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.
DANIEL DENNETTNow 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.
More Daniel Dennett Quotes
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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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There’s no polite way to say to somebody (religious followers) ‘Do you realize you’ve wasted your life?
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Words are memes that can be pronounced.
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There are no good reasons to believe in god.
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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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What you can imagine depends on what you know.
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The way evolution always discovers reasons is by retroactive endorsement.
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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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I think religion for many people is some sort of moral viagra.
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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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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 mind is the effect, not the cause.
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What 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.
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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 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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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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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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True, you don’t have to be religious to be crazy, but it helps. Indeed, if you are religious, you don’t have to be crazy in the medically certifiable sense in order to do massively crazy things.
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Life itself is just a thin coat of paint on the planet, and we hold the paintbrush.
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The chief trick to making good mistakes is not to hide them-especially not from yourself.
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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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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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The secret of happiness is: Find something more important than you are and dedicate your life to it.
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I am a philosopher, not a scientist, and we philosophers are better at questions than answers.
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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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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