Philosophers’ Syndrome: mistaking a failure of the imagination for an insight into necessity.
DANIEL DENNETTThe problem is that no ethical system has ever achieved consensus. Ethical systems are completely unlike mathematics or science. This is a source of concern.
More Daniel Dennett Quotes
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What you can imagine depends on what you know.
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Not a single one of the cells that compose you knows who you are, or cares.
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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 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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There is a time for politeness and there is a time when you are obliged to be rude.
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Darwin’s idea of natural selection makes people uncomfortable because it reverses the direction of tradition.
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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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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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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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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 only meaning of life worth caring about is one that can withstand our best efforts to examine it.
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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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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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We have had plenty of atheist presidents; they just wouldn’t admit it.
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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.
DANIEL DENNETT