Daniel Dennett Short Quotes

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The earth has grown a nervous system, and it's us.

Daniel Dennett
Human consciousness is just about the last surviving mystery.

Daniel Dennett
I think religion for many people is some sort of moral viagra.

Daniel Dennett
Problems in science are sometimes made easier by adding complications.

Daniel Dennett
We often learn more from bold mistakes than from cautious equivocation.

Daniel Dennett
Cost is always an object - the second law of thermodynamics sees to that

Daniel Dennett
Not a single one of the cells that compose you knows who you are, or cares.

Daniel Dennett
But I also can't prove that mushrooms could not be intergalactic spaceships spying on us.

Daniel Dennett
The chief trick to making good mistakes is not to hide them-especially not from yourself.

Daniel Dennett
Philosophers' Syndrome: mistaking a failure of the imagination for an insight into necessity.

Daniel Dennett
I am a philosopher, not a scientist, and we philosophers are better at questions than answers.

Daniel Dennett
No matter how smart you are, you're smarter if you take the easy ways when they are available.

Daniel Dennett
The only meaning of life worth caring about is one that can withstand our best efforts to examine it.

Daniel Dennett
People are afraid of being more ignorant than their children―especially, apparantly, their daughters.

Daniel Dennett
If I know better than you know what I am up to, it is only because I spend more time with myself than you do.

Daniel Dennett
A prosthetically enhanced imagination is still liable to failure, especially if it is not used with sufficient rigor.

Daniel Dennett
We really have to think of reasoning the way we think of romance, it takes two to tango. There has to be a communication.

Daniel Dennett
Animals are not just herbivores or carnivores. They are, in the nice coinage of the psychologist George Miller, informavores.

Daniel Dennett
Go ahead and believe in God, if you like, but don't imagine that you have been given any grounds for such a belief by science.

Daniel Dennett
A philosopher is someone who says, "We know it's possible in practice; we're trying to work out if it's possible in principle!"

Daniel Dennett
I'm the guy who reputedly denies that people experience colors or pains, and thinks that thermostats think — just ask my critics.

Daniel Dennett
If the best the roboticists can hope for is the creation of some crude, cheesy, second-rate, artificial consciousness, they still win.

Daniel Dennett
Every human mind you've ever looked at … is a product not just of natural selection but of cultural redesign of enormous proportions.

Daniel Dennett
Experience teaches... that there is no such thing as a thought experiment so clearly presented that no philosopher can misinterpret it...

Daniel Dennett
Sometimes you don't just want to risk making mistakes; you actually want to make them - if only to give you something clear and detailed to fix.

Daniel Dennett
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 pace.

Daniel Dennett
Any assortment of objects, especially "sticky" objects like molecules, randomly stirred for long enough will give rise to every conceivable possible combination.

Daniel Dennett
In the beginning, there were no reasons; there were only causes. Nothing had a purpose, nothing has so much as a function; there was no teleology in the world at all.

Daniel Dennett
Minds are in limited supply, and each mind has a limited capacity for memes, and hence there is considerable competition among memes for entry in as many minds as possible.

Daniel Dennett
We need to let our children grow up to face the world armed with knowledge, with much more knowledge than we ourselves had at their age. It is scary, but the alternative is worse.

Daniel Dennett