Cost is always an object – the second law of thermodynamics sees to that.
DANIEL DENNETTI’m the guy who reputedly denies that people experience colors or pains, and thinks that thermostats think — just ask my critics.
More Daniel Dennett Quotes
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A child raised on a desert island, alone, without social interaction, without language, and thus lacking empathy, is still a sentient being.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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A scholar is just a library’s way of making another library.
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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.
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The earth has grown a nervous system, and it’s us.
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Churches have given us great treasures such as music and architecture. Whether that pays for the harm they have done is another matter.
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The evidence for evolution pours in, not only from geology, paleontology, biogeography, and anatomy, but of course from molecular biology and every other branch of the life sciences.
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The only meaning of life worth caring about is one that can withstand our best efforts to examine it.
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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.
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Religions have depended on the relative isolation and ignorance of their flocks, forever and this is all breaking down.
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Philosophers are never quite sure what they are talking about – about what the issues really are – and so often it takes them rather a long time to recognize that someone with a somewhat different approach (or destination, or starting point) is making a contribution.
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The only answer to the endless chains of why, why, why is that the alternatives died.
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Not a single one of the cells that compose you knows who you are, or cares.
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The mind is the effect, not the cause.
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Most people in the West who say they believe in God actually believe in belief in God.
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There is no such thing as philosophy-free science, just science that has been conducted without any consideration of its underlying philosophical assumptions.
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Problems in science are sometimes made easier by adding complications.
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There are no forces on this planet more dangerous to all of us than the fanaticisms of fundamentalism.
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The chief trick to making good mistakes is not to hide them-especially not from yourself.
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Life itself is just a thin coat of paint on the planet, and we hold the paintbrush.
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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.
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The idea that God is a worthy recipient of our gratitude for the blessings of life but should not be held accountable for the disasters is a transparently disingenuous innovation of the theologians.
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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