Daniel Dennett (Philosopher)

In fact, of course, science is an unparalleled playground of the imagination, populated by unlikely characters with wonderful names (messenger RNA, black holes, quarks) and capable of performing the most amazing deeds: sub-atomic whirling dervishes that can be in several places - everywhere and nowhere - at the same time; molecular hoop-snakes biting their own tails; self-copying spiral staircases bearing coded instructions; miniature keys searching for the locks in which they fit, on floating odysseys in a trillion synaptic gulfs.

I was once interviewed in Italy and the headline of the interview the next day was wonderful. I saved this for my collection it was... "YES we have a soul but it's made of lots of tiny robots" and I thought that's exactly right. Yes we have a soul, but it's mechanical. But it's still a soul, it still does the work that the soul was supposed to do. It is the seat of reason. It is the seat of moral responsibility. It's why we are appropriate objects of punishment when we do evil things, why we deserve the praise when we do good things. It's just not a mysterious lump of wonder stuff... that will out live us.

— Daniel Dennett soul

Not a single one of the cells that compose you knows who you are, or cares.

— Daniel Dennett sin

Go ahead and believe in God, if you like, but don't imagine that you have been given any grounds for such a belief by science.

— Daniel Dennett science

For two things both to believe that snow is white, they need not to be physically similar in any specifiable way, but they must both be in a "functional" condition or state specifiable in the most functional language; they must share adescription according to which they are both in some particular logical state (which is roughly like two different computers having the same program and being in the same "place" in the program). ...it is a type —each mental type is identifiable as a functional type in the language of Turing machine description.

— Daniel Dennett art

are bogeymen only if they duplicate entire the talents they are rung in to explain. If one can get a team or committee of relatively ignorant, narrow-minded, blind homunculi to produce the intelligent behaviour of the whole, this is progress.

— Daniel Dennett mind

Elbow Room: The Varieties of Free Will Worth Having. The MIT Press.

— Daniel Dennett will

Dennett in Tahiti in 1984

— Daniel Dennett

The MIT Press.

— Daniel Dennett

The trouble with the canons of scientific evidence [...] is that they virtually rule out the description of anything but oft-repeated, oft-observed, stereotypic behavior of a species, and this is just the sort of behavior that reveals no particular intelligence at all - all this behavior can be more or less plausibly explained as the effects of some humdrum combination of "instinct" or tropism and conditioned response. It is the novel bits of behavior, the acts that couldn't plausibly be accounted for in terms of prior conditioning or training or habit, that speak eloquently of intelligence; but if their very novelty and unrepeatability make them anecdotal and hence inadmissible evidence, how can one proceed to develop the cognitive case for the intelligence of one's target species?

— Daniel Dennett intelligence

Philosophers are never quite sure what they are talking about - about what the issues really are - and so often it takes them rather a long time to recognize that someone with a somewhat different approach (or destination, or starting point) is making a contribution.

— Daniel Dennett time

Little, Brown.

— Daniel Dennett

Dennets idea of mind and conscious experience

— Daniel Dennett mind

The juvenile sea squirt wanders through the sea searching for a suitable rock or hunk of coral to cling to and make its home for life. For this task, it has a rudimentary nervous system. When it finds its spot and takes root, it doesn't need its brain anymore, so it eats it! (It's rather like getting tenure.)* * The analogy between the sea squirt and the associate professor was first pointed out, I think, by the neuroscientist Rodolfo Llinas.

— Daniel Dennett life

I find it breathtaking [...] that when musical composition competitions are held, the contestants often do not submit tapes or records (or live performances) of their works they submit written scored, and the judges confidently make their aesthetic judgements on the basis of just reading the scores and hearing the music in their minds. How good are the best musical imaginations? Can a trained musician, swiftly reading a score tell just how that voicing of dissonant oboes and flutes over the massed strings will sound?

— Daniel Dennett reading

Philosophers' Syndrome: mistaking a failure of the imagination for an insight into necessity.

— Daniel Dennett imagination

Up till now [the development of proto-consciousness], 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 men

Are zombies possible? They're not just possible, they're actual. We're all zombies. Nobody is conscious — not in the systematically mysterious way that supports such doctrines as epiphenomenalism.

— Daniel Dennett men

As Akins observes, it is not the point of our sensory systems that they should detect "basic" or "natural" properties of the environment, but that they should serve our "narcissistic" purposes in staying alive; nature doesn't build epistemic engines.

— Daniel Dennett nature

Cartesian theater: Objects experienced are represented within the mind of the observer

— Daniel Dennett art

Dennett, D.C. & Kinsbourne, M. (1995). "". Behavioral and Brain Sciences (15 (2)).

— Daniel Dennett rain

Wherever there is a conscious mind, there is a point of view. A conscious mind is an observer, who takes in the information that is available at a particular (roughly) continuous sequence of times and places in the universe. A mind is thus a locus of subjectivity, a thing it is like something to be (Farrell, 1950, Nagel, 1974). What it is like to be that thing is partly determined by what is available to be observed or experienced along the trajectory through space-time of that moving point of view, which for most practical purposes is just that: a point. For instance, the startling dissociation of the sound and appearance of distant fireworks is explained by the different transmission speeds of sound and light, arriving at the observer (at that point) at different times, even though they left the source simultaneously.

— Daniel Dennett time

But if we ask where precisely in the brain that point of view is located, the simple assumptions that work so well on larger scales of space and time break down. It is now quite clear that there is no single point in the brain where all information funnels in, and this fact has some far from obvious consequences.

— Daniel Dennett time

Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life. Simon & Schuster.

— Daniel Dennett anger

from Chapter 1, "Is Nothing Sacred", p. 21-22:

— Daniel Dennett sacred

is Engineering

— Daniel Dennett

The evidence of evolution pours in, not only from geology, paleontology, biogeography, and anatomy (Darwin's chief sources), but from molecular biology and every other branch of the life sciences. 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. Doubts about the power of Darwin's idea of natural selection to explain this evolutionary process are still intellectually respectable, however, although the burden of proof for such skepticism has become immense...

— Daniel Dennett life

Much of the controversy and anxiety that has enveloped Darwin's idea ... can be understood as a series of failed campaigns to contain Darwin;s idea within some acceptably "safe" and merely partial revolution. Cede some or all of modernto Darwin, perhaps, but hold the line there! Keep Darwinian thinking out of cosmology, out of psychology, out of human culture, out of ethics, politics, and religion! In these campaigns, many battles have been won by the forces of containment: flawed applications of Darwin's idea have been exposed and discredited, beaten back by the champions of the pre-Darwinian tradition. But new waves of Darwinian thinking keep coming.

— Daniel Dennett religion

A prosthetically enhanced imagination is still liable to failure, especially if it is not used with sufficient rigor.

— Daniel Dennett imagination

There is a familiar trio of reactions byto a purportedly radical hypothesis: (a) "You must be out of your mind!", (b) "What else is new? Everybody knows that!", and, later - if the hypothesis is still standing - (c) "Hmm. You *might* be on to something!" Sometimes these phases take years to unfold, one after another, but I have seen all three emerge in near synchrony in the course of a half-hour's heated discussion following a conference paper.

— Daniel Dennett time

People ache to believe that we human beings are vastly different from all other species - and they are right! We are different. We are the only species that has an extra medium of design preservation and design communication: culture. ... We have language, the primary medium of culture... In a few short millennia - a mere instant in biological time - we have already used our new exploration vehicles to transform not only our planet but the very process of design development that created us.

— Daniel Dennett time

Philosophers might care to ask themselves ... how often they are accomplices in increasing the audience for a second-rate article simply because their introductory course needs a simple-minded version of a bad idea that even freshmen can refute. Some of the most frequently reprinted articles in twentieth-century philosophy are famous precisely because nobody believes them; everybody can see what's wrong with them. ... The confirmation of this claim is left as an exercise for the reader. Among the memes that structure the infosphere and hence affect the transmission of other memes are the laws of libel.

— Daniel Dennett philosophy

When comparing the time scales of genetic and cultural evolution, it is useful to bear in mind that we today - every one of us - can easily understand many ideas that were simply unthinkable by the geniuses in our grandparents' generation!

— Daniel Dennett time

Experience teaches...that there is no such thing as a thought experiment so clearly presented that no philosopher can misinterpret it...

— Daniel Dennett men

[I]n all mammalian species that have so far been carefully studied, the rate at which their members engage in the killing of conspecifics is several thousand times greater than the highest homicide rate in any American city.

— Daniel Dennett time

If you have ever asked yourself if there are facts about yourself (about your health, your competence, your prospects) you would rather not know, and decided that there were, you should be prepared to consider seriously the suggestion that the best - perhaps the only - way to ensure that such facts are not imposed on people is by prohibiting investigations likely to discover them.

— Daniel Dennett people

It is not "scientism" to concede the objectivity and precision of good science, any more than it is history worship to concede that Napoleon did once rule in France and the Holocaust actually happened. Those who fear the facts will forever try to discredit the fact-finders.

— Daniel Dennett science

[T]here are no forces on this planet more dangerous to us all than the fanaticisms of fundamentalism, of all species: Protestantism, Catholicism, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism, as well as countless smaller infections.

— Daniel Dennett men

[T]he onlyworth caring about is one that can withstand our best efforts to examine it.

— Daniel Dennett wit

, in the extreme versions worthy of the name, is antithetical to almost all surprising advances in thought. We might call it eumemics, since it is, like the extreme eugenics of Social Darwinists, an attempt to impose myopically derived standards of safety and goodness on the bounty of nature. Few today - but there are a few - would brand all genetic counseling, all genetic policies, with the condemnatory title of eugenics.

— Daniel Dennett nature

The task of the mind is to produce future, as the poet Paul Val

— Daniel Dennett future

Animals are not just herbivores or carnivores. They are, in the nice coinage of the psychologist George Miller, informavores.

— Daniel Dennett age

[I]t makes little difference where we draw the line between the pruning and shaping [of behavior] by natural selection which is genetically transmitted to offspring (the wiring you are born with), and the pruning and shaping that later takes place in the individual (the rewiring you end up with, as a result of experience or training). nature and nurture blend seamlessly together.

— Daniel Dennett nature

Unpredictability is in general a fine protective feature, which should never be squandered but always spent wisely. There is much to be gained from communication if it is craftily doled out - enough truth to keep one's credibility high but enough falsehood to keep one's options open. (This is the first point of wisdom in the game of poker: he who never bluffs never wins; he who always bluffs always loses.)

— Daniel Dennett truth

Of all the mind tools we acquire in the course of furnishing our brains from the stockpiles of culture, none are more important, of course, than words - first spoken, then written. Words make us more intelligent by making cognition easier, in the same way (many times multiplied) that beacons and landmarks make navigation in the world easier for simple creatures. Navigation in the abstract multidimensional world of ideas is simply impossible without a huge stock of movable, memorable landmarks that can be shared, criticized, recorded, and looked at from different perspectives.

— Daniel Dennett time

Every human mind you've ever looked at ... is a product not just of natural selection but of cultural redesign of enormous proportions.

— Daniel Dennett mind

Paper delivered at the 1998 World Congress of Philosophy (13 August 1998)

— Daniel Dennett live

We alone can be wracked with doubt, and we alone have been provoked by that epistemic itch to seek a remedy: better truth-seeking methods. Wanting to keep better track of our food supplies, our territories, our families, our enemies, we discovered the benefits of talking it over with others, asking questions, passing on lore. We invented culture. Then we invented measuring, and arithmetic, and maps, and writing. These communicative and recording innovations come with a built-in ideal: truth. The point of asking questions is to find true answers; the point of measuring is to measure accurately; the point of making maps is to find your way to your destination. ... In short, the goal of truth goes without saying, in every human culture.

— Daniel Dennett truth

are just as vulnerable to wishful thinking, just as likely to be tempted by base motives, just as venal and gullible and forgetful as the rest of humankind. Scientists don't consider themselves to be saints; they don't even pretend to be priests (who according to tradition are supposed to do a better job than the rest of us at fighting off human temptation and frailty). Scientists take themselves to be just as weak and fallible as anybody else, but recognizing those very sources of error in themselves and in the groups to which they belong, they have devised elaborate systems to tie their own hands, forcibly preventing their frailties and prejudices from infecting their results.

— Daniel Dennett thinking

Penguin Group.

— Daniel Dennett

We live in a world that is subjectively open. And we are designed by evolution to be "informavores," epistemically hungry seekers of information, in an endless quest to improve our purchase on the world.

— Daniel Dennett world

..the point of a randomizing device like a coin flip, [is] to make the result uncontrollable by making it sensitive to so many variables that no feasible, finite list of conditions can be singled out as the cause.

— Daniel Dennett man

The salmon swimming upstream to spawn may be wily in a hundred ways, but she cannot even contemplate the prospect of abandoning her reproductive project and deciding instead to live out her days studying coastal geography or trying to learn Portuguese. The creation of a panoply of new standpoints is, to my mind, the most striking product of the euprimatic revolution.

— Daniel Dennett mind

Breaking the Spell: Religion As A Natural Phenomenon

— Daniel Dennett men

Dennett in Venice, 2006

— Daniel Dennett

A philosopher is someone who says, "We know it's possible in practice; we're trying to work out if it's possible in principle!"

— Daniel Dennett work

Evolution is all about processes that almost never happen. Every birth in every lineage is a potential speciation event, but speciation almost never happens, not once in a million births. Mutation in DNA almost never happens -- not once in a trillion copyings -- but evolution depends on it. Take the set of infrequent accidents -- things that almost never happen -- and sort them into the happy accidents, the neutral accidents, and the fatal accidents; amplify the effects of the happy accidents -- which happens automatically when you have replication and competition -- and you get evolution.

— Daniel Dennett evolution

We used to think that secrecy was perhaps the greatest enemy of democracy, and as long as there was no suppression or censorship, people could be trusted to make the informed decisions that would preserve our free society, but we have learned in recent years that the techniques of misinformation and misdirection have become so refined that, even in an open society, a cleverly directed flood of misinformation can overwhelm the truth, even though the truth is out there, uncensored, quietly available to anyone who can find it.

— Daniel Dennett truth

[L]et your self go. If you can approach the world's complexities, both its glories and its horrors, with an attitude of humble curiosity, acknowledging that however deeply you have seen, you have only scratched the surface, you will find worlds within worlds, beauties you could not heretofore imagine, and your own mundane preoccupations will shrink to proper size, not all that important in the greater scheme of things. Keeping that awestruck vision of the world ready to hand while dealing with the demands of daily living is no easy exercise, but it is definitely worth the effort, for if you can stay centered, and engaged, you will find the hard choices easier, the right words will come to you when you need them, and you will be a better person. That, I propose, is the secret to spirituality, and it has nothing at all to do with believing in an immortal soul, or in anything supernatural.

— Daniel Dennett spirituality

In spite of ferocious differences of opinion about other moral issues, there seems to be something approaching consensus that it is cruel and malicious to interfere with the life-enhancing illusions of others- unless those illusions are themselves the cause of of even greater ills. The disagreements come over what these greater ills might be- and this has led to the break down of the whole rationale. Keeping secrets from people for their own good can often be wise, but it takes only one person to give away a secret, and since there are disagreements about which cases warrant discretion, the result is an unsavory miasma of hypocrisy, lies, and frantic but fruitless attempts at distraction.

— Daniel Dennett life

(3 November 2006)"". Edge: The Third Culture (195). Retrieved on 2006-11-11.

— Daniel Dennett culture

(written from his hospital bed after surviving an )

— Daniel Dennett

Do I worship modern medicine? Is science my religion? Not at all; there is no aspect of modern medicine or science that I would exempt from the most rigorous scrutiny, and I can readily identify a host of serious problems that still need to be fixed. That's easy to do, of course, because the worlds of medicine and science are already engaged in the most obsessive, intensive, and humble self-assessments yet known to human institutions, and they regularly make public the results of their self-examinations. Moreover, this open-ended rational criticism, imperfect as it is, is the secret of the astounding success of these human enterprises. There are measurable improvements every day.

— Daniel Dennett religion

The earth has grown a nervous system, and it's us.

— Daniel Dennett art

Norton and Co..

— Daniel Dennett

(See the excellent Wikipedia entry on .) p. 156

— Daniel Dennett

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 man

— Daniel Dennett life

A child raised on a desert island, alone, without social interaction, without language, and thus lacking empathy, is still a sentient being.

— Daniel Dennett language

Some cultural phenomena bear a striking resemblance to the cells of cell biology, actively preserving themselves in their social environments, finding the nutrients they need and fending off the causes of their dissolution.

— Daniel Dennett men

The secret of happiness is: Find something more important than you are and dedicate your life to it.

— Daniel Dennett life

The problem is that no ethical system has ever achieved consensus. Ethical systems are completely unlike mathematics or science. This is a source of concern.

— Daniel Dennett science

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 religion

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 freedom

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 art

Darwin's idea of natural selection makes people uncomfortable because it reverses the direction of tradition.

— Daniel Dennett people

Some of the greatest, most revolutionary advances in science have been given their initial expression in attractively modest terms, with no fanfare.

— Daniel Dennett science

Natural selection is not gene centrist and nor is biology all about genes; our comprehending minds are a result of our fast evolving culture.

— Daniel Dennett mind

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 good

The mind is the effect, not the cause.

— Daniel Dennett mind

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 people

Now that mobile phones and the internet have altered the epistemic selective landscape in a revolutionary way, every religious organisation must scramble to evolve defences or become extinct.

— Daniel Dennett evolution

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 reality

In short, we need to recover the courage we celebrate in our heroes, and in particular, the courage to tolerate, for the sake of a free society, a level of risk we hardly ever imagined in the past.

— Daniel Dennett art

We adore babies because they're so cute. And, of course, we are amused by jokes because they are funny. This is all backwards. It is. And Darwin shows us why.

— Daniel Dennett funny

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 science

Wherever there is a design that is highly successful in a broad range of similar environments, it is apt to emerge again and again, independently - the phenomenon known in biology as convergent evolution. I call these designs 'good tricks.'

— Daniel Dennett success

Words have a genealogy and it's easier to trace the evolution of a single word than the evolution of a language.

— Daniel Dennett language

We should get used to the idea that well 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 cant press much further on this question than we have managed to date.

— Daniel Dennett man

Darwins idea of natural selection makes people uncomfortable because it reverses the direction of tradition.

— Daniel Dennett people

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