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 DENNETTThere is a time for politeness and there is a time when you are obliged to be rude.
More Daniel Dennett Quotes
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Philosophers’ Syndrome: mistaking a failure of the imagination for an insight into necessity.
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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.
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The mind is the effect, not the cause.
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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.
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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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Human consciousness is just about the last surviving mystery.
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Cost is always an object – the second law of thermodynamics sees to that.
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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.
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I think religion for many people is some sort of moral viagra.
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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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There’s no polite way to say to somebody (religious followers) ‘Do you realize you’ve wasted your life?
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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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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.
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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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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