I’m the guy who reputedly denies that people experience colors or pains, and thinks that thermostats think — just ask my critics.
DANIEL DENNETTWhat you can imagine depends on what you know. Philosophers who know only philosophy consign themselves to a janitorial role in the great enterprises of exploration that are illuminating the mysteries of our lives.
More Daniel Dennett Quotes
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The chief trick to making good mistakes is not to hide them-especially not from yourself.
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We have had plenty of atheist presidents; they just wouldn’t admit it.
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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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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 only answer to the endless chains of why, why, why is that the alternatives died.
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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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Human consciousness is just about the last surviving mystery.
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The earth has grown a nervous system, and it’s us.
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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 think religion for many people is some sort of moral viagra.
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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 only meaning of life worth caring about is one that can withstand our best efforts to examine it.
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There’s no polite way to say to somebody (religious followers) ‘Do you realize you’ve wasted your life?
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There’s simply no polite way to tell people they’ve dedicated their lives to an illusion.
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A scholar is just a library’s way of making another library.
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True, you don’t have to be religious to be crazy, but it helps.
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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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AI makes philosophy honest.
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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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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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YES we have a soul but it’s made of lots of tiny robots.
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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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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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Now that mobile phones and the internet have altered the epistemic selective landscape in a revolutionary way, every religious organisation must scramble to evolve defences or become extinct.
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No matter how smart you are, you’re smarter if you take the easy ways when they are available.
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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.
DANIEL DENNETT