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Human consciousness is just about the last surviving mystery.

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
Conscious
Mystery
Consciousness
Lasts
Last
Human
Humans
Surviving

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Problems in science are sometimes made easier by adding complications.
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Philosophers' Syndrome: mistaking a failure of the imagination for an insight into necessity.
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I'm the guy who reputedly denies that people experience colors or pains, and thinks that thermostats think — just ask my critics.
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I think religion for many people is some sort of moral viagra.
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The earth has grown a nervous system, and it's us.
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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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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!
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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.
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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.
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There’s simply no polite way to tell people they’ve dedicated their lives to an illusion.
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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.
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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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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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The chief trick to making good mistakes is not to hide them - especially not from yourself. Instead of turning away in denial when you make a mistake, you should become a connoisseur of your own mistakes, turning them over in your mind as if they were works of art, which in a way they are.
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As every scuba diver knows, panic is your worst enemy: when it hits, your mind starts to thrash and you are likely to do something really stupid and self-destructive.
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The only answer to the endless chains of why, why, why is that the alternatives died
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There is no such thing as philosophy-free science, just science that has been conducted without any consideration of its underlying philosophical assumptions.
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The chief trick to making good mistakes is not to hide them-especially not from yourself.
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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.
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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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