Famous Quotes & Sayings

Dennett Quotes & Sayings

Enjoy reading and share 100 famous quotes about Dennett with everyone.

Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Share on Google+ Pinterest Share on Linkedin

Top Dennett Quotes

Dennett Quotes By Daniel C. Dennett

Darwin's "strange inversion of reasoning" and Turing's equally revolutionary inversion were aspects of a single discovery: competence without comprehension. Comprehension, far from being a Godlike talent from which all design must flow, is an emergent effect of systems of uncomprehending competence: natural selection on the one hand, and mindless computation on the other. These twin ideas have been proven beyond a reasonable doubt, but they still provoke dismay and disbelief in some quarters, which I have tried to dispel in this chapter. Creationists are not going to find commented code in the inner workings of organisms, and Cartesians are not going to find an immaterial res cogitans "where all the understanding happens". — Daniel C. Dennett

Dennett Quotes By 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

Dennett Quotes By 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

Dennett Quotes By 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

Dennett Quotes By Daniel Dennett

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

Dennett Quotes By Daniel C. Dennett

You can't change your beliefs as an act of will, in the way you can decide to improve your skills with chainsaw or keyboard. — Daniel C. Dennett

Dennett Quotes By Daniel Dennett

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

Dennett Quotes By 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

Dennett Quotes By Daniel C. Dennett

prosaic, pedestrian example, but everything — Daniel C. Dennett

Dennett Quotes By Daniel C. Dennett

Does that mean that religious texts are worthless as guides to ethics? Of course not. They are magnificent sources of insight into human nature, and into the possibilities of ethical codes. Just as we should not be surprised to discover that ancient folk medicine has a great deal to teach modern hightech medicine, we should not be surprised if we find that these great religious texts hold versions of the very best ethical systems any human culture will ever devise. But, like folk medicine, we should test it all carefully, and take nothing whatever on faith. — Daniel C. Dennett

Dennett Quotes By Daniel C. Dennett

Like many other natural wonders, the human mind is something of a bag of tricks, cobbled together over the eons by the foresightless process of evolution by natural selection. — Daniel C. Dennett

Dennett Quotes By 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

Dennett Quotes By 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

Dennett Quotes By Daniel C. Dennett

Carpenters don't make their saws and hammers, tailors don't make their scissors and needles, and plumbers don't make their wrenches, but blacksmiths can make their hammers, tongs, anvils, and chisels — Daniel C. Dennett

Dennett Quotes By 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

Dennett Quotes By Daniel Dennett

If you can approach the world's complexities, both its glories and its horrors, with an attitude of humble curiosity, acknowledging that however deeply you have seen, you have only scratched the surface, you will find worlds within worlds, beauties you could not heretofore imagine, and your own mundane preoccupations will shrink to proper size, not all that important in the greater scheme of things. — Daniel Dennett

Dennett Quotes By 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

Dennett Quotes By 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

Dennett Quotes By Daniel Dennett

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

Dennett Quotes By Daniel Dennett

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

Dennett Quotes By Daniel Dennett

Atheism, a term which will, I'm sure, eventually become as unnecessary as round-earthism ... — Daniel Dennett

Dennett Quotes By Daniel C. Dennett

We have all heard the forlorn refrain "Well, it seemed like a good idea at the time!" This phrase has come to stand for the rueful reflection of an idiot, a sign of stupidity, but in fact we should appreciate it as a pillar of wisdom. Any being, any agent, who can truly say, "Well, it seemed like a good idea at the time!" is standing on the threshold of brilliance. We — Daniel C. Dennett

Dennett Quotes By Daniel Dennett

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

Dennett Quotes By Daniel C. Dennett

But if it is true that human minds are themselves to a very great degree the creations of memes, then we cannot sustain the polarity of vision we considered earlier; it cannot be "memes versus us," because earlier infestations of memes have already played a major role in determining who or what we are. The "independent" mind struggling to protect itself from alien and dangerous memes is a myth. There is a persisting tension between the biological imperative of our genes on the one hand and the cultural imperatives of our memes on the other, but we would be foolish to "side with" our genes; that would be to commit the most egregious error of pop sociobiology. Besides, as we have already noted, what makes us special is that we, alone among species, can rise above the imperatives of our genes - thanks to the lifting cranes of our memes. — Daniel C. Dennett

Dennett Quotes By Daniel C. Dennett

Is this Tree of Life a God one could worship? Pray to? Fear? Probably not. But it did make the ivy twine and the sky so blue, so perhaps the song I love tells a truth after all. The Tree of Life is neither perfect nor infinite in space or time, but it is actual, and if it is not Anselm's "Being greater than which nothing can be conceived," it is surely a being that is greater than anything any of us will ever conceive of in detail worthy of its detail. Is something sacred? Yes, say I with Nietzsche. I could not pray to it, but I can stand in affirmation of its magnificence. This world is sacred. — Daniel C. Dennett

Dennett Quotes By 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

Dennett Quotes By 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

Dennett Quotes By 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

Dennett Quotes By Steve Volk

At one conference Hameroff told Dennett, publicly, "You know, Dan, maybe the reason you like this [mechanistic] idea is because you're a zombie. And maybe the reason I see things differently is because, I'm not."

Hameroff told me he was half-joking. But Dennett took offense. "I wound up apologizing," says Hameroff. "I guess he only likes the idea of being a zombie if we're all zombies. — Steve Volk

Dennett Quotes By Daniel Dennett

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

Dennett Quotes By 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

Dennett Quotes By 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

Dennett Quotes By Daniel C. Dennett

This is natural selection, plain as day: the islanders have a simple rule: if it returns from the sea intact, copy it! They may have considerable comprehension of the principles of naval architecture that retrospectively endorse their favorite designs, but it is strictly unnecessary. — Daniel C. Dennett

Dennett Quotes By Daniel Dennett

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

Dennett Quotes By Daniel Dennett

My faith in the expertise of physicists like Richard Feynman, for instance, permits me to endorse - and, if it comes to it, bet heavily on the truth of - a proposition that I don't understand. So far, my faith is not unlike religious faith, but I am not in the slightest bit motivated to go to my death rather than recant the formulas of physics. Watch: E doesn't equal mc2, it doesn't, it doesn't! I was lying, so there! — Daniel Dennett

Dennett Quotes By Daniel Dennett

Those who feel guilty contemplating "betraying" the tradition they love by acknowledging their disapproval of elements within it should reflect on the fact that the very tradition to which they are so loyal - the "eternal" tradition introduced to them in their youth - is in fact the evolved product of many adjustments firmly but delicately made by earlier lovers of the same tradition. — Daniel Dennett

Dennett Quotes By Daniel Dennett

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

Dennett Quotes By 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

Dennett Quotes By 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

Dennett Quotes By Daniel C. Dennett

So Paley was right in saying not just that Design was a wonderful thing to explain, but also that Design took Intelligence. All he missed - and Darwin provided - was the idea that this Intelligence could be broken into bits so tiny and stupid that they didn't count as intelligence at all, and then distributed through space and time in a gigantic, connected network of algorithmic process. — Daniel C. Dennett

Dennett Quotes By Jerry A. Coyne

Scientism is in fact a mug's game, a grab bag of disparate accusations that are mostly inaccurate or overblown. Nearly all articles criticizing scientism not only fail to convince us that it's dangerous, but don't even give any good examples of it. In the end, as Daniel Dennett argues, scientism is a completely undefined term. It just means science that you don't like. — Jerry A. Coyne

Dennett Quotes By 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

Dennett Quotes By 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

Dennett Quotes By 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

Dennett Quotes By Steven Pinker

Journalists sometimes speculate about "brain transplants" when they really should be calling them "body transplants," because, as the philosopher Dan Dennett has noted, this is the one transplant operation in which it is better to be the donor than the recipient. — Steven Pinker

Dennett Quotes By Marvin Minsky

Logic doesn't apply to the real world. D. R. Hofstadter and D. C. Dennett (eds.) The Mind's I, 1981. — Marvin Minsky

Dennett Quotes By Daniel C. Dennett

It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail. — Daniel C. Dennett

Dennett Quotes By 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

Dennett Quotes By Daniel Dennett

Is he a dread genetic determinist, or a dread environmental determinist? He is neither, of course, for both these species of bogeyman are as mythical as werewolves. By increasing the information we have about the various causes of the constraints that limit our current opportunities, he has increased our powers to avoid what we want to avoid, prevent what we want to prevent. Knowledge of the roles of our genes, and the genes of the other species around us, is not the enemy of human freedom, but one of its best friends. — Daniel Dennett

Dennett Quotes By Daniel Dennett

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. — Daniel Dennett

Dennett Quotes By Edward Feser

(For the uninitiated, "ectoplasm" is a ghostly kind of stuff that writers like Dennett are constantly accusing critics of materialism of believing in. It plays the same sort of straw-man role in his writings on the mind that Paley does in Dawkins's writings on religion.) — Edward Feser

Dennett Quotes By 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

Dennett Quotes By 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

Dennett Quotes By 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

Dennett Quotes By 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

Dennett Quotes By Daniel C. Dennett

Science properly done is one of the humanities, as a fine physics teacher once said. The point of science is to help us understand what we are and how we got here, and for this we need the great stories: the tale of how, once upon a time, there was a Big Bang; the Darwinian epic of the evolution of life on Earth; and now the story we are just beginning to learn how to tell... — Daniel C. Dennett

Dennett Quotes By 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

Dennett Quotes By Daniel C. Dennett

If you want to teach your children that they are the tools of God, you had better not teach them that they are God's rifles, or we will have to stand firmly opposed to you: your doctrine has no glory, no special rights, no intrinsic and inalienable merit. If you insist on teaching your children false-hoods - that the Earth is flat, that "Man" is not a product of evolution by natural selection - then you must expect, at the very least, that those of us who have freedom of speech will feel free to describe your teachings as the spreading of falsehoods, and will attempt to demonstrate this to your children at our earliest opportunity. Our future well-being - the well-being of all of us on the planet - depends on the education of our descendants. — Daniel C. Dennett

Dennett Quotes By 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

Dennett Quotes By 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

Dennett Quotes By Daniel C. Dennett

These bizarre examples attempt to prove one conceptual point or another by deliberately reducing all but one underappreciated feature of some phenomenon to zero, so that what really counts can shine through. The twin earth example sets internal similarity to a maximum (you are whisked off to Twin Earth without being given a chance to register this huge shift) so that external context can be demonstrated to be responsible for whatever our intuition tells us. — Daniel C. Dennett

Dennett Quotes By Daniel Dennett

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

Dennett Quotes By 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

Dennett Quotes By Daniel Dennett

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

Dennett Quotes By 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

Dennett Quotes By Daniel C. Dennett

I think we should stop treating ["God works in mysterious ways"] as any kind of wisdom and recognize it as the transparently defensive propaganda that it is. A positive response might be, "Oh good! I love a mystery. Let's see if we can solve this one, too. Do you have any ideas? — Daniel C. Dennett

Dennett Quotes By Daniel Dennett

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

Dennett Quotes By Daniel C. Dennett

What you can imagine depends on what you know. — Daniel C. Dennett

Dennett Quotes By 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

Dennett Quotes By Daniel Dennett

There is a time for politeness and there is a time when you are obliged to be rude, — Daniel Dennett

Dennett Quotes By Daniel C. Dennett

Religions exist primarily for people to achieve together what they cannot achieve alone. - David Sloan Wilson, Darwin's Cathedral — Daniel C. Dennett

Dennett Quotes By 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

Dennett Quotes By 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

Dennett Quotes By 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

Dennett Quotes By 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

Dennett Quotes By Daniel Dennett

No matter how smart you are, you're smarter if you take the easy ways when they are available. — Daniel Dennett

Dennett Quotes By 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

Dennett Quotes By 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

Dennett Quotes By Daniel C. Dennett

A mountain climber foolishly climbing alone slips off a precipice and finds himself dangling at the end of his safety rope, a thousand feet above a ravine. Unable to climb the rope or swing to a safe resting spot, he calls out in despair: "Hallooo, hallooo! Can anybody help me?" To his astonishment, the clouds part, a beautiful light pours through them, and a mighty voice replies, "Yes, my son, I can help you. Take your knife and cut the rope!" The climber takes out his knife, and then he stops, and thinks and thinks. Then he cries out: "Can anybody else help me? — Daniel C. Dennett

Dennett Quotes By Daniel C. Dennett

Our manifest image, unlike the daisy's ontology or Umwelt, really is manifest, really is subjective in a strong sense. It's the world we live in, the world according to us. — Daniel C. Dennett

Dennett Quotes By Daniel C. Dennett

It is worth recalling that it took brave pioneers many years to overcome the powerful taboo against the dissection of human cadavers during the early years of modern medicine. And we should note that, notwithstanding the outrage and revulsion with which the idea of dissection was then received, overcoming that tradition has not led to the feared collapse of morality and decency. We live in an era in which human corpses are still treated with due respect - indeed, with rather more respect and decorum than they were treated with at the time dissection was still disreputable. — Daniel C. Dennett

Dennett Quotes By 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

Dennett Quotes By Daniel Dennett

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. — Daniel Dennett

Dennett Quotes By Daniel Dennett

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

Dennett Quotes By Daniel Dennett

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

Dennett Quotes By Daniel C. Dennett

The more you have invested in your religion, the more you will be motivated to protect that investment. Stark — Daniel C. Dennett

Dennett Quotes By Daniel C. Dennett

One of the surprising discoveries of modern psychology is how easy it is to be ignorant of your own ignorance. — Daniel C. Dennett

Dennett Quotes By Daniel Dennett

Not a single one of the cells that compose you knows who you are, or cares. — Daniel Dennett

Dennett Quotes By Daniel C. Dennett

People who want to study religion usually have an ax to grind. They either want to defend their favorite religion from its critics or want to demonstrate the irrationality and futility of religion, and this tends to infect their methods with bias. — Daniel C. Dennett

Dennett Quotes By Daniel Dennett

People ache to believe that we human beings are vastly different from all other species - and they are right! We are different. We are the only species that has an extra medium of design preservation and design communication: culture. — Daniel Dennett

Dennett Quotes By 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

Dennett Quotes By 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

Dennett Quotes By 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

Dennett Quotes By 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

Dennett Quotes By 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

Dennett Quotes By Daniel C. Dennett

human beings are actually more closely related to the two species of chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes, the familiar chimp, and Pan paniscus, the rare, smaller pygmy chimp or bonobo) than those chimpanzees are to the other apes. — Daniel C. Dennett

Dennett Quotes By 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

Dennett Quotes By Richard Dawkins

That scientifically savvy philosopher Daniel Dennett pointed out that evolution counters one of the oldest ideas we have: 'the idea that it takes a big fancy smart thing to make a lesser thing. I call that the trickle-down theory of creation. — Richard Dawkins

Dennett Quotes By 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

Dennett Quotes By Daniel Dennett

[I]n 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. — Daniel Dennett