Quotes by Daniel Dennett

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

“Human consciousness is just about the last surviving mystery. A mystery is a phenomenon that people don't know how to think about - yet. There have been other great mysteries: the mystery of the or...”

“In most sciences, there are few findings more prized than a counterintuitive result. It shows something surprising and forces us to reconsider our often tacit assumptions. In philosophy of mind, a ...”

“The problem is that no ethical system has ever achieved consensus. Ethical systems are completely unlike mathematics or science. This is a source of concern.”

“The secret of happiness is: Find something more important than you are and dedicate your life to it.”

“I don't think the 9/11 attacks taught us anything we didn't already know about religion. It has long been obvious - even to the deeply religious - that religious fanaticism is an extremely dangerou...”

“In short, we need to recover the courage we celebrate in our heroes, and in particular, the courage to tolerate, for the sake of a free society, a level of risk we hardly ever imagined in the past.”

“We adore babies because they're so cute. And, of course, we are amused by jokes because they are funny. This is all backwards. It is. And Darwin shows us why.”

“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 fi...”

“A child raised on a desert island, alone, without social interaction, without language, and thus lacking empathy, is still a sentient being.”

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

“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 th...”

“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 cons...”

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

“I was once interviewed in Italy and the headline of the interview the next day was wonderful. I saved this for my collection it was... YES we have a soul but it's made of lots of tiny robots and I ...”

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

“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.”

“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 fu...”

“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 th...”

“The trouble with the canons of scientific evidence [...] is that they virtually rule out the description of anything but oft-repeated, oft-observed, stereotypic behavior of a species, and this is j...”