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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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Daniel Dennett
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: March 28
Cognitive Scientist
Philosopher
Professor
Writer
Boston
Massachusetts
Daniel Clement Dennett III
Daniel Clement Dennett
Genius
Test
Perfect
Economics
Algorithmic
Order
Tests
Cascade
Beautiful
Machines
Requisite
Ends
Bottom
Mindless
Human
Products
Generate
Humans
Understood
Procedures
Make
Works
Machine

More quotes by Daniel Dennett

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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.
Daniel Dennett
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A scholar is just a library's way of making another library.
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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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Keep Darwinian thinking out of cosmology, out of psychology, out of human culture, out of ethics, politics, and religion!
Daniel Dennett
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I think religion for many people is some sort of moral viagra.
Daniel Dennett
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...but I also can't prove that mushrooms could not be intergalactic spaceships spying on us.
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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There is no reality of consciousness independent of the effects of various vehicles of content on subsequent action (and hence, of course, on memory).
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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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Natural selection is not gene centrist and nor is biology all about genes our comprehending minds are a result of our fast evolving culture.
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
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The way evolution always discovers reasons is by retroactive endorsement.
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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Consciousness is cerebral celebrity--nothing more and nothing less. Those contents are conscious that persevere, that monopolize resources long enough to achieve certain typical and symptomatic effects--on memory, on the control of behavior and so forth.
Daniel Dennett
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Love is blind, as they say, and because love is blind, it often leads to tragedy: to conflicts in which one love is pitted against another love, and something has to give, with suffering guaranteed in any resolution.
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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Religions have depended on the relative isolation and ignorance of their flocks, forever and this is all breaking down.
Daniel Dennett
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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.
Daniel Dennett
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I am a philosopher, not a scientist, and we philosophers are better at questions than answers.
Daniel Dennett
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Life itself is just a thin coat of paint on the planet, and we hold the paintbrush.
Daniel Dennett