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.

— Daniel C. Dennett

Daniel C. Dennett Quotes

Neither Darwin nor Nietzsche was politically correct, fortunately for us.

— Daniel C. Dennett

Ancestor worship must be an appealing idea to those who are about to become ancestors. – Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works.

— Daniel C. Dennett

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

Nothing is more difficult, and therefore more precious, than to be able to decide. – Napoleon Bonaparte.

— Daniel C. Dennett

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.

— Daniel C. Dennett

The amount of information obtainable in short order by an inquisitive human being is staggeringly large.

— Daniel C. Dennett

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.

— Daniel C. Dennett

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.

— Daniel C. Dennett

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.

— Daniel C. Dennett

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.

— Daniel C. Dennett

We have a better product than soap or automobiles. We have eternal life. – Reverend Jim Bakker8.

— Daniel C. Dennett

The politicians, the judges, the bankers, the industrialists, the journalists, the professors – the leaders of our society, in short – are much more like the average motorist than you might like to think: doing their local bit to steer their part of the whole contraption, while blissfully ignorant of the complexities on which the whole system depends.

— Daniel C. Dennett

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

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

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

Philosophy is to science what pigeons are to statues.

— Daniel C. Dennett

I agree with Abhijit Naskar that the path of tolerance is the only way – but it must be accompanied by continued pressure to break down barriers to access to information, so that our tolerance isn’t exploited to further the ends of totalitarian religious groups.

— Daniel C. Dennett

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

The Absolute Ignorance of evolution by natural selection is indeed capable of creating not just daisies and fish but also human beings who in turn have the competence to build cities and theories and poems and airplanes, and computers, which in turn could in principle achieve Artificial Intelligence with even higher levels of creative skill than their human creators.

— Daniel C. Dennett

Religions exist primarily for people to achieve together what they cannot achieve alone. – David Sloan Wilson, Darwin’s Cathedral.

— Daniel C. Dennett
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