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 DENNETTIf I know better than you know what I am up to, it is only because I spend more time with myself than you do.
More Daniel Dennett Quotes
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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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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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I think religion for many people is some sort of moral viagra.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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The secret of happiness is: Find something more important than you are and dedicate your life to it.
DANIEL DENNETT -
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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We have had plenty of atheist presidents; they just wouldn’t admit it.
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The chief trick to making good mistakes is not to hide them-especially not from yourself.
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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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A scholar is just a library’s way of making another library.
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Religion is defined as social systems whose participants avow a supernatural agent or agents whose approval is to be sought.
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 -
Not a single one of the cells that compose you knows who you are, or cares.
DANIEL DENNETT -
A child raised on a desert island, alone, without social interaction, without language, and thus lacking empathy, is still a sentient being.
DANIEL DENNETT -
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.
DANIEL DENNETT -
What you can imagine depends on what you know.
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Darwin’s idea of natural selection makes people uncomfortable because it reverses the direction of tradition.
DANIEL DENNETT -
Philosophers’ Syndrome: mistaking a failure of the imagination for an insight into necessity.
DANIEL DENNETT -
Most people in the West who say they believe in God actually believe in belief in God.
DANIEL DENNETT -
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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The only answer to the endless chains of why, why, why is that the alternatives died.
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 -
There’s simply no polite way to tell people they’ve dedicated their lives to an illusion.
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AI makes philosophy honest.
DANIEL DENNETT