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This is natural selection, plain as day: the islanders have a simple rule: if it returns from the sea intact, copy it! They may have considerable comprehension of the principles of naval architecture that retrospectively endorse their favorite designs, but it is strictly unnecessary.
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Daniel C. Dennett |
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WELCOME TO THE PHENOM Suppose
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Daniel C. Dennett |
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As I have often noted, a wagon with spoked wheels doesn't just carry grain or freight from place to place; it carries the brilliant idea of a wagon with spoked wheels. The
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Daniel C. Dennett |
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The case of the frogs is simply an artificially clear instance of what happens in natural selection all the time: exaptation--
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Daniel C. Dennett |
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does require anyone who makes the trip to abandon some precious intuitions, but I think that I have at last found ways of making the act of jettisoning these "obvious truths" not just bearable but even delightful: it turns your head inside out, in a way, yielding some striking new perspectives on what is going on."
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Daniel C. Dennett |
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Good people will do good things, and bad people will do bad things. But for good people to do bad things--that takes religion. --Steven Weinberg, 1999
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Daniel C. Dennett |
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atheists and agnostics can have sacred values, values that are simply not up for re-evaluation at all. I have sacred
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Daniel C. Dennett |
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Nobody ever became a famous philosopher by being a champion of ecumenical hybridism.
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Daniel C. Dennett |
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There may be things that are completely unknowable to us, so we must be careful not to treat the limits of our knowledge as sure guides to the limit of what there is.
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Daniel C. Dennett |
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The amount of information obtainable in short order by an inquisitive human being is staggeringly large.
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Daniel C. Dennett |
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Try to acquire the weird practice of savoring your mistakes, delighting in uncovering the strange quirks that led you astray. Then, once you have sucked out all the goodness to be gained from having made them, you can cheerfully set them behind you, and go on to the next big opportunity. But that is not enough: you should actively seek out opportunities to make grand mistakes, just so you can then recover from them.
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Daniel C. Dennett |
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Science properly done is one of the humanities, as a fine physics teacher once said. The point of science is to help us understand what we are and how we got here, and for this we need the great stories: the tale of how, once upon a time, there was a Big Bang; the Darwinian epic of the evolution of life on Earth; and now the story we are just beginning to learn how to tell...
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Daniel C. Dennett |
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Words exist. What are they made of? Air under pressure? Ink? Some instances of the word "cat" are made of ink, and some are made of bursts of acoustic energy in the atmosphere, and some are made of patterns of glowing dots on computer screens, and some occur silently in thoughts, and what they have in common is just that they count as "the same" (tokens of the same type, as philosophers say) say in a system of symbols known as a language. W..
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Daniel C. Dennett |
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Our errors are surely not such awfully solemn things. In a world where we are so certain to incur them in spite of all our caution, a certain lightness of heart seems healthier than this excessive nervousness on their behalf. --WILLIAM JAMES, "The Will to Believe" If"
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Daniel C. Dennett |
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Religions exist primarily for people to achieve together what they cannot achieve alone. --David Sloan Wilson, Darwin's Cathedral
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Daniel C. Dennett |
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IN ORDER TO BE A PERFECT AND BEAUTIFUL COMPUTING MACHINE, IT IS NOT REQUISITE TO KNOW WHAT ARITHMETIC IS.
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Daniel C. Dennett |
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Nothing is more difficult, and therefore more precious, than to be able to decide. --Napoleon Bonaparte
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Daniel C. Dennett |
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People who want to study religion usually have an ax to grind. They either want to defend their favorite religion from its critics or want to demonstrate the irrationality and futility of religion, and this tends to infect their methods with bias.
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Daniel C. Dennett |
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determinism, the idea that the facts at one moment in time--the location, mass, direction, and velocity of every particle--determine what happens in the next moment, and so on, forever.
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Daniel C. Dennett |
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But as Descartes observed, even an infinitely powerful evil demon couldn't trick him into thinking he himself existed if he didn't exist: cogito ergo sum, "I think, therefore I am." --
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Daniel C. Dennett |
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It's just that it would be nice to hear someone accidentally whistle something of mine, somewhere, just once.
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Daniel C. Dennett |