Daniel Dennett Quotes
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Are zombies possible? They're not just possible, they're actual. We're all zombies.* Nobody is conscious - not in the systematically mysterious way that supports such doctrines as epiphenomenalism.*It would be an act of desperate intellectual dishonesty to quote this assertion out of context!
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Philosophers' Syndrome: mistaking a failure of the imagination for an insight into necessity.
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An inert historical fact is any fact about a perfectly ordinary arrangement of matter in the world at some point in the past that is no longer discernible, a fact that has left no footprints at all in the world today.
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Animals are not just herbivores or carnivores. They are, in the nice coinage of the psychologist George Miller, informavores.
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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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The earth has grown a nervous system, and it's us.
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We should get used to the idea that we'll probably never be able to find - and confirm - a good explanation of the ultimate origin of the universe, though I see no reason to believe that we can't press much further on this question than we have managed to date.
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Homunculi are bogeymen only if they duplicate entire the talents they are rung in to explain. If one can get a team or committee of relatively ignorant, narrow-minded, blind homunculi to produce the intelligent behaviour of the whole, this is progress.
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A philosopher is someone who says, 'We know it's possible in practice; we're trying to work out if it's possible in principle!'
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Biology is Engineering
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In all mammalian species that have so far been carefully studied, the rate at which their members engage in the killing of conspecifics is several thousand times greater than the highest homicide rate in any American city.
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It is not 'scientism' to concede the objectivity and precision of good science, any more than it is history worship to concede that Napoleon did once rule in France and the Holocaust actually happened. Those who fear the facts will forever try to discredit the fact-finders.
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But if we ask where precisely in the brain that point of view is located, the simple assumptions that work so well on larger scales of space and time break down. It is now quite clear that there is no single point in the brain where all information funnels in, and this fact has some far from obvious consequences.
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Every human mind you've ever looked at … is a product not just of natural selection but of cultural redesign of enormous proportions.
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I think religion for many people is some sort of moral viagra.
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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.
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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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Up till now the development of proto-consciousness, we can suppose, nervous systems solved the 'Now what do I do?' problem by a relatively simple balancing act between a strictly limited repertoire of actions - if not the famous four F's (fight, flee, feed, or mate), then a modest elaboration of them.
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There are no forces on this planet more dangerous to us all than the fanaticisms of fundamentalism, of all species: Protestantism, Catholicism, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism, as well as countless smaller infections.
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..the point of a randomizing device like a coin flip, is to make the result uncontrollable by making it sensitive to so many variables that no feasible, finite list of conditions can be singled out as the cause.
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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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When comparing the time scales of genetic and cultural evolution, it is useful to bear in mind that we today - every one of us - can easily understand many ideas that were simply unthinkable by the geniuses in our grandparents' generation!
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A prosthetically enhanced imagination is still liable to failure, especially if it is not used with sufficient rigor.
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Not a single one of the cells that compose you knows who you are, or cares.