Daniel Dennett
Daniel Dennett
Daniel Clement Dennett III is an American philosopher, writer, and cognitive scientist whose research centers on the philosophy of mind, philosophy of science, and philosophy of biology, particularly as those fields relate to evolutionary biology and cognitive science...
ProfessionPhilosopher
Date of Birth28 March 1942
atheism unnecessary term
Atheism, a term which will, I'm sure, eventually become as unnecessary as round-earthism...
running long information
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.
successful design evolution
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.'
way evolution reason
The way evolution always discovers reasons is by retroactive endorsement.
cities killing members
[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.
team intelligent ignorant
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.
believe belief imagine
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.
daughter children people
People are afraid of being more ignorant than their children―especially, apparantly, their daughters.
buddhism thinking religion
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.
past expectations mind
The task of the mind is to produce future, as the poet Paul Valery once put it. A mind is fundamentally an anticipator, an expectation-generator. It mines the present for clues, which it refines with the help of the materials it has saved from the past, turning them into anticipations of the future. And then it acts, rationally, on the basis of those hard-won anticipations.
truth asking-questions goal
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.
writing talking religion
... 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.
mushrooms religion spaceships
...but I also can't prove that mushrooms could not be intergalactic spaceships spying on us.
running may fields
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.