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.
DANIEL DENNETTA scholar is just a library’s way of making another library.
More Daniel Dennett Quotes
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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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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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Religion is defined as social systems whose participants avow a supernatural agent or agents whose approval is to be sought.
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YES we have a soul but it’s made of lots of tiny robots.
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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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Cost is always an object – the second law of thermodynamics sees to that.
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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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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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Problems in science are sometimes made easier by adding complications.
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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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What you can imagine depends on what you know.
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True, you don’t have to be religious to be crazy, but it helps.
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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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If I know better than you know what I am up to, it is only because I spend more time with myself than you do.
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The way evolution always discovers reasons is by retroactive endorsement.
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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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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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Religions have depended on the relative isolation and ignorance of their flocks, forever and this is all breaking down.
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There are no good reasons to believe in god.
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We have had plenty of atheist presidents; they just wouldn’t admit it.
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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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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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Most people in the West who say they believe in God actually believe in belief in God.
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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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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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We need to let our children grow up to face the world armed with knowledge, with much more knowledge than we ourselves had at their age. It is scary, but the alternative is worse.
DANIEL DENNETT