It is not so much that we, using our brains, spin our yarns, as that our brains, using yarns, spin us.
DANIEL DENNETTThere is no such thing as philosophy-free science, just science that has been conducted without any consideration of its underlying philosophical assumptions.
More Daniel Dennett Quotes
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Darwin’s idea of natural selection makes people uncomfortable because it reverses the direction of tradition.
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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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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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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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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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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 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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What you can imagine depends on what you know.
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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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No matter how smart you are, you’re smarter if you take the easy ways when they are available.
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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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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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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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Words are memes that can be pronounced.
DANIEL DENNETT