Darwin’s idea of natural selection makes people uncomfortable because it reverses the direction of tradition.
DANIEL DENNETTDarwin’s idea of natural selection makes people uncomfortable because it reverses the direction of tradition.
DANIEL DENNETTNot a single one of the cells that compose you knows who you are, or cares.
DANIEL DENNETTThe only answer to the endless chains of why, why, why is that the alternatives died.
DANIEL DENNETTThe way evolution always discovers reasons is by retroactive endorsement.
DANIEL DENNETTIn the long run I certainly hope information is the cure for fanaticism, but I am afraid information is more the cause than the cure.
DANIEL DENNETTWe 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 DENNETTWe have had plenty of atheist presidents; they just wouldn’t admit it.
DANIEL DENNETTYES we have a soul but it’s made of lots of tiny robots.
DANIEL DENNETTPhilosophers’ Syndrome: mistaking a failure of the imagination for an insight into necessity.
DANIEL DENNETTThere 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 DENNETTThe 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 DENNETTHuman consciousness is just about the last surviving mystery.
DANIEL DENNETTThanks 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 DENNETTIn 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 DENNETTMinds 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 DENNETTWhat you can imagine depends on what you know.
DANIEL DENNETT