Daniel Dennett cytaty (129 cytatów, strona 3)

Fałsze i mity, które stanowią „mądrość potoczną”, mogą czasem trwać nieograniczenie długo po prostu dlatego, że sam zamiar ujawnienia ich jest, za sprawą tabu, traktowany jako wstydliwy lub niestosowny. Wspólnie żywione wątpliwe domniemania bywają podtrzymywane przez całe lata lub nawet stulecia tylko dlatego, że każdy zakłada, iż <u>ktoś inny</u> zna jakieś dobre powody, by ich nie kwestionować, więc nikt nie ośmiela się tego uczynić.
Komentarz: podkreślenie autora.
Odczarowanie. Religia jako zjawisko naturalne
Źródło: s. 42.

O sile , O religii

„Niektórzy upatrują w religii największą nadzieję na pokój, łódź ratunkową, na której nie należy wprowadzać zamieszania, bo można ją wywrócić, a wtedy wszyscy zginiemy; inni natomiast widzą w religijnej samoidentyfikacji główne źródło konfliktów i przemocy na świecie i wierzą równie mocno, że przekonania religijne są niefortunnym substytutem chłodnego, opartego na wiedzy rozumowania. Dobrymi intencjami wybrukowane są obie drogi. Kto ma rację? Nie wiem. Nie wiedzą tego również miliardy ludzi żarliwie religijnych. Nie wiedzą tego także ateiści, przekonani, że świat byłby dużo lepszy, gdyby wszystkie religie zeń znikły. Jest tu jednak pewna asymetria: ateiści są na ogół przychylni wszelkiemu wnikliwemu i obiektywnemu badaniu ich poglądów, praktyk i argumentów. (Prawdę mówiąc, ich nieustanne żądanie samokontroli bywa zgoła nużące). Ludzie religijni natomiast często traktują tych, którzy chcą badać ich poglądy, jako impertynentów i świętokradców.”

Daniel Dennett

Odczarowanie. Religia jako zjawisko naturalne
Źródło: s. 40.

O wiedzę , O ludziach , O świecie , O pokoju

„Czarem, który – jak twierdzę – trzeba zdjąć, jest tabu zakazujące naukowego, niczym nieskrępowanego badania religii jako jednego z wielu zjawisk naturalnych.”

Daniel Dennett

Odczarowanie. Religia jako zjawisko naturalne
Źródło: s. 41.

O zdjęciach , O religii

„W krainie nieuków można opatentować cegłę jako urządzenie do przytrzymywania otwartych drzwi; w niebie inżynierów latający dom zasilany przez światło słoneczne może zostać uznany za banalne rozwinięcie istniejącej wiedzy i praktyki.”

Daniel Dennett

Od bakterii do Bacha
Źródło: s. 181.

O wiedzę , O świetle , O domu

„West Side Story to potomek Romea i Julii – nie dlatego, że ciąg śladów atramentu czy dźwięków, które tworzą sztukę Szekspira, został fizycznie powtórzony, ale dlatego że powielone są ciągi okoliczności i relacje, co jest replikacją czysto semantyczną.”

Daniel Dennett

Od bakterii do Bacha
Źródło: s. 301.

O relacjach

„Umieć, a nie rozumieć to sposób życia większości żywych istot na tej planecie. Powinno się go uznawać za domyślny, dopóki nie będziemy w stanie wykazać, że pewne pojedyncze organizmy naprawdę – w tym czy innym sensie – rozumieją to, co robią.”

Daniel Dennett

Od bakterii do Bacha
Źródło: s. 123.

Sens

„Teoretyczny pomysł Turinga, zrealizowany przez implementację Johna von Neumanna, to znaczy szeregowy komputer programowany, w ciągu ostatnich 60 lat rozmnożył się wykładniczo, a teraz zajmuje każde środowisko na Ziemi i wysłał w kosmos tysiące, może nawet miliony potomków; to najbardziej podróżująca idea w historii.”

Daniel Dennett

Od bakterii do Bacha
Źródło: s. 207.

O historii

„Tak samo jak budzenie się z głębokiego snu często odbywa się stopniowo, gdy żadna chwila nie wydaje się pierwszym momentem wznowionej świadomości, tak rozwój świadomości dziecka w formie godnej takiego miana (coś więcej niż wrażliwość, reagowanie na bodźce, co jest rozpowszechnione u bakterii) jest prawdopodobnie stopniowy, podobnie jak wszystkie wielkie przemiany w życiu.”

Daniel Dennett

Od bakterii do Bacha
Źródło: s. 257.

O dzieciach

„Słowa (…) są najlepszymi przykładami memów, kulturowo przekazywanych elementów, które ewoluują za sprawą zróżnicowania replikacji, to jest za sprawą doboru naturalnego.”

Daniel Dennett

Od bakterii do Bacha
Źródło: s. 237-238.

„Racje bezpodmiotowe nie są bardziej nieziemskie czy problematyczne niż liczby, czy ośrodki ciężkości. Sześciany miały osiem rogów, zanim ludzie wynaleźli arytmetykę, a asteroidy miały środki ciężkości, zanim fizycy wpadli na ten pomysł i zaczęli go stosować. Racje istniały na długo, zanim pojawiły się podmioty rozumujące.”

Daniel Dennett

Od bakterii do Bacha
Źródło: s. 75.

O ludziach

„Procesy ewolucyjne powołały do istnienia cele i racje w ten sam sposób, jak stopniowo powołały do istnienia widzenie barw (i stąd się biorą barwy). Jeśli zrozumiemy, że nasz ludzki świat racji wyrósł z prostszego świata, w którym nie było żadnych racji, zrozumiemy, że cele i racje są tak samo prawdziwe jak barwy, tak prawdziwe jak życie.”

Daniel Dennett

Od bakterii do Bacha
Źródło: s. 59.

O świecie , O życiu

„Mózgi przypominają raczej kolonie termitów niż inteligentnie zaprojektowane korporacje czy armie.”

Daniel Dennett

Od bakterii do Bacha
Źródło: s. 225.

„Można wymienić lub dosztukować nerw słuchowy nieżywym przewodem, odpowiednio dołączonym na obu końcach. Dlaczego nie resztę mózgu? Czy istnieje jakiś superspecjalny kawałek mózgu, który musi być żywy, aby mózg mógł funkcjonować?”

Daniel Dennett

Od bakterii do Bacha
Źródło: s. 213.

„Łodzie, które wracają, są kopiowane; pozostałe są zapominane, co jest klasycznym przypadkiem doboru naturalnego w działaniu.”

Daniel Dennett

Od bakterii do Bacha
Źródło: s. 285.

O zapominaniu

„Kiedy ludzie zaczynają redagować swoją językową produkcję (dosłownie w przypadku pisania, czy przenośnie w przypadku, gdy po cichu wypróbowują zdania w głowie, zanim wymówią je głośno), spełniają ostateczne wymagania Darwina wobec udomowienia: kontrolowanie reprodukcji członków gatunku - przynajmniej tych, których posiadają.”

Daniel Dennett

Od bakterii do Bacha
Źródło: s. 266

O ludziach

„Język wyewoluował, aby pasował do mózgu, zanim mózg wyewoluował, aby lepiej dostosować się do języka.”

Daniel Dennett

Od bakterii do Bacha
Źródło: s. 260.

O języku słowackim

„Jak często zaznaczałem, pojazd z kołami szprychowymi nie tylko nosi ziarno lub towary z miejsca na miejsce; niesie ze sobą genialny pomysł pojazdu z kołami szprychowymi.”

Daniel Dennett

Od bakterii do Bacha
Źródło: s. 183.

O pewności siebie

„Ekonomiści pokazali, dlaczego gospodarki planowane centralnie nie działają tak dobrze jak gospodarki rynkowe, a z tych samych względów centralnie planowane (odgórne) architektury nieskutecznie organizują mózg.”

Daniel Dennett

Od bakterii do Bacha
Źródło: s. 218.

Daniel Dennett: Cytaty po angielsku

“The evidence of evolution pours in, not only from geology, paleontology, biogeography, and anatomy (Darwin's chief sources), but from molecular biology and every other branch of the life sciences. To put it bluntly but fairly, anyone today who doubts that the variety of life on this planet was produced by a process of evolution is simply ignorant — inexcusably ignorant, in a world where three out of four people have learned to read and write. Doubts about the power of Darwin's idea of natural selection to explain this evolutionary process are still intellectually respectable, however, although the burden of proof for such skepticism has become immense…”

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Daniel Dennett książka Darwin's Dangerous Idea

Darwin's Dangerous Idea (1995)

“We used to think that secrecy was perhaps the greatest enemy of democracy, and as long as there was no suppression or censorship, people could be trusted to make the informed decisions that would preserve our free society, but we have learned in recent years that the techniques of misinformation and misdirection have become so refined that, even in an open society, a cleverly directed flood of misinformation can overwhelm the truth, even though the truth is out there, uncensored, quietly available to anyone who can find it.”

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Daniel Dennett książka Odczarowanie

Breaking the Spell (2006)

“[A] skyhook is … an exception to the principle that all design, and apparent design, is ultimately the result of mindless, motiveless mechanicity. A crane, in contrast, is a subprocess or special feature of a design process that can be demonstrated to permit the local speeding up of the basic, slow process of natural selection, and that can be demonstrated to be itself the predictable (or retroactively explicable) product of the basic process. … [T]he physicist Steven Weinberg, in Dreams of a Final Theory (1992) … distinguishes between uncompromising reductionism (a bad thing) and compromising reductionism (which he ringingly endorses). Here is my own version. We must distinguish reductionism, which is in general a good thing, from greedy reductionism, which is not. The difference, in the context of Darwin's theory, is simple: greedy reductionists think that everything can be explained without cranes; good reductionists think that everything can be explained without skyhooks.”

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Daniel Dennett książka Darwin's Dangerous Idea

Darwin's Dangerous Idea (1995)

“Unpredictability is in general a fine protective feature, which should never be squandered but always spent wisely. There is much to be gained from communication if it is craftily doled out — enough truth to keep one's credibility high but enough falsehood to keep one's options open. (This is the first point of wisdom in the game of poker: he who never bluffs never wins; he who always bluffs always loses.)”

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Daniel Dennett

Kinds of Minds (1996)

“[T]here are no forces on this planet more dangerous to us all than the fanaticisms of fundamentalism, of all species: Protestantism, Catholicism, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism, as well as countless smaller infections.”

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Daniel Dennett książka Darwin's Dangerous Idea

Darwin's Dangerous Idea (1995)

“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 functional language; they must share a Turing machine description according to which they are both in some particular logical state (which is roughly like two different computers having the same program and being in the same "place" in the program). … it is a type functionalism—each mental type is identifiable as a functional type in the language of Turing machine description.”

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Daniel Dennett książka Brainstorms

Źródło: Brainstorms (1978), p. xvi

“Scientists are just as vulnerable to wishful thinking, just as likely to be tempted by base motives, just as venal and gullible and forgetful as the rest of humankind. Scientists don't consider themselves to be saints; they don't even pretend to be priests (who according to tradition are supposed to do a better job than the rest of us at fighting off human temptation and frailty). Scientists take themselves to be just as weak and fallible as anybody else, but recognizing those very sources of error in themselves and in the groups to which they belong, they have devised elaborate systems to tie their own hands, forcibly preventing their frailties and prejudices from infecting their results.”

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Daniel Dennett

Postmodernism and truth (1998)

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

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Daniel Dennett książka Sweet Dreams

Sweet Dreams: Philosophical Obstacles to a Science of Consciousness (2005), p. 2

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

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Daniel Dennett

Daniel Dennett in a panel under the title "Can Rationality Be Taught?" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ImE6-3GuvhE at TAM 2014.

“A philosopher is someone who says, "We know it's possible in practice; we're trying to work out if it's possible in principle!"”

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Daniel Dennett książka Odczarowanie

Breaking the Spell (2006)

“If you have ever asked yourself if there are facts about yourself (about your health, your competence, your prospects) you would rather not know, and decided that there were, you should be prepared to consider seriously the suggestion that the best — perhaps the only — way to ensure that such facts are not imposed on people is by prohibiting investigations likely to discover them.”

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Daniel Dennett książka Darwin's Dangerous Idea

Darwin's Dangerous Idea (1995)

“[I]n all mammalian species that have so far been carefully studied, the rate at which their members engage in the killing of conspecifics is several thousand times greater than the highest homicide rate in any American city.”

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Daniel Dennett książka Darwin's Dangerous Idea

citing the research of George Williams from "Huxley's Evolution and Ethics in Sociobiological Perspective" in Zygon (v.23/88)
Darwin's Dangerous Idea (1995)

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

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Daniel Dennett

"Atheism Tapes, part 6", BBC TV documentation of Jonathan Miller, produced by Richard Denton, recorded 2003, broadcast 2004

“Since September 11, 2001, I have often thought that perhaps it was fortunate for the world that the attackers targeted the World Trade Center instead of the Statue of Liberty, for if they had destroyed our sacred symbol of democracy I fear we as Americans would have been unable to keep ourselves from indulging in paroxysms of revenge of a sort the world has never seen before. If that had happened, it would have befouled the meaning of the Statue of Liberty beyond any hope of subsequent redemption — if there were any people left to care. I have learned from my students that this upsetting thought of mine is subject to several unfortunate misconstruals, so let me expand on it to ward them off. The killing of thousands of innocents in the World Trade Center was a heinous crime, much more evil than the destruction of the Statue of Liberty would have been. And, yes, the World Trade Center was a much more appropriate symbol of al Qaeda's wrath than the Statue of Liberty would have been, but for that very reason it didn't mean as much, as a symbol, to us. It was Mammon and Plutocrats and Globalization, not Lady Liberty. I do suspect that the fury with which Americans would have responded to the unspeakable defilement of our cherished national symbol, the purest image of our aspirations as a democracy, would have made a sane and measured response extraordinarily difficult. This is the great danger of symbols — they can become too "sacred."”

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Daniel Dennett książka Odczarowanie

An important task for religious people of all faiths in the twenty-first century will be spreading the conviction that there are no acts more dishonorable than harming "infidels" of one stripe or another for "disrespecting" a flag, a cross, a holy text.
Breaking the Spell (2006)

“A neurosurgeon once told me about operating on the brain of a young man with epilepsy. As is customary in this kind of operation, the patient was wide awake, under only local anesthesia, while the surgeon delicately explored his exposed cortex, making sure that the parts tentatively to be removed were not absolutely vital by stimulating them electrically and asking the patient what he experienced. Some stimulations provoked visual flashes or hand-raisings, others a sort of buzzing sensation, but one spot produced a delighted response from the patient: "It's 'Outta Get Me' by Guns N'Roses, my favorite heavy metal [sic] band!"I asked the neurosurgeon if he had asked the patient to sing or hum along with the music, since it would be fascinating to learn how "high fidelity" the provoked memory was. Would it be in exactly the same key and tempo as the record? Such a song (unlike "Silent Night") has one canonical version, so we could simply have superimposed a recording of the patient's humming with the standard record and compare the results. Unfortunately, even though a tape recorder had been running during the operation, the surgeon hadn't asked the patient to sing along. "Why not?" I asked, and he replied: "I hate rock music!"Later in the conversation the neurosurgeon happened to remark that he was going to have to operate again on the same young man, and I expressed the hope that he would just check to see if he could restimulate the rock music, and this time ask the fellow to sing along. "I can't do that," replied the neurosurgeon, "since I cut out that part." "It was part of the epileptic focus?"”

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Daniel Dennett książka Consciousness Explained

I asked, and he replied, "No, I already told you — I hate rock music."</p>
Źródło: Consciousness Explained (1991), p. 58-59

“If I were designing a phony religion, I'd surely include a version of this little gem — but I'd have a hard time saying it with a straight face:If anybody ever raises questions of objections about our religion that you cannot answer, that person is almost certainly Satan. In fact, the more reasonable the person is, the more eager to engage you in open-minded and congenial discussion, the more sure you can be that you're talking to Satan in disguise! Turn away! Do not listen! It's a trap!What is particularly cute about this trick is that it is a perfect "wild card," so lacking in content that any sect or creed or conspiracy can use it effectively. Communist cells can be warned that any criticism they encounter is almost sure to be the work of FBI infiltrators in disguise, and radical feminist discussion groups can squelch any unanswerable criticism by declaring it to be phallocentric propaganda being unwittingly spread by a brainwashed dupe of the evil patriarchy, and so forth. This all-purpose loyalty-enforcer is paranoia in a pill, sure to keep the critics muted if not silent.Did anyone invent this brilliant adaptation, or is it a wild meme that domesticated itself by attaching itself to whatever memes were competing for hosts in its neighborhood? Nobody knows, but now it is available for anybody to use — although, if this book has any success, its virulence should diminish as people begin to recognize it for what it is.”

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Daniel Dennett książka Odczarowanie

Breaking the Spell (2006)

“[W]hat good to us is the gods' knowledge if we can't get it from them? How could one communicate with the gods? Our ancestors (while they were alive!) stumbled on an extremely ingenious solution: divination.

We all know how hard it is to make the major decisions of life: should I hang tough or admit my transgression, should I move or stay in my present position, should I go to war or not, should I follow my heart or my head? We still haven't figured out any satisfactory systematic way of deciding these things. Anything that can relieve the burden of figuring out how to make these hard calls is bound to be an attractive idea.

Consider flipping a coin, for instance. Why do we do it? To take away the burden of having to find a reason for choosing A over B. We like to have reasons for what we do, but sometimes nothing sufficiently persuasive comes to mind, and we recognize that we have to decide soon, so we concoct a little gadget, an external thing that will make the decision for us. But if the decision is about something momentous, like whether to go to war, or marry, or confess, anything like flipping a coin would be just too, well, flippant.

In such a case, choosing for no good reason would be too obviously a sign of incompetence, and, besides, if the decision is really that important, once the coin has landed you'll have to confront the further choice: should you honor your just-avowed commitment to be bound by the flip of the coin, or should you reconsider? Faced with such quandaries, we recognize the need for some treatment stronger than a coin flip. Something more ceremonial, more impressive, like divination, which not only tells you what to do, but gives you a reason (if you squint just right and use your imagination).

Scholars have uncovered a comically variegated profusion of ancient ways of delegating important decisions to uncontrollable externalities. Instead of flipping a coin, you can flip arrows (belomancy) or rods (rhabdomancy) or bones or cards (sortilege), and instead of looking at tea leaves (tasseography), you can examine the livers of sacrificed animals (hepatoscopy) or other entrails (haruspicy) or melted wax poured into water (ceroscopy). Then there is moleosophy (divination by blemishes), myomancy (divination by rodent behavior), nephomancy (divination by clouds), and of course the old favorites, numerology and astrology, among dozens of others.”

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Daniel Dennett książka Odczarowanie

Breaking the Spell (2006)

“I have grown accustomed to the disrespect expressed by some of the participants for their colleagues in the other disciplines. "Why, Dan," ask the people in artificial intelligence, "do you waste your time conferring with those neuroscientists? They wave their hands about 'information processing' and worry about where it happens, and which neurotransmitters are involved, but they haven't a clue about the computational requirements of higher cognitive functions." "Why," ask the neuroscientists, "do you waste your time on the fantasies of artificial intelligence? They just invent whatever machinery they want, and say unpardonably ignorant things about the brain." The cognitive psychologists, meanwhile, are accused of concocting models with neither biological plausibility nor proven computational powers; the anthropologists wouldn't know a model if they saw one, and the philosophers, as we all know, just take in each other's laundry, warning about confusions they themselves have created, in an arena bereft of both data and empirically testable theories. With so many idiots working on the problem, no wonder consciousness is still a mystery. All these charges are true, and more besides, but I have yet to encounter any idiots. Mostly the theorists I have drawn from strike me as very smart people – even brilliant people, with the arrogance and impatience that often comes with brilliance – but with limited perspectives and agendas, trying to make progress on the hard problems by taking whatever shortcuts they can see, while deploring other people's shortcuts. No one can keep all the problems and details clear, including me, and everyone has to mumble, guess and handwave about large parts of the problem.”

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Daniel Dennett książka Consciousness Explained

Consciousness Explained (1991)

“In a Thumbnail Sketch here is [the Multiple Drafts theory of consciousness] so far:There is no single, definitive "stream of consciousness," because there is no central Headquarters, no Cartesian Theatre where "it all comes together" for the perusal of a Central Meaner. Instead of such a single stream (however wide), there are multiple channels in which specialist circuits try, in parallel pandemoniums, to do their various things, creating Multiple Drafts as they go. Most of these fragmentary drafts of "narrative" play short-lived roles in the modulation of current activity but some get promoted to further functional roles, in swift succession, by the activity of a virtual machine in the brain. The seriality of this machine (its "von Neumannesque" character) is not a "hard-wired" design feature, but rather the upshot of a succession of coalitions of these specialists.The basic specialists are part of our animal heritage. They were not developed to perform peculiarly human actions, such as reading and writing, but ducking, predator-avoiding, face-recognizing, grasping, throwing, berry-picking, and other essential tasks. They are often opportunistically enlisted in new roles, for which their talents may more or less suit them. The result is not bedlam only because the trends that are imposed on all this activity are themselves part of the design. Some of this design is innate, and is shared with other animals. But it is augmented, and sometimes even overwhelmed in importance, by microhabits of thought that are developed in the individual, partly idiosyncratic results of self-exploration and partly the predesigned gifts of culture. Thousands of memes, mostly borne by language, but also by wordless "images" and other data structures, take up residence in an individual brain, shaping its tendencies and thereby turning it into a mind.”

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Daniel Dennett książka Consciousness Explained

Źródło: Consciousness Explained (1991), p. 253–4.

“Biology is Engineering”

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Daniel Dennett książka Darwin's Dangerous Idea

Darwin's Dangerous Idea (1995)

“Evolution is all about processes that almost never happen.”

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Daniel Dennett książka Odczarowanie

Every birth in every lineage is a potential speciation event, but speciation almost never happens, not once in a million births. Mutation in DNA almost never happens — not once in a trillion copings — but evolution depends on it. Take the set of infrequent accidents — things that almost never happen — and sort them into the happy accidents, the neutral accidents, and the fatal accidents; amplify the effects of the happy accidents — which happens automatically when you have replication and competition — and you get evolution.
Breaking the Spell (2006)

“It is commonly observed — but not commonly enough!”

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Daniel Dennett

that old folks removed from their homes to hospital settings are put at a tremendous disadvantage, even though their basic bodily needs are well provided for. They often appear to be quite demented — to be utterly incapable of feeding, clothing, and washing themselves, let alone engaging in any activities of greater interest. Often, however, if they are returned to their homes, they can manage quite well for themselves. How do they do this? Over the years, they have loaded their home environments with ultrafamiliar landmarks, triggers for habits, reminder of what to do, where to find the food, how to get dressed, where the telephone is, and so forth. An old person can be a veritable virtuoso of self-help in such a hugely overlearned world, in spite of his or her brain's increasing imperviousness to new bouts of learning... Taking them out of their homes is literally separating them from large parts of their minds — potentially just as devastating a development as undergoing brain surgery.
Kinds of Minds (1996)