The mind is the effect, not the cause.
DANIEL DENNETTTo 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.
More Daniel Dennett Quotes
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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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We need to let our children grow up to face the world armed with knowledge, with much more knowledge than we ourselves had at their age. It is scary, but the alternative is worse.
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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 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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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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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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The best thing about saying thank goodness in place of thank God this that here really are lots of ways of repaying your debt of goodness – by setting to create more of it, for the benefit of those to come.
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It is not so much that we, using our brains, spin our yarns, as that our brains, using yarns, spin us.
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The way evolution always discovers reasons is by retroactive endorsement.
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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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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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It’s a no win situation. It’s a mug’s game. The religions have contrived to make it impossible to disagree with them critically without being rude. They play the hurt feelings card at every opportunity.
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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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There are no good reasons to believe in god.
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True, you don’t have to be religious to be crazy, but it helps.
DANIEL DENNETT






