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 DENNETTMost people in the West who say they believe in God actually believe in belief in God.
More Daniel Dennett Quotes
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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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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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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.
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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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I think religion for many people is some sort of moral viagra.
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A scholar is just a library’s way of making another library.
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Philosophers’ Syndrome: mistaking a failure of the imagination for an insight into necessity.
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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.
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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 or become extinct.
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The mind is the effect, not the cause.
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I’m the guy who reputedly denies that people experience colors or pains, and thinks that thermostats think — just ask my critics.
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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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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.
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The secret of happiness is: Find something more important than you are and dedicate your life to it.
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I am a philosopher, not a scientist, and we philosophers are better at questions than answers.
DANIEL DENNETT