Top 100 Dennett's Quotes
#1. Religious reasons, which is no reason. I notice Skeptic had a review of Dennett's book, Darwin's Dangerous Idea. Religious reasons amount to what Dennett terms "skyhooks." Do you believe in skyhooks? I don't.
Garrett Hardin
#2. I think many people are terribly afraid of being demoted by the Darwinian scheme from the role of authors and creators in their own right into being just places where things happen in the universe.
Daniel Dennett
#3. Problems in science are sometimes made easier by adding complications.
Daniel Dennett
#4. 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 and fending off the causes of their dissolution.
Daniel Dennett
#5. There is a time for politeness and there is a time when you are obliged to be rude,
Daniel Dennett
#6. Keep Darwinian thinking out of cosmology, out of psychology, out of human culture, out of ethics, politics, and religion!
Daniel Dennett
#7. 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
#8. There is only one way to respect the substance of any purported God-given moral edict: consider it conscientiously in the full light of reason, using all the evidence at our command. No God that was pleased by displays of unreasoning love would be worthy of worship.
Daniel C. Dennett
#9. 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 find your way to your destination ... In short, the goal of truth goes without saying, in every human culture.
Daniel Dennett
#10. Whereas religions may serve a benign purpose by letting many people feel comfortable with the level of morality they themselves can attain, no religion holds its member to the high standards of moral responsibility that the secular world of science and medicine does!
Daniel Dennett
#11. Imagination is cheap as long as you don't have to worry about the details.
Daniel Dennett
#12. We live in a world that is subjectively open. And we are designed by evolution to be "informavores", epistemically hungry seekers of information, in an endless quest to improve our purchase on the world, the better to make decisions about our subjectively open future.
Daniel Dennett
#13. The best thing about saying thank goodness in place of thank God this that here really are lots of ways of repaying your debt of goodness - by setting to create more of it, for the benefit of those to come.
Daniel Dennett
#14. A scholar is just a library's way of making another library.
Daniel Dennett
#15. We have had plenty of atheist presidents; they just wouldn't admit it.
Daniel Dennett
#16. Daniel Dennett is our best current philosopher. He is the next Bertrand Russell. Unlike traditional philosophers, Dan is a student of neuroscience, linguistics, artificial intelligence, computer science, and psychology. He's redefining and reforming the role of the philosopher.
Marvin Minsky
#17. An inert historical fact is any fact about a perfectly ordinary arrangement of matter in the world at some point in the past that is no longer discernible, a fact that has left no footprints at all in the world today.
Daniel Dennett
#18. It turns out that all the "magic" of cognition depends, just as life itself does, on cycles within cycles of recurrent, "re-entrant," reflexive information-transformation processes
Daniel C. Dennett
#19. One cannot learn all about what it's like to run a marathon by interviewing only those who drop out - but one can learn something.
Daniel C. Dennett
#20. As the comedian Emo Phillips once said, "When I was a child, I used to pray to God for a bicycle. But then I realized that God doesn't work in that way - so I stole a bike and prayed for forgiveness!
Daniel C. Dennett
#21. Atheism, a term which will, I'm sure, eventually become as unnecessary as round-earthism ...
Daniel Dennett
#22. 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
#23. There is no reality of consciousness independent of the effects of various vehicles of content on subsequent action (and hence, of course, on memory).
Daniel Dennett
#24. 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 really stupid and self-destructive.
Daniel Dennett
#26. Wherever there is a design that is highly successful in a broad range of similar environments, it is apt to emerge again and again, independently - the phenomenon known in biology as convergent evolution. I call these designs 'good tricks.'
Daniel Dennett
#27. But I also can't prove that mushrooms could not be intergalactic spaceships spying on us.
Daniel Dennett
#28. Our manifest image, unlike the daisy's ontology or Umwelt, really is manifest, really is subjective in a strong sense. It's the world we live in, the world according to us.
Daniel C. Dennett
#29. Words have a genealogy and it's easier to trace the evolution of a single word than the evolution of a language.
Daniel Dennett
#30. I think we should stop treating ["God works in mysterious ways"] as any kind of wisdom and recognize it as the transparently defensive propaganda that it is. A positive response might be, "Oh good! I love a mystery. Let's see if we can solve this one, too. Do you have any ideas?
Daniel C. Dennett
#31. The secret of happiness is: Find something more important than you are and dedicate your life to it.
Daniel Dennett
#32. Darwin's idea of natural selection makes people uncomfortable because it reverses the direction of tradition.
Daniel Dennett
#33. In 50 years - or 20 years, or 200 years - our current epistemic horizon (the Big Bang, roughly) may look as parochial as the horizon Newton had to settle for in his day, but no doubt there will still be good questions whose answers elude us.
Daniel Dennett
#34. We should get used to the idea that we'll probably never be able to find - and confirm - a good explanation of the ultimate origin of the universe, though I see no reason to believe that we can't press much further on this question than we have managed to date.
Daniel Dennett
#35. It is not so much that we, using our brains, spin our yarns, as that our brains, using yarns, spin us.
Daniel Dennett
#36. Human freedom is not an illusion; it is an objective phenomenon, distinct from all other biological conditions and found in only one species - us.
Daniel Dennett
#37. The more you have invested in your religion, the more you will be motivated to protect that investment. Stark
Daniel C. Dennett
#38. Try to acquire the weird practice of savoring your mistakes, delighting in uncovering the strange quirks that led you astray. Then, when you have sucked out all the goodness to be gained from having made them, you can cheerfully forget them and go on to the next big opportunity.
Daniel Dennett
#39. The way evolution always discovers reasons is by retroactive endorsement.
Daniel Dennett
#40. Americans are notoriously ill-informed about evolution. A recent Gallup poll (June 1993) discovered that 47 percent of adult Americans believe that Homo sapiens is a species created by God less than ten thousand years ago.
Daniel C. Dennett
#41. That scientifically savvy philosopher Daniel Dennett pointed out that evolution counters one of the oldest ideas we have: 'the idea that it takes a big fancy smart thing to make a lesser thing. I call that the trickle-down theory of creation.
Richard Dawkins
#42. People who want to study religion usually have an ax to grind. They either want to defend their favorite religion from its critics or want to demonstrate the irrationality and futility of religion, and this tends to infect their methods with bias.
Daniel C. Dennett
#43. It's not an intellectual exercise. It's not an academic pursuit - it sort of masquerades as one, but at its core it's a test of trust in each other. Are you or aren't you one of us? And woe to the one who doesn't toe the line.
Daniel C. Dennett
#44. Most people in the West who say they believe in God actually believe in belief in God.
Daniel Dennett
#45. The earth has grown a nervous system, and it's us.
Daniel Dennett
#46. I look around the world and see so many wonderful things that I love and enjoy and benefit from, whether it's art or music or clothing or food and all the rest. And I'd like to add a little to that goodness.
Daniel Dennett
#47. A good library has all the good books. A great library has all the books.
Daniel C. Dennett
#48. The problem is that no ethical system has ever achieved consensus. Ethical systems are completely unlike mathematics or science. This is a source of concern.
Daniel Dennett
#49. We adore babies because they're so cute. And, of course, we are amused by jokes because they are funny. This is all backwards. It is. And Darwin shows us why.
Daniel Dennett
#51. There could be talking bunny rabbits, spiders who write English messages in their webs, and for that matter, melancholy choo-choo trains. There could be, I suppose, but there aren't-so my theory doesn't have to explain them.
Daniel Dennett
#52. I don't think there is any religious revival. I think what we are hearing, the furor, is merely the hysterical response of the churches the handwriting on the wall that they are seeing.
Daniel Dennett
#53. There's simply no polite way to tell people they've dedicated their lives to an illusion.
Daniel Dennett
#54. You don't get to advertise all the good that your religion does without first scrupulously subtracting all the harm it does and considering seriously the question of whether some other religion, or no religion at all, does better.
Daniel Dennett
#55. If nobody cares, then it doesn't matter what happens to flowers.
Daniel Dennett
#56. [I]n all mammalian species that have so far been carefully studied, the rate at which their members engage in the killing of conspecifics is several thousand times greater than the highest homicide rate in any American city.
Daniel Dennett
#57. Religions exist primarily for people to achieve together what they cannot achieve alone. - David Sloan Wilson, Darwin's Cathedral
Daniel C. Dennett
#58. Ancestor worship must be an appealing idea to those who are about to become ancestors. - Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works
Daniel C. Dennett
#59. 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
#60. human beings are actually more closely related to the two species of chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes, the familiar chimp, and Pan paniscus, the rare, smaller pygmy chimp or bonobo) than those chimpanzees are to the other apes.
Daniel C. Dennett
#61. I didn't plan to become an atheist. I didn't even want to become an atheist. It's just that I had no choice. If I'm being honest with myself.
Daniel C. Dennett
#62. Logic doesn't apply to the real world. D. R. Hofstadter and D. C. Dennett (eds.) The Mind's I, 1981.
Marvin Minsky
#63. People ache to believe that we human beings are vastly different from all other species - and they are right! We are different. We are the only species that has an extra medium of design preservation and design communication: culture.
Daniel Dennett
#64. 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
#65. No matter how smart you are, you're smarter if you take the easy ways when they are available.
Daniel Dennett
#66. The only answer to the endless chains of why, why, why is that the alternatives died
Daniel Dennett
#67. I don't think the 9/11 attacks taught us anything we didn't already know about religion. It has long been obvious - even to the deeply religious - that religious fanaticism is an extremely dangerous deranger of otherwise sane and goodhearted people.
Daniel Dennett
#69. Love is blind, as they say, and because love is blind, it often leads to tragedy: to conflicts in which one love is pitted against another love, and something has to give, with suffering guaranteed in any resolution.
Daniel Dennett
#70. To put it bluntly but fairly, anyone today who doubts that the variety of life on this planet was produced by a process of evolution is simply ignorant - inexcusably ignorant, in a world where three out of four people have learned to read and write.
Daniel Dennett
#71. I am inclined to think that nothing could matter more than what people love. At any rate, I can think of no value that I would place higher. I would not want to live in a world without love.
Daniel Dennett
#72. There may be things that are completely unknowable to us, so we must be careful not to treat the limits of our knowledge as sure guides to the limit of what there is.
Daniel Dennett
#73. The haven all memes depend on reaching is the human mind, but a human mind is itself an artifact created when memes restructure a human brain in order to make it a better habitat for memes.
Daniel Dennett
#74. YES we have a soul but it's made of lots of tiny robots
Daniel Dennett
#75. 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 free society, a level of risk we hardly ever imagined in the past.
Daniel Dennett
#76. 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 over the massed strings will sound?
Daniel Dennett
#77. (For the uninitiated, "ectoplasm" is a ghostly kind of stuff that writers like Dennett are constantly accusing critics of materialism of believing in. It plays the same sort of straw-man role in his writings on the mind that Paley does in Dawkins's writings on religion.)
Edward Feser
#78. You can't get through seminary and come out believing in God!
Daniel Dennett
#79. I think that what one can see from a Darwinian account is how the addition of culture in our species turns us into a very special sort of animal, an animal that can be a moral agent in a way that no other animal can be.
Daniel Dennett
#80. It's a no win situation. It's a mug's game. The religions have contrived to make it impossible to disagree with them critically without being rude. They play the hurt feelings card at every opportunity.
Daniel Dennett
#81. If the best the roboticists can hope for is the creation of some crude, cheesy, second-rate, artificial consciousness, they still win.
Daniel Dennett
#82. Consciousness is cerebral celebrity
nothing more and nothing less. Those contents are conscious that persevere, that monopolize resources long enough to achieve certain typical and "symptomatic" effects
on memory, on the control of behavior and so forth.
Daniel Dennett
#83. The only meaning of life worth caring about is one that can withstand our best efforts to examine it.
Daniel Dennett
#84. Reasons for declaring belief is not are not the same as reasons for believing in god.
Daniel Dennett
#85. The juvenile sea squirt wanders through the sea searching for a suitable rock or hunk of coral to cling to and make its home for life. For this task, it has a rudimentary nervous system. When it finds its spot and takes root, it doesn't need its brain anymore so it eats it!
Daniel Dennett
#86. Journalists sometimes speculate about "brain transplants" when they really should be calling them "body transplants," because, as the philosopher Dan Dennett has noted, this is the one transplant operation in which it is better to be the donor than the recipient.
Steven Pinker
#87. True, you don't have to be religious to be crazy, but it helps. Indeed, if you are religious, you don't have to be crazy in the medically certifiable sense in order to do massively crazy things.
Daniel Dennett
#88. Some of the greatest, most revolutionary advances in science have been given their initial expression in attractively modest terms, with no fanfare.
Daniel Dennett
#89. Philosophers' Syndrome: mistaking a failure of the imagination for an insight into necessity.
Daniel Dennett
#90. Up till now, we can suppose, nervous systems solved the Now what do I do? problem by a relatively simple balancing act between a strictly limited repertoire of actions - if not the famous four F's (fight, flee, feed, or mate), then a modest elaboration of them.
Daniel Dennett
#91. Churches have given us great treasures such as music and architecture. Whether that pays for the harm they have done is another matter.
Daniel Dennett
#92. There's no polite way to say to somebody (religious followers) 'Do you realize you've wasted your life?
Daniel Dennett
#93. Religion is defined as social systems whose participants avow a supernatural agent or agents whose approval is to be sought.
Daniel Dennett
#94. That's a rhetorical question, and trying to answer rhetorical questions instead of being cowed by them is a good habit to cultivate.
Daniel C. Dennett
#95. I think religion for many people is some sort of moral viagra.
Daniel Dennett
#96. There is no such thing as philosophy-free science, just science that has been conducted without any consideration of its underlying philosophical assumptions.
Daniel Dennett
#97. Not a single one of the cells that compose you knows who you are, or cares.
Daniel Dennett
#98. Like many other natural wonders, the human mind is something of a bag of tricks, cobbled together over the eons by the foresightless process of evolution by natural selection.
Daniel C. Dennett
#99. 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
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