We need to let our children grow up to face the world armed with knowledge, with much more knowledge than we ourselves had at their age. It is scary, but the alternative is worse.
Daniel DennettRead
If the concept of consciousness were to fall to science, what would happen to our sense of moral agency and free will? If conscious experience were reduced somehow to mere matter in motion, what would happen to our appreciation of love and pain and dreams and joy? If conscious human beings were just animated material objects, how could anything we do to them be right or wrong?
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote questions the implications of reducing consciousness to mere physical processes.
Daniel Dennett explores the potential impact on our understanding of morality, free will, and the richness of human experience if consciousness is solely interpreted through a scientific lens, suggesting that such a reduction may strip away the profound qualities that define our lives, such as love, joy, and moral responsibility.
Themes
ConsciousnessMoralityFree WillExperienceScience
In practice
Example use cases
In a philosophical debate about the nature of consciousness.
More from Daniel Dennett
All quotes βPhilosophers 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 DennettRead
Words have a genealogy and it's easier to trace the evolution of a single word than the evolution of a language.
Daniel DennettRead
The secret of happiness is: Find something more important than you are and dedicate your life to it.
Daniel DennettRead
Some philosophers can't bear to say simple things, like "Suppose a dog bites a man." They feel obliged instead to say, "Suppose a dog d bites a man m at time t," thereby demonstrating their unshakable commitment to logical rigor, even though they don't go on to manipulate any formulae involving d, m, and t.
Daniel DennettRead
As every scuba diver knows, panic is your worst enemy: when it hits, your mind starts to thrash and you are likely to do something really stupid and self-destructive.
Daniel DennettRead
Similar quotes
In lazy apathy let stoics boast, their virtue fixed, 'tis fixed as in a frost.
Alexander PopeRead
The good opinion of mankind, like the lever of Archimedes, with the given fulcrum, moves the world.
Thomas JeffersonRead
A woman can walk miles without making one single step forward. As a child born in a harem, I instinctively knew that to live is to open closed doors. To live is to look outside. To live is to step out. Life is trespassing.
Fatema MernissiRead
When we learn to read the story of Jesus and see it as the story of the love of God, doing for us what we could not do for ourselves--that insight produces, again and again, a sense of astonished gratitude which is very near the heart of authentic Christian experience.
N. T. WrightRead
People associate feminism with hate - with man hate - and that's really negative. I don't think that's what feminism is about at all - it's really positive. I think that's why women became reluctant to use the word.
Emma WatsonRead
I can't even say I made my own mistakes. Really - one has to ask oneself - what dignity is there in that?
Kazuo IshiguroRead