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.'
More from Daniel Dennett
All quotes →Philosophers 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
Most animals, including most domesticated primates (humans) show truly staggering ability to 'ignore' certain kinds of information - that which does not 'fit' their imprinted/ conditioned reality-tunnel
Robert Anton WilsonRead
It is good to be charitable; but to whom? That is the point. As to the ungrateful, there is not one who does not at last die miserable.
Jean De La FontaineRead
I hope for nothing. I fear nothing. I am free.
Nikos KazantzakisRead
But this people has deliberately made itself stupid, for nearly a millennium: nowhere have the two great European narcotics, alcohol and Christianity, been abused more dissolutely.
Friedrich NietzscheRead
If God seems to be in no hurry to make the problem of evil go away, maybe we shouldn't be, either. Maybe our compulsion to wash God's hands for him is a service he doesn't appreciate. Maybe - all theodicies and nearly all theologians to the contrary - evil is where we meet God. Maybe he isn't bothered by showing up dirty for his dates with creation. Maybe - just maybe - if we ever solved the problem, we'd have talked ourselves out of a lover.
Robert Farrar CaponRead
The way of paradoxes is the way of truth. To test Reality we must see it on the tight-rope.
Oscar WildeRead