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
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, the better to make decisions about our subjectively open future.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote highlights humanity's innate desire for knowledge and understanding in an uncertain world.
Daniel Dennett emphasizes that humans are evolutionarily equipped to seek information and understanding about the world around us. This quest for knowledge is driven by our subjective experiences and the need to make informed decisions about an unpredictable future, suggesting that our capacity for learning and inquiry is crucial for navigating life's uncertainties.
Themes
KnowledgeInformationEpistemologyDecision MakingEvolution
In practice
Example use cases
In a lecture on personal development, one might say, 'As Daniel Dennett reminds us, our quest for information shapes our future.'
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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.
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Words have a genealogy and it's easier to trace the evolution of a single word than the evolution of a language.
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The secret of happiness is: Find something more important than you are and dedicate your life to it.
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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.
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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.
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A person of good intelligence and of sensitivity cannot exist in this society very long without having some anger about the inequality - and it's not just a bleeding-heart, knee-jerk, liberal kind of a thing - it is just a normal human reaction to a nonsensical set of values where we have cinnamon flavored dental floss and there are people sleeping in the street.
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The cause of war is preparation for war.
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Nothing is so good as it seems beforehand.
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Man is never sufficiently touched and affected by the awareness of his lowly state until he has compared himself with God's majesty.
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No one may threaten or commit violence ('aggress') against another man's person or property. Violence may be employed only against the man who commits such violence; that is, only defensively against the aggressive violence of another. In short, no violence may be employed against a non-aggressor. Here is the fundamental rule from which can be deduced the entire corpus of libertarian theory.
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