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We have had plenty of atheist presidents; they just wouldn’t admit it.

Daniel Dennett

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.
DANIEL DENNETT

Decision Future Improvement Live Open World
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.
DANIEL DENNETT

Fair Ignorance Learning Myself Process Reading Writing
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.
DANIEL DENNETT

Destruction Enemy Hit Mindset Panic Worst Yourself
Human consciousness is just about the last surviving mystery.
DANIEL DENNETT

Conscious Human Mystery Survive
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.
DANIEL DENNETT

Clear Detail Mistake Risk Time Yourself
YES we have a soul but it’s made of lots of tiny robots.
DANIEL DENNETT

Build Ourselves Robot Soul
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.
DANIEL DENNETT

Evidence Life Science Subject
Human freedom is not an illusion; it is an objective phenomenon, distinct from all other biological conditions and found in only one species – us.
DANIEL DENNETT

Condition Freedom Human Mistake Objection Oneself
You can’t get through seminary and come out believing in God!
DANIEL DENNETT

Believe Seminar Yourself
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.
DANIEL DENNETT

Care Complete Guide Knowledge Limitation Yourself
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.
DANIEL DENNETT

Blind Love Resolution Suffering Tragedy
Philosophers are never quite sure what they are talking about – about what the issues really are – and so often it takes them rather a long time to recognize that someone with a somewhat different approach (or destination, or starting point) is making a contribution.
DANIEL DENNETT

Contribution Destination Philosophy Quite Recognition Talk
Not a single one of the cells that compose you knows who you are, or cares.
DANIEL DENNETT

Care Knowledge Yourself
It is not so much that we, using our brains, spin our yarns, as that our brains, using yarns, spin us.
DANIEL DENNETT

Brain Ourselves
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.
DANIEL DENNETT

Competition Consider Mindset Possible
I am a philosopher, not a scientist, and we philosophers are better at questions than answers.
DANIEL DENNETT

Better Philosophy Question Science Way Yourself

We have had plenty of atheist presidents; they just wouldn’t admit it.

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We have had plenty of atheist presidents; they just wouldn’t admit it.

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