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Philosophers' Syndrome: mistaking a failure of the imagination for an insight into necessity.

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
Necessity
Insight
Philosopher
Failure
Philosophy
Mistaking
Imagination
Syndromes
Syndrome
Philosophers

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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Life itself is just a thin coat of paint on the planet, and we hold the paintbrush.
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I think religion for many people is some sort of moral viagra.
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Human consciousness is just about the last surviving mystery.
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... 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.
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Some of the greatest, most revolutionary advances in science have been given their initial expression in attractively modest terms, with no fanfare.
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Keep Darwinian thinking out of cosmology, out of psychology, out of human culture, out of ethics, politics, and religion!
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Problems in science are sometimes made easier by adding complications.
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I am a philosopher, not a scientist, and we philosophers are better at questions than answers.
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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.
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A child raised on a desert island, alone, without social interaction, without language, and thus lacking empathy, is still a sentient being.
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Words have a genealogy and it's easier to trace the evolution of a single word than the evolution of a language.
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Religions have depended on the relative isolation and ignorance of their flocks, forever and this is all breaking down.
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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.
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Natural selection is not gene centrist and nor is biology all about genes our comprehending minds are a result of our fast evolving culture.
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