine it.
• No matter how smart you are, you're smarter if you take the easy ways when they are available.
• People ache to believe that we human beings are vastly different from all other species - and they are right! We are different. We are…
• Every living thing is, from the cosmic perspective, incredibly lucky simply to be alive. Most, 90 percent and more, of all the organisms that have…

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