|
c02eeb6
|
The more you have invested in your religion, the more you will be motivated to protect that investment. Stark
|
|
|
Daniel C. Dennett |
|
1886e8f
|
Carpenters don't make their saws and hammers, tailors don't make their scissors and needles, and plumbers don't make their wrenches, but blacksmiths can make their hammers, tongs, anvils, and chisels
|
|
|
Daniel C. Dennett |
|
cfe4007
|
It's not an intellectual exercise. It's not an academic pursuit--it sort of masquerades as one, but at its core it's a test of trust in each other. Are you or aren't you one of us? And woe to the one who doesn't toe the line.
|
|
|
Daniel C. Dennett |
|
c7d0ef5
|
That's a rhetorical question, and trying to answer rhetorical questions instead of being cowed by them is a good habit to cultivate.
|
|
reason
knowledge
|
Daniel C. Dennett |
|
c1ecf43
|
Does that mean that religious texts are worthless as guides to ethics? Of course not. They are magnificent sources of insight into human nature, and into the possibilities of ethical codes. Just as we should not be surprised to discover that ancient folk medicine has a great deal to teach modern hightech medicine, we should not be surprised if we find that these great religious texts hold versions of the very best ethical systems any human ..
|
|
|
Daniel C. Dennett |
|
0b69dea
|
It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail.
|
|
|
Daniel C. Dennett |
|
f451fa5
|
A mountain climber foolishly climbing alone slips off a precipice and finds himself dangling at the end of his safety rope, a thousand feet above a ravine. Unable to climb the rope or swing to a safe resting spot, he calls out in despair: "Hallooo, hallooo! Can anybody help me?" To his astonishment, the clouds part, a beautiful light pours through them, and a mighty voice replies, "Yes, my son, I can help you. Take your knife and cut the ro..
|
|
|
Daniel C. Dennett |
|
dfa6c61
|
Darwin's "strange inversion of reasoning" and Turing's equally revolutionary inversion were aspects of a single discovery: competence without comprehension. Comprehension, far from being a Godlike talent from which all design must flow, is an emergent effect of systems of uncomprehending competence: natural selection on the one hand, and mindless computation on the other. These twin ideas have been proven beyond a reasonable doubt, but they..
|
|
|
Daniel C. Dennett |
|
b9e0d20
|
Like many other natural wonders, the human mind is something of a bag of tricks, cobbled together over the eons by the foresightless process of evolution by natural selection.
|
|
|
Daniel C. Dennett |
|
7eb16e1
|
Not all historians of philosophy have the same goals and attitudes, and I for one see no good reason for disqualifying any of the contenders. Some insist on placing their thinkers in the historical context in which they wrote, which means, for instance, learning a lot of seventeenth-century science if you really want to understand Descartes, and a lot of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century political history if you really want to understand ..
|
|
|
Daniel C. Dennett |
|
9834b44
|
It turns out that all the "magic" of cognition depends, just as life itself does, on cycles within cycles of recurrent, "re-entrant," reflexive information-transformation processes"
|
|
|
Daniel C. Dennett |
|
c8bc876
|
There is no future in a sacred myth. Why not? Because of our curiosity. (...) Whatever we hold precious, we cannot protect it from our curiosity, because being who we are, one of the things we deem precious is the truth.
|
|
science
truth
|
Daniel C. Dennett |
|
9ac535c
|
Any theory that makes progress is bound to be initially counterintuitive.
|
|
|
Daniel C. Dennett |
|
27e8fd1
|
Americans are notoriously ill-informed about evolution. A recent Gallup poll (June 1993) discovered that 47 percent of adult Americans believe that Homo sapiens is a species created by God less than ten thousand years ago.
|
|
|
Daniel C. Dennett |
|
05a9839
|
human beings are actually more closely related to the two species of chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes, the familiar chimp, and Pan paniscus, the rare, smaller pygmy chimp or bonobo) than those chimpanzees are to the other apes.
|
|
|
Daniel C. Dennett |
|
71c80dd
|
So Paley was right in saying not just that Design was a wonderful thing to explain, but also that Design took Intelligence. All he missed--and Darwin provided--was the idea that this Intelligence could be broken into bits so tiny and stupid that they didn't count as intelligence at all, and then distributed through space and time in a gigantic, connected network of algorithmic process.
|
|
|
Daniel C. Dennett |
|
bf1e869
|
When I was a child, I used to pray to God for a bicycle. But then I realized that God doesn't work in that way--so I stole a bike and prayed for forgiveness!
|
|
|
Daniel C. Dennett |
|
56e7088
|
Don't be afraid of a little metaphor; it won't bite you, but you should always make sure you know how to cash it in for unvarnished fact when you feel the urge.
|
|
philosophy-of-language
|
Daniel C. Dennett |
|
84733c6
|
There is only one way to respect the substance of any purported God-given moral edict: consider it conscientiously in the full light of reason, using all the evidence at our command. No God that was pleased by displays of unreasoning love would be worthy of worship.
|
|
|
Daniel C. Dennett |
|
4ed1613
|
I might repeat to myself slowly and soothingly, a list of quotations beautiful from minds profound--if I can remember any of the damn things. --Dorothy Parker
|
|
|
Daniel C. Dennett |
|
2eea17c
|
We have all heard the forlorn refrain "Well, it seemed like a good idea at the time!" This phrase has come to stand for the rueful reflection of an idiot, a sign of stupidity, but in fact we should appreciate it as a pillar of wisdom. Any being, any agent, who can truly say, "Well, it seemed like a good idea at the time!" is standing on the threshold of brilliance. We"
|
|
|
Daniel C. Dennett |
|
c5bcce3
|
It is worth recalling that it took brave pioneers many years to overcome the powerful taboo against the dissection of human cadavers during the early years of modern medicine. And we should note that, notwithstanding the outrage and revulsion with which the idea of dissection was then received, overcoming that tradition has not led to the feared collapse of morality and decency. We live in an era in which human corpses are still treated wit..
|
|
|
Daniel C. Dennett |
|
261c9ff
|
Anything that is usefully and voluminously predictable from the intentional stance is, by definition, an intentional system, and as we shall see, many fascinating and complicated things that don't have brains or eyes or ears or hands, and hence really don't have minds, are nevertheless intentional systems. Folk psychology's basic trick, that is to say, has some bonus applications outside the world of human interactions.
|
|
|
Daniel C. Dennett |
|
ebe0989
|
Our manifest image, unlike the daisy's ontology or Umwelt, really is manifest, really is subjective in a strong sense. It's the world we live in, the world according to us.
|
|
|
Daniel C. Dennett |
|
2666355
|
Some philosophical research projects -- or problematics, to speak with the more literary types -- are rather like working out the truths of chess. A set of mutually agreed-upon rules are presupposed -- and seldom discussed -- and the implications of those rules are worked out, articulated, debated, refined. So far, so good. Chess is a deep and important human artifact, about which much of value has been written. But some philosophical resea..
|
|
|
Daniel C. Dennett |
|
b66bb79
|
normalnoto polozhenie na neshchata za vsiaka zhivo s'shchestvo, koeto se razmnozhava, e takova, che pri vsiako pokolenie se razhda po-mnogobroino potomstvo, otkolkoto e v'zmozhno da se v'zproizvede. Inache kazano, nozh't pochti vinagi e oprian do kokala. Poznat primer za deistvieto na praviloto na Maltus e razmnozhavaneto na populatsiia ot drozhdi v parche testo ili grozdov sok. Blagodarenie na izobilieto ot zakhari i drugi khranitelni vesh..
|
|
Малтус
дрожди
популационна-експлозия
|
Daniel C. Dennett |
|
f3832ea
|
In this section I have tried to demonstrate that Darwinian thinking does live up to its billing as universal acid: it turns the whole traditional world upside down, challenging the top-down image of designs flowing from that genius of geniuses, the Intelligent Designer, and replacing it with the bubble-up image of mindless, motiveless cyclical processes churning out ever-more robust combinations until they start replicating on their own, sp..
|
|
|
Daniel C. Dennett |
|
fcc572a
|
Some people would much prefer the infinite regress of mysteries, apparently, but in this day and age the cost is prohibitive: you have to get yourself deceived. You can either deceive yourself or let others do the dirty work, but there is no intellectually defensible way of rebuilding the mighty barriers to comprehension that Darwin smashed. (p.25)
|
|
religion
infinite-regress
delusion
|
Daniel C. Dennett |
|
789c05c
|
If I burst into a house and yell to all assembled, "Put on the kettle!" I have uttered an imperative English sentence, but some will probably infer that I would like to have a cup of tea or other hot beverage, while another may further surmise that I feel myself at home here, and may in fact be the occupant of this house. Yet another person present, a monoglot Hungarian, may infer only that I speak English, and so does whomever I am address..
|
|
|
Daniel C. Dennett |
|
b464605
|
As Dawkins goes on to say (p. 316), "The one thing that makes evolution such a neat theory is that it explains how organized complexity can arise out of primeval simplicity." This is one of the key strengths of Darwin's idea, and the key weakness of the alternatives. In fact, I once argued, it is unlikely that any other theory could have this strength:"
|
|
|
Daniel C. Dennett |
|
59c9350
|
T]he idea of treating Mind as an effect rather than as a First Cause is too revolutionary for some-an "awful stretcher" that their own minds cannot acommodate comfortably. This is as true today as it was in 1860, and it has always been as true of some of evolution's best friends as of its foes. For instance, the physicist Paul Davies, in his recent book , proclaims that the reflective power of human minds can be "no trivial detail, no mino..
|
|
evolution
purpose
natural-selection
|
Daniel C. Dennett |
|
47eee43
|
Ignorance is a necessary condition for many excellent things.
|
|
|
Daniel C. Dennett |
|
5923f95
|
We can now expose perhaps the most common misunderstanding of Darwinism: the idea that Darwin showed that evolution by natural selection is a procedure for producing Us. Ever since Darwin proposed his theory, people have often misguidedly tried to interpret it as showing that we are the destination, the goal, the point of all that winnowing and competition, and our arrival on the scene was guaranteed by the mere holding of the tournament. T..
|
|
|
Daniel C. Dennett |
|
ba66f59
|
Ancestor worship must be an appealing idea to those who are about to become ancestors. --Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works
|
|
|
Daniel C. Dennett |
|
4282b8f
|
Asked by a student for an example of infectious cultural junk that is hard to eradicate, I replied, "Well, it's like, when, like, you use a phrase which, like, isn't really, like, doing any serious work, but, like you go on, like, using it." To which the student replied, "I, like, understand the point, but I wanted, like, an example."
|
|
mind
|
Daniel C. Dennett |
|
dc7b3f9
|
But unless dualism or vitalism is true (in which case you have some extra, secret ingredient in you), you are made of robots--or what comes to the same thing, a collection of trillions of macromolecular machines. And all of these are ultimately descended from the original macros. So something made of robots can exhibit genuine consciousness, or genuine intentionality, because you do if anything does.
|
|
|
Daniel C. Dennett |
|
b836031
|
Take, for instance, the possible fat man in that doorway; and, again, the possible bald man in that doorway. Are they the same possible man, or two possible men? How do we decide? How many possible men are there in that doorway? Are there more possible thin ones than fat ones? How many of them are alike? Or would their being alike make them one? Are no two possible things alike? Is this the same as saying that it is impossible for two thing..
|
|
|
Daniel C. Dennett |
|
4b03ac5
|
prosaic, pedestrian example, but everything
|
|
|
Daniel C. Dennett |
|
a207418
|
We have a better product than soap or automobiles. We have eternal life. --Reverend Jim Bakker8
|
|
|
Daniel C. Dennett |
|
2c7183c
|
One cannot learn all about what it's like to run a marathon by interviewing only those who drop out--but one can learn something.
|
|
|
Daniel C. Dennett |
|
f540f22
|
One of the surprising discoveries of modern psychology is how easy it is to be ignorant of your own ignorance. You are normally oblivious of your own blind spot, and people are typically amazed to discover that we don't see colors in our peripheral vision. It seems as if we do, but we don't, as you can prove to yourself by wiggling colored cards at the edge of your vision--you'll see motion just fine but not be able to identify the color of..
|
|
|
Daniel C. Dennett |
|
9d092c4
|
Those who are religious and believe religion to be the best hope of humankind cannot reasonably expect those of us who are skeptical to refrain from expressing our doubts if they themselves are unwilling to put their convictions under the microscope.
|
|
|
Daniel C. Dennett |
|
d39fa2c
|
Words, I will argue, are the best example of memes, culturally transmitted items that evolve by differential replication--that is, by natural selection.
|
|
|
Daniel C. Dennett |
|
407f7f0
|
The real danger, I think, is not that machines more intelligent than we are will usurp our role as captains of our destinies, but that we will over-estimate the comprehension of our latest thinking tools, prematurely ceding authority to them far beyond their competence.
|
|
|
Daniel C. Dennett |