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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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Daniel Dennett
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: March 28
Cognitive Scientist
Philosopher
Professor
Writer
Boston
Massachusetts
Daniel Clement Dennett III
Daniel Clement Dennett
Courses
Vehicle
Course
Content
Action
Various
Reality
Memory
Independent
Effects
Subsequent
Consciousness
Vehicles
Memories
Hence

More quotes by 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.
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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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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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Religions have depended on the relative isolation and ignorance of their flocks, forever and this is all breaking down.
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I think religion for many people is some sort of moral viagra.
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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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If the best the roboticists can hope for is the creation of some crude, cheesy, second-rate, artificial consciousness, they still win.
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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.
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The way evolution always discovers reasons is by retroactive endorsement.
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I think many people are terribly afraid of being demoted by the Darwinian scheme from the role of authors and creators in their own right into being just places where things happen in the universe.
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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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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.
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If I know better than you know what I am up to, it is only because I spend more time with myself than you do.
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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.
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A scholar is just a library's way of making another library.
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The earth has grown a nervous system, and it's us.
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Human consciousness is just about the last surviving mystery.
Daniel Dennett
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I don't think the 9/11 attacks taught us anything we didn't already know about religion. It has long been obvious - even to the deeply religious - that religious fanaticism is an extremely dangerous deranger of otherwise sane and goodhearted people.
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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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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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