{"author":"Daniel C. Dennett","author_id":"Daniel+C.+Dennett","total_quotes":32,"quotes":[{"text":"The secret of happiness: Find something more important than you are and dedicate your life to it.","author":"Daniel C. Dennett","tags":["2014","happiness","purpose","purpose-driven-life","secret-of-happiness","ted-talks"],"id":752,"author_id":"Daniel+C.+Dennett"},{"text":"I find that some philosophers think that my whole approach to qualia is not playing fair. I don’t respect the standard rules of philosophical thought experiments. “But Dan, your view is so counterintuitive!” No kidding. That’s the whole point. Of course it is counterintuitive. Nowhere is it written that the true materialist theory of consciousness should be blandly intuitive. I have all along insisted that it may be very counterintuitive. That’s the trouble with “pure” philosophical method here. It has no resources for developing, or even taking seriously, counterintuitive theories, but since it is a very good bet that the true materialist theory of consciousness will be highly counterintuitive (like the Copernican theory--at least at first), this means that “pure” philosophy must just concede impotence and retreat into conservative conceptual anthropology until the advance of science puts it out of its misery. Philosophers have a choice: they can play games with folk concepts (ordinary language philosophy lives on, as a kind of aprioristic social anthropology) or they can take seriously the claim that some of these folk concepts are illusion-generators. The way to take that prospect seriously is to consider theories that propose revisions to those concepts.","author":"Daniel C. Dennett","tags":["intuition","qualia"],"id":4004,"author_id":"Daniel+C.+Dennett"},{"text":"One of the surprising discoveries of modern psychology is how easy it is to be ignorant of your own ignorance.","author":"Daniel C. Dennett","tags":["ignorance"],"id":23045,"author_id":"Daniel+C.+Dennett"},{"text":"But if it is true that human minds are themselves to a very great degree the creations of memes, then we cannot sustain the polarity of vision we considered earlier; it cannot be 'memes versus us,' because earlier infestations of memes have already played a major role in determining who or what we are. The 'independent' mind struggling to protect itself from alien and dangerous memes is a myth. There is a persisting tension between the biological imperative of our genes on the one hand and the cultural imperatives of our memes on the other, but we would be foolish to 'side with' our genes; that would be to commit the most egregious error of pop sociobiology. Besides, as we have already noted, what makes us special is that we, alone among species, can rise above the imperatives of our genes— thanks to the lifting cranes of our memes.","author":"Daniel C. Dennett","tags":["ego","me","memetics"],"id":39006,"author_id":"Daniel+C.+Dennett"},{"text":"Imagination is cheap as long as you don't have to worry about the details.","author":"Daniel C. Dennett","tags":["free-will","philosophy","science"],"id":49416,"author_id":"Daniel+C.+Dennett"},{"text":"Some years ago, there was a lovely philosopher of science and journalist in Italy named Giulio Giorello, and he did an interview with me. And I don’t know if he wrote it or not, but the headline in Corriere della Sera when it was published was 'Sì, abbiamo un'anima. Ma è fatta di tanti piccoli robot – 'Yes, we have a soul, but it’s made of lots of tiny robots.' And I thought, exactly. That’s the view. Yes, we have a soul, but in what sense? In the sense that our brains, unlike the brains even of dogs and cats and chimpanzees and dolphins, our brains have functional structures that give our brains powers that no other brains have - powers of look-ahead, primarily. We can understand our position in the world, we can see the future, we can understand where we came from. We know that we’re here. No buffalo knows it’s a buffalo, but we jolly well know that we’re members of Homo sapiens, and it’s the knowledge that we have and the can-do, our capacity to think ahead and to reflect and to evaluate and to evaluate our evaluations, and evaluate the grounds for our evaluations.It’s this expandable capacity to represent reasons that we have that gives us a soul. But what’s it made of? It’s made of neurons. It’s made of lots of tiny robots. And we can actually explain the structure and operation of that kind of soul, whereas an eternal, immortal, immaterial soul is just a metaphysical rug under which you sweep your embarrassment for not having any explanation.","author":"Daniel C. Dennett","tags":["beauty","matter","mind","robots","soul","truth"],"id":50712,"author_id":"Daniel+C.+Dennett"},{"text":"I agree with Abhijit Naskar that the path of tolerance is the only way—but it must be accompanied by continued pressure to break down barriers to access to information, so that our tolerance isn’t exploited to further the ends of totalitarian religious groups.","author":"Daniel C. Dennett","tags":["knowledge","naskar","philosophy","religious-extremism","totalitarianism"],"id":74856,"author_id":"Daniel+C.+Dennett"},{"text":"This 'web of discourses' as Robyn called it...Is as much a biological product as any of the other constructions to be found in the animal world. (Clothes too, are part of the extended phenotype of Homo Sapiens almost every niche inhabited by that species.An illustrated encyclopedia of zoology should no more picture Homo Sapiens naked than it should picture Ursus arctus-the black bear- wearing a clown suit and riding a bicycle.","author":"Daniel C. Dennett","tags":["consciousness","dennett","humor","philosophy","philosophy-of-mind","science"],"id":78685,"author_id":"Daniel+C.+Dennett"},{"text":"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.","author":"Daniel C. Dennett","tags":["biology","creationism","evolution","science"],"id":97104,"author_id":"Daniel+C.+Dennett"},{"text":"One reader of an early draft of this chapter complained at this point, saying that by treating the hypothesis of God as just one more scientific hypothesis, to be evaluated by the standards of science in particular and rational thought in general, Dawkins and I are ignoring the very widespread claim by believers in God that their faith is quite beyond reason, not a matter to which such mundane methods of testing applies. It is not just unsympathetic, he claimed, but strictly unwarranted for me simply to assume that the scientific method continues to apply with full force in this domain of truth.Very well, let's consider the objection. I doubt that the defender of religion will find it attractive, once we explore it carefully.The philosopher Ronaldo de Souza once memorably described philosophical theology as 'intellectual tennis without a net,' and I readily allow that I have indeed been assuming without comment or question up to now that the net of rational judgement was up. But we can lower it if you really want to.It's your serve.Whatever you serve, suppose I return service rudely as follows: 'What you say implies that God is a ham sandwich wrapped in tin foil. That's not much of a God to worship!'. If you then volley back, demanding to know how I can logically justify my claim that your serve has such a preposterous implication, I will reply: 'oh, do you want the net up for my returns, but not for your serves?Either way the net stays up, or it stays down. If the net is down there are no rules and anybody can say anything, a mug's game if there ever was one. I have been giving you the benefit of the assumption that you would not waste your own time or mine by playing with the net down.","author":"Daniel C. Dennett","tags":["debate","religion","science"],"id":144266,"author_id":"Daniel+C.+Dennett"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":32,"pages":4,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}