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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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Daniel Dennett
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: March 28
Cognitive Scientist
Philosopher
Professor
Writer
Boston
Massachusetts
Daniel Clement Dennett III
Daniel Clement Dennett
Humility
Brain
Much
Yarns
Yarn
Spin
Accuracy
Brains
Using

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The only answer to the endless chains of why, why, why is that the alternatives died
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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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People are afraid of being more ignorant than their children―especially, apparantly, their daughters.
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Human consciousness is just about the last surviving mystery.
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The chief trick to making good mistakes is not to hide them-especially not from yourself.
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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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The secret of happiness is: Find something more important than you are and dedicate your life to it.
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Human consciousness is just about the last surviving mystery... a topic that often leaves even the most sophisticated thinkers tongue-tied and confused. And, as with all of the earlier mysteries, there are many who insist - and hope - that there will never be a demystification of consciousness.
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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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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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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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Up till now, we can suppose, nervous systems solved the 'Now what do I do?' problem by a relatively simple balancing act between a strictly limited repertoire of actions - if not the famous four F's (fight, flee, feed, or mate), then a modest elaboration of them.
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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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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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There are no forces on this planet more dangerous to all of us than the fanaticisms of fundamentalism.
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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.
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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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The earth has grown a nervous system, and it's us.
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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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I think religion for many people is some sort of moral viagra.
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