Quote

If the best the roboticists can hope for is the creation of some crude, cheesy, second-rate, artificial consciousness, they still win.

Daniel Dennett

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Daniel Dennett
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: March 28
Cognitive Scientist
Philosopher
Professor
Writer
Boston
Massachusetts
Daniel Clement Dennett III
Daniel Clement Dennett
Stills
Crude
Still
Artificial
Best
Rate
Creation
Second
Consciousness
Winning
Hope
Cheesy

More quotes by Daniel Dennett

Image
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
Image
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
Image
There’s simply no polite way to tell people they’ve dedicated their lives to an illusion.
Daniel Dennett
Image
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
Image
...but I also can't prove that mushrooms could not be intergalactic spaceships spying on us.
Daniel Dennett
Image
The way evolution always discovers reasons is by retroactive endorsement.
Daniel Dennett
Image
I am a philosopher, not a scientist, and we philosophers are better at questions than answers.
Daniel Dennett
Image
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
Image
You can't get through seminary and come out believing in God!
Daniel Dennett
Image
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.
Daniel Dennett
Image
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
Image
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.
Daniel Dennett
Image
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.
Daniel Dennett
Image
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.
Daniel Dennett
Image
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.
Daniel Dennett
Image
The earth has grown a nervous system, and it's us.
Daniel Dennett
Image
You don't get to advertise all the good that your religion does without first scrupulously subtracting all the harm it does and considering seriously the question of whether some other religion, or no religion at all, does better.
Daniel Dennett
Image
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.
Daniel Dennett
Image
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.
Daniel Dennett
Image
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.
Daniel Dennett