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Daniel Dennett - From the Children category:
A child raised on a desert island, alone, without social interaction, without language, and thus lacking empathy, is still a sentient being. (Daniel Dennett)
Daniel Dennett - From the Children category:
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)
Daniel Dennett - From the Courage category:
In short, we need to recover the courage we celebrate in our heroes, and in particular, the courage to tolerate... a level of risk we hardly ever imagined in the past. (Daniel Dennett)
Daniel Dennett - From the Critics category:
I'm the guy who reputedly denies that people experience colors or pains, and thinks that thermostats think - just ask my critics. (Daniel Dennett)
Daniel Dennett - From the Culture category:
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)
Daniel Dennett - From the Design category:
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)
Daniel Dennett - From the Earth category:
The earth has grown a nervous system, and it's us. (Daniel Dennett)
Daniel Dennett - From the Effort category:
No matter how smart you are, you're smarter if you take the easy ways when they are available. (Daniel Dennett)
Daniel Dennett - From the Happiness category:
The secret of happiness: Find something more important than you are and dedicate your life to it. (Daniel Dennett)
Daniel Dennett - From the Humanity category:
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)
Daniel Dennett - From the Imagination category:
What you can imagine depends on what you know. (Daniel Dennett)
Daniel Dennett - From the Imagination category:
Imagination is cheap as long as you don't have to worry about the details. (Daniel Dennett)
Daniel Dennett - From the Information category:
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)
Daniel Dennett - From the Intellect category:
-Consciousness Explained, 1991...
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! (It's rather like getting tenure.) (Daniel Dennett)
Daniel Dennett - From the Life category:
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)
Daniel Dennett - From the Life category:
Life itself is just a thin coat of paint on the planet, and we hold the paintbrush. (Daniel Dennett)
Daniel Dennett - From the Love category:
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)
Daniel Dennett - From the Music category:
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)
Daniel Dennett - From the Philosophy category:
Philosophers' Syndrome: mistaking a failure of the imagination for an insight into necessity. (Daniel Dennett)
Daniel Dennett - From the Problems category:
Problems in science are sometimes made easier by adding complications. (Daniel Dennett)
Daniel Dennett - From the Religion category:
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)
Daniel Dennett - From the Religion category:
Now that mobile phones and the Internet have altered the epistemic selective landscape in a revolutionary way, every religious organisation must scramble to evolve defenses or become extinct. (Daniel Dennett)
Daniel Dennett - From the Technology category:
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)
Daniel Dennett - From the Tradition category:
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... is in fact the evolved product of many adjustments firmly but delicately made by earlier lovers of the same tradition. (Daniel Dennett)
Daniel Dennett - From the Truth category:
-Postmodernism and truth...
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)
Daniel Dennett - From the Unknowns category:
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)
Daniel Dennett - From the Words category:
Words are memes that can be pronounced. (Daniel Dennett)
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