Daniel Dennett Quotes & Sayings

Whereas religions may serve a benign purpose by letting many people feel comfortable with the level of morality they themselves can attain, no religion holds its member to the high standards of moral responsibility that the secular world of science and medicine does! — Daniel Dennett

I think that there are no forces on this planet more dangerous to us all than the fanaticisms of fundamentalism, of all the species: Protestantism, Catholicism, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism, as well as countless smaller infections. Is there a conflict between science and religion here? There most certainly is. — Daniel Dennett

Up till now, 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. — Daniel Dennett

I think many people are terribly afraid of being demoted by the Darwinian scheme from the role of authors and creators in their own right into being just places where things happen in the universe. — Daniel Dennett

A scholar is just a library's way of making another library. — Daniel Dennett

The point of asking questions is to find true answers; the point of measuring is to measure accurately; the point of making maps is to find your way to your destination ... In short, the goal of truth goes without saying, in every human culture. — Daniel Dennett

Cost is always an object - the second law of thermodynamics sees to that — Daniel Dennett

Every living thing is, from the cosmic perspective, incredibly lucky simply to be alive. Most, 90 percent and more, of all the organisms that have ever lived have died without viable offspring, but not a single one of your ancestors, going back to the dawn of life on Earth, suffered that normal misfortune. You spring from an unbroken line of winners ... — Daniel Dennett

If nobody cares, then it doesn't matter what happens to flowers. — Daniel Dennett

Reasons for declaring belief is not are not the same as reasons for believing in god. — Daniel Dennett

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. — Daniel Dennett

Isn't it true that whatever isn't determined by our genes must be determined by our environment? What else is there? There's Nature and there's Nurture. Is there also some X, some further contributor to what we are? There's Chance. Luck. This extra ingredient is important but doesn't have to come from the quantum bowels of our atoms or from some distant star. It is all around us in the causeless coin-flipping of our noisy world, automatically filling in the gaps of specification left unfixed by our genes, and unfixed by salient causes in our environment. — Daniel Dennett

I don't myself need that role for God. My view is that creation itself, the universe itself, is the most wonderful thing deserving awe and respect. And that satisfies me as my substitute for God. — Daniel Dennett

I even agree that the concept of god helps some people lead better lives. That does happen. Don't ever forget it. I just think there are better ways to help people lead better lives. — Daniel Dennett

To 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. — Daniel Dennett

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. — Daniel Dennett

You don't get to advertise all the good that your religion does without first scrupulously subtracting all the harm it does and considering seriously the question of whether some other religion, or no religion at all, does better. — 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. — Daniel Dennett

Highly technical philosophical arguments of the sort many philosophers favor are absent here. That is because I have a prior problem to deal with. I have learned that arguments, no matter how watertight, often fall on deaf ears. I am myself the author of arguments that I consider rigorous and unanswerable but that are often not such much rebutted or even dismissed as simply ignored. — Daniel Dennett

Natural selection is not gene centrist and nor is biology all about genes; our comprehending minds are a result of our fast evolving culture. — Daniel Dennett

There's no polite way to say to somebody (religious followers) 'Do you realize you've wasted your life? — Daniel Dennett

The only answer to the endless chains of why, why, why is that the alternatives died — Daniel Dennett

Let me lay my cards on the table. If I were to give an award for the single best idea anyone ever had, I'd give it to Darwin, ahead of even Newton or Einstein and everyone else. In a single stroke, the idea of evolution by natural selection unifies the realm of life, meaning and purpose with the realm of space and time, cause and effect, mechanism and physical law. It is not just a wonderful idea. It is a dangerous idea. — Daniel Dennett

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 Dennett

Life itself is just a thin coat of paint on the planet, and we hold the paintbrush. — Daniel Dennett

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. — Daniel Dennett

There's simply no polite way to tell people they've dedicated their lives to an illusion. — Daniel Dennett

YES we have a soul but it's made of lots of tiny robots — Daniel Dennett

The traditional view of purpose says it comes from on high, from God, from the Creator. Darwin's idea of natural selection makes people uncomfortable because it reverses the direction of tradition. Whereas people used to think of meaning coming from on high and being ordained from the top down, now we have Darwin saying, "No, all of this design can happen, all of this purpose can emerge from the bottom up without any direction at all." — Daniel Dennett

Religion is defined as social systems whose participants avow a supernatural agent or agents whose approval is to be sought. — Daniel Dennett

We adore babies because they're so cute. And, of course, we are amused by jokes because they are funny. This is all backwards. It is. And Darwin shows us why. — Daniel Dennett

I am confident that those who believe in belief are wrong. That is, we no more need to preserve the myth of God in order to preserve a just and stable society than we needed to cling to the Gold Standard to keep our currency sound. It was a useful crutch, but we've outgrown it. Denmark, according to a recent study, is the sanest, healthiest, happiest, most crime-free nation in the world, and by and large the Danes simply ignore the God issue. We should certainly hope that those who believe in belief are wrong, because belief is waning fast, and the props are beginning to buckle. — Daniel Dennett

Some cultural phenomena bear a striking resemblance to the cells of cell biology, actively preserving themselves in their social environments, finding the nutrients they need and fending off the causes of their dissolution. — Daniel Dennett

Some philosophers can't bear to say simple things, like "Suppose a dog bites a man." They feel obliged instead to say, "Suppose a dog d bites a man m at time t," thereby demonstrating their unshakable commitment to logical rigor, even though they don't go on to manipulate any formulae involving d, m, and t. — Daniel Dennett

In fact, if you are faced with the prospect of running across an open field in which lightning bolts are going to be a problem, you are much better off if their timing and location are determined by something, since then they may be predictable by you, and hence avoidable. Determinism is the friend, not the foe, of those who dislike inevitability. — Daniel Dennett

You can't get through seminary and come out believing in God! — Daniel Dennett

Try to acquire the weird practice of savoring your mistakes, delighting in uncovering the strange quirks that led you astray. Then, when you have sucked out all the goodness to be gained from having made them, you can cheerfully forget them and go on to the next big opportunity. — Daniel Dennett

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. — Daniel Dennett

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 Dennett

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

Human consciousness is just about the last surviving mystery ... a topic that often leaves even the most sophisticated thinkers tongue-tied and confused. And, as with all of the earlier mysteries, there are many who insist - and hope - that there will never be a demystification of consciousness. — Daniel Dennett

Imagination is cheap as long as you don't have to worry about the details. — Daniel Dennett

Most people in the West who say they believe in God actually believe in belief in God. — Daniel Dennett

There is no reality of consciousness independent of the effects of various vehicles of content on subsequent action (and hence, of course, on memory). — Daniel Dennett

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! — Daniel Dennett

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. — Daniel Dennett

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. — Daniel Dennett

I am inclined to think that nothing could matter more than what people love. At any rate, I can think of no value that I would place higher. I would not want to live in a world without love. — Daniel Dennett

It is not so much that we, using our brains, spin our yarns, as that our brains, using yarns, spin us. — Daniel Dennett

Churches have given us great treasures such as music and architecture. Whether that pays for the harm they have done is another matter. — Daniel Dennett

Some of the greatest, most revolutionary advances in science have been given their initial expression in attractively modest terms, with no fanfare. — Daniel Dennett

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

Postmodernism, the school of 'thought' that proclaimed 'There are no truths, only interpretations' has largely played itself out in absurdity, but it has left behind a generation of academics in the humanities disabled by their distrust of the very idea of truth and their disrespect for evidence, settling for 'conversations' in which nobody is wrong and nothing can be confirmed, only asserted with whatever style you can muster. — Daniel Dennett

The secret of happiness is: Find something more important than you are and dedicate your life to it. — Daniel Dennett

Darwin's idea of natural selection makes people uncomfortable because it reverses the direction of tradition. — Daniel Dennett

In short, we need to recover the courage we celebrate in our heroes, and in particular, the courage to tolerate, for the sake of a free society, a level of risk we hardly ever imagined in the past. — Daniel Dennett

The theoretical fruits of deliberate oversimplification through idealization are not to be denied ... Reality in all its messy particularity is too complicated to theorize about, taken straight. The issue is, rather (since every idealization is a strategic choice), which idealizations might really shed some light ... which will just land us ... diverting fairy tales. — 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. — Daniel Dennett

There could be talking bunny rabbits, spiders who write English messages in their webs, and for that matter, melancholy choo-choo trains. There could be, I suppose, but there aren't-so my theory doesn't have to explain them. — Daniel Dennett

After Darwin, God's role changes from being the designer of all creatures great and small to being the designer of the laws of nature, from which natural selection can unfold, to being perhaps just the chooser of the laws. By the time God's role has been so diminished, he becomes a bit like a constitutional monarch, presiding ceremonially but not having any more work to do. That's a place for God if it makes people comfortable to keep God as the presider over the universe. I suppose that is satisfying for many. — Daniel Dennett

There is no such thing as philosophy-free science, just science that has been conducted without any consideration of its underlying philosophical assumptions. — Daniel Dennett

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. — Daniel Dennett

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. — Daniel Dennett

In 50 years - or 20 years, or 200 years - our current epistemic horizon (the Big Bang, roughly) may look as parochial as the horizon Newton had to settle for in his day, but no doubt there will still be good questions whose answers elude us. — Daniel Dennett

We have had plenty of atheist presidents; they just wouldn't admit it. — Daniel Dennett

In order to make a perfect and beautiful machine, it is not requisite to know how to make it. All the works of human genius can be understood in the end to be products of a cascade of generate-and-test procedures that are, at bottom, algorithmic and mindless — Daniel Dennett

There are no forces on this planet more dangerous to all of us than the fanaticisms of fundamentalism. — Daniel Dennett

The only meaning of life worth caring about is one that can withstand our best efforts to examine it. — Daniel Dennett

The way evolution always discovers reasons is by retroactive endorsement. — Daniel Dennett

Words have a genealogy and it's easier to trace the evolution of a single word than the evolution of a language. — Daniel Dennett

Human freedom is not an illusion; it is an objective phenomenon, distinct from all other biological conditions and found in only one species - us. — Daniel Dennett

Wherever there is a design that is highly successful in a broad range of similar environments, it is apt to emerge again and again, independently - the phenomenon known in biology as convergent evolution. I call these designs 'good tricks.' — Daniel Dennett

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. — Daniel Dennett

Consciousness is cerebral celebrity
nothing more and nothing less. Those contents are conscious that persevere, that monopolize resources long enough to achieve certain typical and "symptomatic" effects
on memory, on the control of behavior and so forth. — Daniel Dennett

A child raised on a desert island, alone, without social interaction, without language, and thus lacking empathy, is still a sentient being. — Daniel Dennett

It's this expandable capacity to represent reasons that we have that gives us a soul. But what's it made of? It's made of neurons. It's made of lots of tiny robots. And we can actually explain the structure and operation of that kind of soul, whereas an eternal, immortal, immaterial soul is just a metaphysical rug under which you sweep your embarrassment for not having any explanation. — Daniel Dennett

While we tend to conceive of the operations of the mind as unified and transparent, they're actually chaotic and opaque. There's no invisible boss in the brain, no central meaner, no unitary self in command of our activities and utterances. There's no internal spectator of a Cartesian theater in our heads to applaud the march of consciousness across its stage. — Daniel Dennett

The earth has grown a nervous system, and it's us. — Daniel Dennett

The chief trick to making good mistakes is not to hide them-especially not from yourself. — Daniel Dennett

If the history of resistance to Darwinian thinking is a good measure, we can expect that long into the future, long after every triumph of human thought has been matched or surpassed by 'mere machines,' there will still be thinkers who insist that the human mind works in mysterious ways that no science can comprehend. — Daniel Dennett

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 listen to all these complaints about rudeness and intemperateness, and the opinion that I come to is that there is no polite way of asking somebody: have you considered the possibility that your entire life has been devoted to a delusion? But that's a good question to ask. Of course we should ask that question and of course it's going to offend people. Tough. — Daniel Dennett

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. — Daniel Dennett

The kindly God who lovingly fashioned each and every one of us and sprinkled the sky with shining stars for our delight - that God is, like Santa Claus, a myth of childhood, not anything [that] a sane, undeluded adult could literally believe in. That God must either be turned into a symbol for something less concrete or abandoned altogether. — Daniel Dennett

If the best the roboticists can hope for is the creation of some crude, cheesy, second-rate, artificial consciousness, they still win. — Daniel Dennett

In most sciences, there are few findings more prized than a counterintuitive result. It shows something surprising and forces us to reconsider our often tacit assumptions. In philosophy of mind, a counterintuitive "result" (e.g., a mind-boggling implication of somebody's "theory" of perception, memory, consciousness, or whatever) is typically taken as tantamount to a refutation. This affection for one's current intuitions, sometimes amounting (as we saw in the previous chapter) to a refusal even to consider alternative perspectives, installs deep conservatism in the methods of philosophers. Conservatism can be a good thing, but only if it is acknowledged. By all means, let's not abandon perfectly good and familiar intuitions without a fight, but let's recognize that the intuitions that are initially used to frame the issues may not live to settle the issues. — Daniel Dennett

If I were to give a prize for the single best idea anybody ever had, I'd give it to Darwin for the idea of natural selection - ahead of Newton, ahead of Einstein - because his idea unites the two most disparate features of our universe: the world of purposeless, meaningless matter and motion, particles jostling on the one side, and the world of meaning and purpose, design on the other. — Daniel Dennett

The juvenile sea squirt wanders through the sea searching for a suitable rock or hunk of coral to cling to and make its home for life. For this task, it has a rudimentary nervous system. When it finds its spot and takes root, it doesn't need its brain anymore so it eats it! — Daniel Dennett

How good are the best musical imaginations? Can a trained musician, swiftly reading a score, tell just how that voicing of dissonant oboes and flutes over the massed strings will sound? — Daniel Dennett

But I also can't prove that mushrooms could not be intergalactic spaceships spying on us. — Daniel Dennett

The evidence for evolution pours in, not only from geology, paleontology, biogeography, and anatomy, but of course from molecular biology and every other branch of the life sciences. — Daniel Dennett

I should emphasize this, to keep well-meaning but misguided multiculturalists at bay: the theoretical entities in which these tribal people frankly believe - the gods and other spirits - don't exist. These people are mistaken, and you know it as well as I do. It is possible for highly intelligent people to have a very useful but mistaken theory, and we don't have to pretend otherwise in order to show respect for these people and their ways. — Daniel Dennett

If I know better than you know what I am up to, it is only because I spend more time with myself than you do. — Daniel Dennett

I don't think the 9/11 attacks taught us anything we didn't already know about religion. It has long been obvious - even to the deeply religious - that religious fanaticism is an extremely dangerous deranger of otherwise sane and goodhearted people. — Daniel Dennett

I think religion for many people is some sort of moral viagra. — Daniel Dennett

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. — Daniel Dennett

When people ask me what philosophy is, I say philosophy is what you do when
you don't know what the right questions are yet. Once you get the questions
right, then you go answer them, and that's typically not philosophy, that's
one science or another. Anywhere in life where you find that people aren't
quite sure what the right questions to ask are, what they're doing, then,
is philosophy. — Daniel Dennett

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. — Daniel Dennett

Has it ever occurred to you how lucky you are to be alive? More than 99 percent of all the creatures that have ever lived have died without progeny, but not a single one of your ancestors falls into that group! ... Not a single one of your ancestors, all the way back to the bacteria, succumbed to predation before reproducing, or lost out in the competition for a mate. — Daniel Dennett

Problems in science are sometimes made easier by adding complications. — Daniel Dennett