What you can imagine depends on what you know.
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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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 -
Not a single one of the cells that compose you knows who you are, or cares.
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The mind is the effect, not the cause.
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Religion is defined as social systems whose participants avow a supernatural agent or agents whose approval is to be sought.
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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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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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There’s no polite way to say to somebody (religious followers) ‘Do you realize you’ve wasted your life?
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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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Thanks to technology, what almost anybody can do has been multiplied a thousandfold, and our moral understanding about what we ought to do hasn’t kept pace.
DANIEL DENNETT -
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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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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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 -
I look around the world and see so many wonderful things that I love and enjoy and benefit from, whether it’s art or music or clothing or food and all the rest. And I’d like to add a little to that goodness.
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I am a philosopher, not a scientist, and we philosophers are better at questions than answers.
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Most people in the West who say they believe in God actually believe in belief in God.
DANIEL DENNETT