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What you can imagine depends on what you know. Philosophers who know only philosophy consign themselves to a janitorial role in the great enterprises of exploration that are illuminating the mysteries of our lives.

Daniel Dennett

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Daniel Dennett
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: March 28
Cognitive Scientist
Philosopher
Professor
Writer
Boston
Massachusetts
Daniel Clement Dennett III
Daniel Clement Dennett
Depends
Illuminating
Roles
Mysteries
Philosophy
Philosophers
Imagine
Exploration
Lives
Enterprise
Great
Philosopher
Role
Consign
Mystery
Enterprises

More quotes by Daniel Dennett

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The chief trick to making good mistakes is not to hide them-especially not from yourself.
Daniel Dennett
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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
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If the best the roboticists can hope for is the creation of some crude, cheesy, second-rate, artificial consciousness, they still win.
Daniel Dennett
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You can't get through seminary and come out believing in God!
Daniel Dennett
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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Philosophers' Syndrome: mistaking a failure of the imagination for an insight into necessity.
Daniel Dennett
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The best thing about saying thank goodness in place of thank God this that here really are lots of ways of repaying your debt of goodness - by setting to create more of it, for the benefit of those to come.
Daniel Dennett
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A scholar is just a library's way of making another library.
Daniel Dennett
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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
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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
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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
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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.
Daniel Dennett
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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
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It is not so much that we, using our brains, spin our yarns, as that our brains, using yarns, spin us.
Daniel Dennett