“The task of the mind is to produce future, as the poet Paul Valéry once put it. A mind is fundamentally an anticipator, an expectation-generator. It mines the present for clues, which it refines with the help of the materials it has saved from the past, turning them into anticipations of the future. And then it acts, rationally, on the basis of those hard-won anticipations.”

Kinds of Minds (1996)

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "The task of the mind is to produce future, as the poet Paul Valéry once put it. A mind is fundamentally an anticipator,…" by Daniel Dennett?
Daniel Dennett photo
Daniel Dennett 86
American philosopher 1942

Related quotes

Prevale photo

“Avoid the past, live the present, anticipate the future.”

Prevale (1983) Italian DJ and producer

Original: (it) Evita il passato, vivi il presente, anticipa il futuro.
Source: prevale.net

Richard Brinsley Sheridan photo
Paramahansa Yogananda photo
Oliver Lodge photo

“Our memories are thronged with the past; our anticipations range over the future; and it is in the past and the future that we really live. It is so even with the higher animals: they too order their lives by memory and anticipation.”

Oliver Lodge (1851–1940) British physicist

Raymond, p. 312 https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=loc.ark:/13960/t80k3mq4s;view=1up;seq=354
Raymond, or Life and Death (1916)

Robin Hobb photo
Sri Sri Ravi Shankar photo
Eckhart Tolle photo
Richard Francis Burton photo

“Thus he seeks to discover a system which will prove them all right, and all wrong; which will reconcile their differences; will unite past creeds; will account for the present, and will anticipate the future with a continuous and uninterrupted development; this, too, by a process, not negative and distinctive, but, on the contrary, intensely positive and constructive.”

Richard Francis Burton (1821–1890) British explorer, geographer, translator, writer, soldier, orientalist, cartographer, ethnologist, spy, lin…

The Kasîdah of Hâjî Abdû El-Yezdî (1870), Note I : Hâjî Abdû, The Man
Context: He looks with impartial eye upon the endless variety of systems, maintained with equal confidence and self-sufficiency, by men of equal ability and honesty. He is weary of wandering over the world, and of finding every petty race wedded to its own opinions; claiming the monopoly of Truth; holding all others to be in error, and raising disputes whose violence, acerbity and virulence are in inverse ratio to the importance of the disputed matter. A peculiarly active and acute observation taught him that many of these jarring families, especially those of the same blood, are par in the intellectual processes of perception and reflection; that in the business of the visible working world they are confessedly by no means superior to one another; whereas in abstruse matters of mere Faith, not admitting direct and sensual evidence, one in a hundred will claim to be right, and immodestly charge the other ninety-nine with being wrong.
Thus he seeks to discover a system which will prove them all right, and all wrong; which will reconcile their differences; will unite past creeds; will account for the present, and will anticipate the future with a continuous and uninterrupted development; this, too, by a process, not negative and distinctive, but, on the contrary, intensely positive and constructive. I am not called upon to sit in the seat of judgment; but I may say that it would be singular if the attempt succeeded. Such a system would be all-comprehensive, because not limited by space, time, or race; its principle would be extensive as Matter itself, and, consequently, eternal. Meanwhile he satisfies himself, — the main point.

Sun Tzu photo
Benjamin Disraeli photo

“What we anticipate seldom occurs; what we least expected generally happens.”

Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881) British Conservative politician, writer, aristocrat and Prime Minister

Book 2, chapter 4. Compare: "I say the very things that make the greatest Stir / An' the most interestin' things, are things that did n't occur", Sam Walter Foss, Things that did n't occur.
Books, Coningsby (1844), Henrietta Temple (1837)

Related topics