Daniel Dennett

About Daniel Dennett

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“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 in a panel under the title "Can Rationality Be Taught?" at TAM 2014.
“Not a single one of the cells that compose you knows who you are, or cares.”
— Sweet Dreams: Philosophical Obstacles to a Science of Consciousness (2005), p. 2
“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.”
— p. 173
“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.”
— P. 137
“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.”
— Citing Kathleen Akins: "On Piranhas, Narcissism and Mental Representations: An Essay on Intentionality and Naturalism" (1989)
“There’s simply no polite way to tell people they’ve dedicated their lives to an illusion.”
— New York Times, "Philosophy That Stirs the Waters" (29 April 2013)

Quotes via Wikiquote (CC BY-SA), each with its original source.