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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.

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
Mind
Haven
Artifact
Make
Created
Restructure
Depends
Memes
Brain
Artifacts
Order
Habitat
Better
Depend
Human
Reaching
Humans
Havens

More quotes by Daniel Dennett

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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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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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There are no forces on this planet more dangerous to all of us than the fanaticisms of fundamentalism.
Daniel Dennett
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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.
Daniel Dennett
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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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... 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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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.
Daniel Dennett
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The kindly God who lovingly fashioned each and every one of us and sprinkled the sky with shining stars for our delight - that God is, like Santa Claus, a myth of childhood, not anything [that] a sane, undeluded adult could literally believe in. That God must either be turned into a symbol for something less concrete or abandoned altogether.
Daniel Dennett
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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.
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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I even agree that the concept of god helps some people lead better lives. That does happen. Don't ever forget it. I just think there are better ways to help people lead better lives.
Daniel Dennett
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Human freedom is not an illusion it is an objective phenomenon, distinct from all other biological conditions and found in only one species - us.
Daniel Dennett
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Philosophers' Syndrome: mistaking a failure of the imagination for an insight into necessity.
Daniel Dennett
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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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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.
Daniel Dennett
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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.
Daniel Dennett
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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.
Daniel Dennett
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I think religion for many people is some sort of moral viagra.
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).
Daniel Dennett
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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.
Daniel Dennett