Quotes : Daniel Dennett

Daniel Dennett (born March 28, 1942) is a prominent American atheist philosopher, writer and cognitive scientist whose research centers on the philosophy of mind, philosophy of science and philosophy of biology, particularly as those fields relate to evolutionary biology.

QUOTES :

-“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.”

-“ What you can imagine depends on what you know.”

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

-“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.”

-“In the long run I certainly hope information is the cure for fanaticism, but I am afraid information is more the cause than the cure.”

-“We need to let our children grow up to face the world armed with knowledge, with much more knowledge than we ourselves had at their age. It is scary, but the alternative is worse.”

-“Let 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 just 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.”

-“If nobody cares, then it doesn't matter what happens to flowers.”

-“Imagination is cheap as long as you don't have to worry about the details.”

-“My faith in the expertise of physicists like Richard Feynman, for instance, permits me to endorse—and, if it comes to it, bet heavily on the truth of—a proposition that I don't understand. So far, my faith is not unlike religious faith, but I am not in the slightest bit motivated to go to my death rather than recant the formulas of physics. Watch: E doesn't equal mc2, it doesn't, it doesn't! I was lying, so there!”

-“I think we should stop treating ["God works in mysterious ways"] as any kind of wisdom and recognize it as the transparently defensive propaganda that it is. A positive response might be, "Oh good! I love a mystery. Let's see if we can solve this one, too. Do you have any ideas?”

-“I listen to all these complaints about rudeness and intemperateness, and the opinion that I come to is that there is no polite way of asking somebody: have you considered the possibility that your entire life has been devoted to a delusion? But that’s a good question to ask. Of course we should ask that question and of course it’s going to offend people. Tough.”

-‘There is a species of primate in South America more gregarious than most other mammals, with a curious behavior.The members of this species often gather in groups, large and small, and in the course of their mutual chattering , under a wide variety of circumstances, they are induced to engage in bouts of involuntary, convulsive respiration, a sort of loud, helpless, mutually reinforcing group panting that sometimes is so severe as to incapacitate them. Far from being aversive,however, these attacks seem to be sought out by most members of the species, some of whom even appear to be addicted to them………...the species in Homo sapiens (which does indeed inhabit South America, among other places), and the behavior is laughter.”

-“No matter how smart you are, you’re smarter if you take the easy ways when they are available”

- “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.” {Epiphenomenalism is the view that mental events are caused by physical events in the brain, but have no effects upon any physical events}

- “The earth has grown a nervous system – and it is us”