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Daniel Dennett

88 quotes

• “We really have to think of reasoning the way we think of romance, it takes two to tango. There has to be a communication.”

  Daniel Dennett (1942–2024) first seen 2014 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Daniel Dennett in a panel under the title "Can Rationality Be Taught?" at TAM 2014.

• “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.”

  Daniel Dennett (1942–2024) first seen 1981 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Reflections on 'A Conversation With Einstein's Brain'" in The Mind's I (1981), edited by Douglas R. Hofstadter and Daniel C. Dennett

• “We now understand how very complex and even apparently intelligent phenomena, such as genetic coding, the immune system, and low-level visual processing, can be accomplished without a trace of consciousness. But this seems to uncover an enormous puzzle of just what, if anything, consciousness is for. Can a conscious entity do anything for itself that an unconscious (but cleverly wired up) simulation of that entity couldn't do for itself?”

  Daniel Dennett (1942–2024) first seen 1998 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: The Evolution of Consciousness," Consciousness and Emotion in Cognitive Science: Conceptual and Empirical Issues (1998) ed. Josefa Toribio & Andy Clark

• “I think religion for many people is some sort of moral viagra.”

  Daniel Dennett (1942–2024) first seen 2003 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Atheism Tapes, part 6", BBC TV documentation of Jonathan Miller, produced by Richard Denton, recorded 2003, broadcast 2004

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

  Daniel Dennett (1942–2024) first seen 2005 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Sweet Dreams: Philosophical Obstacles to a Science of Consciousness (2005), p. 2

• “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 (1942–2024) first seen 2009 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: New York Times, letter to the editor (26 August 2009)

• “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 a Turing machine description 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 functionalism—each mental type is identifiable as a functional type in the language of Turing machine description.”

  Daniel Dennett (1942–2024) said by 2024 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Homunculi 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 (1942–2024) said by 2024 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “The more I considered this answer, the more obviously true it appeared. But, strange to say, the more true it appeared, the less important the question to which it could be the true answer seemed. A sad, but not unprecedented, fate for a philosophical question to suffer.”

  Daniel Dennett (1942–2024) said by 2024 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “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 (1942–2024) said by 2024 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “When a portion of the world comes in this way to compose a skein of narratives, that portion of the world is an observer. That is what it is for there to be an observer in the world, a something it is like something to be.”

  Daniel Dennett (1942–2024) said by 2024 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “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 (1942–2024) said by 2024 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “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 (1942–2024) said by 2024 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

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

  Daniel Dennett (1942–2024) said by 2024 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “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 (1942–2024) said by 2024 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “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.* It would be an act of desperate intellectual dishonesty to quote this assertion out of context!”

  Daniel Dennett (1942–2024) said by 2024 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “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 (1942–2024) first seen 1989 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Citing Kathleen Akins: "On Piranhas, Narcissism and Mental Representations: An Essay on Intentionality and Naturalism" (1989)

• “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 (1942–2024) said by 2024 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

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

  Daniel Dennett (1942–2024) said by 2024 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Biology is Engineering”

  Daniel Dennett (1942–2024) said by 2024 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Let us understand that a skyhook is a "mind-first" force or power or process, an exception to the principle that all design, and apparent design, is ultimately the result of mindless, motiveless mechanicity. A crane, in contrast, is a subprocess or special feature of a design process that can be demonstrated to permit the local speeding up of the basic, slow process of natural selection, and that can be demonstrated to be itself the predictable (or retroactively explicable) product of the basic process.”

  Daniel Dennett (1942–2024) said by 2024 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “[T]he physicist Steven Weinberg, in Dreams of a Final Theory (1992) … distinguishes between uncompromising reductionism (a bad thing) and compromising reductionism (which he ringingly endorses). Here is my own version. We must distinguish reductionism, which is in general a good thing, from greedy reductionism, which is not. The difference, in the context of Darwin's theory, is simple: greedy reductionists think that everything can be explained without cranes; good reductionists think that everything can be explained without skyhooks.”

  Daniel Dennett (1942–2024) said by 2024 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

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

  Daniel Dennett (1942–2024) said by 2024 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “There is a familiar trio of reactions by scientists to 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 (1942–2024) said by 2024 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “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 (1942–2024) said by 2024 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “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 (1942–2024) said by 2024 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

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

  Daniel Dennett (1942–2024) said by 2024 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “[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 (1942–2024) said by 2024 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “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 (1942–2024) said by 2024 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “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 (1942–2024) said by 2024 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “[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 (1942–2024) said by 2024 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “[T]he only meaning of life worth caring about is one that can withstand our best efforts to examine it.”

  Daniel Dennett (1942–2024) said by 2024 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Political correctness, 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 (1942–2024) said by 2024 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “The task of the mind is to produce future, as the poet Paul Valéry once put it. A mind is fundamentally an anticipator, an expectation-generator. It mines the present for clues, which it refines with the help of the materials it has saved from the past, turning them into anticipations of the future. And then it acts, rationally, on the basis of those hard-won anticipations.”

  Daniel Dennett (1942–2024) said by 2024 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

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

  Daniel Dennett (1942–2024) said by 2024 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “[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 (1942–2024) said by 2024 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “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 (1942–2024) said by 2024 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “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 (1942–2024) said by 2024 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “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 (1942–2024) said by 2024 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “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 (1942–2024) said by 2024 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “..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 (1942–2024) said by 2024 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “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 (1942–2024) said by 2024 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “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 (1942–2024) said by 2024 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “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 copings — 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 (1942–2024) said by 2024 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “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 (1942–2024) said by 2024 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

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

  Daniel Dennett (1942–2024) said by 2024 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “The middle ground, roughly halfway between poetry and mathematics, is where philosophers can make their best contributions, I believe, yielding genuine clarifications of deeply puzzling problems.”

  Daniel Dennett (1942–2024) said by 2024 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Philosophy — in every field of inquiry — is what you have to do until you figure out what questions you should have been asking in the first place.”

  Daniel Dennett (1942–2024) said by 2024 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “The utility of a thought experiment is inversely proportional to the size of its departures from reality.”

  Daniel Dennett (1942–2024) said by 2024 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “What you are is that rolling sum of experience and talent, solemn intention and daydreaming fantasy, bound together in one brain and body and called by a given name. The idea that there is, in addition, a special indissoluble nugget of you, or ego, or spirit, or soul, is an attractive fantasy, but nothing that we need in order to make sense of people, their dreams and hopes, their heroism and their sins.”

  Daniel Dennett (1942–2024) said by 2024 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

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