Problems in science are sometimes made easier by adding complications.
DANIEL DENNETTReligions have depended on the relative isolation and ignorance of their flocks, forever and this is all breaking down.
More Daniel Dennett Quotes
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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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What you can imagine depends on what you know.
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You don’t get to advertise all the good that your religion does without first scrupulously subtracting all the harm it does and considering seriously the question of whether some other religion, or no religion at all, does better.
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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 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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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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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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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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Love is blind, as they say, and because love is blind, it often leads to tragedy: to conflicts in which one love is pitted against another love, and something has to give, with suffering guaranteed in any resolution.
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I look around the world and see so many wonderful things that I love and enjoy and benefit from, whether it’s art or music or clothing or food and all the rest. And I’d like to add a little to that goodness.
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Churches have given us great treasures such as music and architecture. Whether that pays for the harm they have done is another matter.
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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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YES we have a soul but it’s made of lots of tiny robots.
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You can’t get through seminary and come out believing in God!
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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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Human consciousness is just about the last surviving mystery.
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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 secret of happiness is: Find something more important than you are and dedicate your life to it.
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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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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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It is not so much that we, using our brains, spin our yarns, as that our brains, using yarns, spin us.
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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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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 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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A scholar is just a library’s way of making another library.
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No matter how smart you are, you’re smarter if you take the easy ways when they are available.
DANIEL DENNETT