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The chief trick to making good mistakes is not to hide them-especially not from yourself.

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
Tricks
Mistakes
Especially
Mistake
Making
Trick
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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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... 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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People are afraid of being more ignorant than their children―especially, apparantly, their daughters.
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Whereas religions may serve a benign purpose by letting many people feel comfortable with the level of morality they themselves can attain, no religion holds its member to the high standards of moral responsibility that the secular world of science and medicine does!
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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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...but I also can't prove that mushrooms could not be intergalactic spaceships spying on us.
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A scholar is just a library's way of making another library.
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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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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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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 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.
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The way evolution always discovers reasons is by retroactive endorsement.
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Philosophers' Syndrome: mistaking a failure of the imagination for an insight into necessity.
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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.
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Human consciousness is just about the last surviving mystery.
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The only answer to the endless chains of why, why, why is that the alternatives died
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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.
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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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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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