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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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Daniel Dennett
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: March 28
Cognitive Scientist
Philosopher
Professor
Writer
Boston
Massachusetts
Daniel Clement Dennett III
Daniel Clement Dennett
Technology
Thousandfold
Almost
Multiplied
Moral
Hasn
Understanding
Pace
Thanks
Kept
Anybody
Ought

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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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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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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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...but I also can't prove that mushrooms could not be intergalactic spaceships spying on us.
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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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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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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 earth has grown a nervous system, and it's us.
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Some of the greatest, most revolutionary advances in science have been given their initial expression in attractively modest terms, with no fanfare.
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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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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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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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Life itself is just a thin coat of paint on the planet, and we hold the paintbrush.
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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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You can't get through seminary and come out believing in God!
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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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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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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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A scholar is just a library's way of making another library.
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