The earth has grown a nervous system, and it’s us.
DANIEL DENNETTThere’s simply no polite way to tell people they’ve dedicated their lives to an illusion.
More Daniel Dennett Quotes
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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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A scholar is just a library’s way of making another library.
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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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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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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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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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Words are memes that can be pronounced.
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I am a philosopher, not a scientist, and we philosophers are better at questions than answers.
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I am inclined to think that nothing could matter more than what people love. At any rate, I can think of no value that I would place higher. I would not want to live in a world without love.
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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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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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The haven all memes depend on reaching is the human mind, but a human mind is itself an artifact created when memes restructure a human brain in order to make it a better habitat for memes.
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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 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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YES we have a soul but it’s made of lots of tiny robots.
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Cost is always an object – the second law of thermodynamics sees to that.
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What you can imagine depends on what you know.
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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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There are no forces on this planet more dangerous to all of us than the fanaticisms of fundamentalism.
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There are no good reasons to believe in god.
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AI makes philosophy honest.
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Human consciousness is just about the last surviving mystery.
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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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In the long run I certainly hope information is the cure for fanaticism, but I am afraid information is more the cause than the cure.
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The only meaning of life worth caring about is one that can withstand our best efforts to examine it.
DANIEL DENNETT