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 DENNETTPhilosophers 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.
More Daniel Dennett Quotes
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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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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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There’s simply no polite way to tell people they’ve dedicated their lives to an illusion.
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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.
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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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What you can imagine depends on what you know.
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Philosophers’ Syndrome: mistaking a failure of the imagination for an insight into necessity.
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What you can imagine depends on what you know. Philosophers who know only philosophy consign themselves to a janitorial role in the great enterprises of exploration that are illuminating the mysteries of our lives.
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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.
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A scholar is just a library’s way of making another library.
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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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Human consciousness is just about the last surviving mystery.
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There are no good reasons to believe in god.
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Religion is defined as social systems whose participants avow a supernatural agent or agents whose approval is to be sought.
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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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Words are memes that can be pronounced.
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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.
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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 mind is the effect, not the cause.
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The earth has grown a nervous system, and it’s us.
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The only answer to the endless chains of why, why, why is that the alternatives died.
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There is a time for politeness and there is a time when you are obliged to be rude.
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YES we have a soul but it’s made of lots of tiny robots.
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No matter how smart you are, you’re smarter if you take the easy ways when they are available.
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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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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