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Sometimes You Don’t Just Want To Risk Making Mistakes; You Actually Want To Make Them - If Only To Give You Something Clear And Detailed To Fix.
-Daniel Dennett
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Sometimes You Don’t Just

Daniel Dennett
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Sometimes You Don’t Just Want To Risk Making Mistakes; You Actually Want To Make Them - If Only To Give You Something Clear And Detailed To Fix.

Understanding the Quote: "sometimes you don’t just want to risk making mistakes; you actually want..."

This quote by Daniel Dennett reflects deeply on the theme of mistake. It connects to the universal human journey of purpose, motivation, and reflection. Often categorized under Mistake, Giving, Risk, the quote offers insight, emotional clarity, and intellectual inspiration to readers worldwide.

Whether you’re a student exploring new ideas, a leader trying to motivate your team, or someone seeking direction in life — this quote provides value. It resonates because it’s more than words — it’s a bridge between experience and wisdom. It shows how Daniel Dennett interprets life's core challenges and triumphs.

Lessons From the Quote

This quote teaches resilience and focus. It reminds readers that no matter where they stand in life, reflection and self-awareness lead to growth. Each word has meaning, and when studied, it becomes clear how impactful thoughtful language can be.

About Daniel Dennett

Daniel Dennett is celebrated for insightful thoughts on mistake and giving. Their legacy lives on through writings that guide, comfort, and inspire. Discover more on their profile page.

Actionable Takeaways

  • Reflect on how this quote applies to your current life path.
  • Share the message with someone who needs inspiration.
  • Write your thoughts on this quote in a journal or blog post.
  • Use it as a daily affirmation or reminder.

Closing Thoughts

Quotes like this endure because they capture universal truths. They comfort us in solitude and empower us in groups. Carry this quote forward — live by its wisdom, share its message, and keep its essence alive.

Views: 7871
Topic
Mistake
Giving
Risk
More From Daniel Dennett
Natural Selection Is Not Gene Centrist And Nor Is Biology All About Genes; Our Comprehending Minds Are A Result Of Our Fast Evolving Culture.
Mind
Culture
Biology
...but I Also Can't Prove That Mushrooms Could Not Be Intergalactic Spaceships Spying On Us.
Mushrooms
Religion
Spaceships
When People Ask Me What Philosophy Is, I Say Philosophy Is What You Do When You Don't Know What The Right Questions Are Yet. Once You Get The Questions Right, Then You Go Answer Them, And That's Typically Not Philosophy, That's One Science Or Another. Anywhere In Life Where You Find That People Aren't Quite Sure What The Right Questions To Ask Are, What They're Doing, Then, Is Philosophy.
Philosophy
People
Answers
Churches Have Given Us Great Treasures Such As Music And Architecture. Whether That Pays For The Harm They Have Done Is Another Matter.
Church
Done
Treasure
Love Is Blind, As They Say, And Because Love Is Blind, It Often Leads To Tragedy: To Conflicts In Which One Love Is Pitted Against Another Love, And Something Has To Give, With Suffering Guaranteed In Any Resolution.
Love Is
Giving
Suffering
In 50 Years - Or 20 Years, Or 200 Years - Our Current Epistemic Horizon (the Big Bang, Roughly) May Look As Parochial As The Horizon Newton Had To Settle For In His Day, But No Doubt There Will Still Be Good Questions Whose Answers Elude Us.
Elude Us
Years
Doubt
Highly Technical Philosophical Arguments Of The Sort Many Philosophers Favor Are Absent Here. That Is Because I Have A Prior Problem To Deal With. I Have Learned That Arguments, No Matter How Watertight, Often Fall On Deaf Ears. I Am Myself The Author Of Arguments That I Consider Rigorous And Unanswerable But That Are Often Not Such Much Rebutted Or Even Dismissed As Simply Ignored.
Fall
Philosophical
Atheism
What You Can Imagine Depends On What You Know. Philosophers Who Know Only Philosophy Consign Themselves To A Janitorial Role In The Great Enterprises Of Exploration That Are Illuminating The Mysteries Of Our Lives.
Philosophy
Roles
Philosopher
Wherever There Is A Design That Is Highly Successful In A Broad Range Of Similar Environments, It Is Apt To Emerge Again And Again, Independently - The Phenomenon Known In Biology As Convergent Evolution. I Call These Designs 'good Tricks.'
Successful
Design
Evolution
Those Who Feel Guilty Contemplating "betraying" The Tradition They Love By Acknowledging Their Disapproval Of Elements Within It Should Reflect On The Fact That The Very Tradition To Which They Are So Loyal—the "eternal" Tradition Introduced To Them In Their Youth—is In Fact The Evolved Product Of Many Adjustments Firmly But Delicately Made By Earlier Lovers Of The Same Tradition.
Elements
Loyal
Facts
I'm The Guy Who Reputedly Denies That People Experience Colors Or Pains, And Thinks That Thermostats Think — Just Ask My Critics.
Pain
Thinking
Color
I Don't Think The 9/11 Attacks Taught Us Anything We Didn't Already Know About Religion. It Has Long Been Obvious - Even To The Deeply Religious - That Religious Fanaticism Is An Extremely Dangerous Deranger Of Otherwise Sane And Goodhearted People.
Religious
Thinking
Taught Us
Consciousness Is Cerebral Celebrity--nothing More And Nothing Less. Those Contents Are Conscious That Persevere, That Monopolize Resources Long Enough To Achieve Certain Typical And "symptomatic" Effects--on Memory, On The Control Of Behavior And So Forth.
Memories
Long
Typical
In Order To Make A Perfect And Beautiful Machine, It Is Not Requisite To Know How To Make It. All The Works Of Human Genius Can Be Understood In The End To Be Products Of A Cascade Of Generate-and-test Procedures That Are, At Bottom, Algorithmic And Mindless.
Beautiful
Order
Perfect
Thanks To Technology, What Almost Anybody Can Do Has Been Multiplied A Thousandfold, And Our Moral Understanding About What We Ought To Do Hasn't Kept Pace.
Technology
Understanding
Pace
Human Freedom Is Not An Illusion; It Is An Objective Phenomenon, Distinct From All Other Biological Conditions And Found In Only One Species - Us.
Illusion
Found
Phenomenon
Darwin's Idea Of Natural Selection Makes People Uncomfortable Because It Reverses The Direction Of Tradition.
Ideas
People
Tradition
While We Tend To Conceive Of The Operations Of The Mind As Unified And Transparent, They're Actually Chaotic And Opaque. There's No Invisible Boss In The Brain, No Central Meaner, No Unitary Self In Command Of Our Activities And Utterances. There's No Internal Spectator Of A Cartesian Theater In Our Heads To Applaud The March Of Consciousness Across Its Stage.
Self
Boss
Brain
The Problem Is That No Ethical System Has Ever Achieved Consensus. Ethical Systems Are Completely Unlike Mathematics Or Science. This Is A Source Of Concern.
Problem
Ethical
Mathematics
You Can't Get Through Seminary And Come Out Believing In God!
Believe
Religion
Believe In God
The Way Evolution Always Discovers Reasons Is By Retroactive Endorsement.
Way
Evolution
Reason
If I Know Better Than You Know What I Am Up To, It Is Only Because I Spend More Time With Myself Than You Do.
Consciousness
More Time
Knows
The Only Answer To The Endless Chains Of Why, Why, Why Is That The Alternatives Died
Alternatives
Answers
Economics
I Listen To All These Complaints About Rudeness And Intemperateness, And The Opinion That I Come To Is That There Is No Polite Way Of Asking Somebody: Have You Considered The Possibility That Your Entire Life Has Been Devoted To A Delusion? But That’s A Good Question To Ask. Of Course We Should Ask That Question And Of Course It’s Going To Offend People. Tough.
People
Good Questions
Asking
Human Consciousness Is Just About The Last Surviving Mystery.
Lasts
Mystery
Consciousness
Life Itself Is Just A Thin Coat Of Paint On The Planet, And We Hold The Paintbrush.
Life
Coats
Paint
What You Can Imagine Depends On What You Know.
Inspirational
Imagine
Knows
In 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.
Cities
Killing
Members
I Think Religion For Many People Is Some Sort Of Moral Viagra.
Thinking
People
Viagra
Philosophers' Syndrome: Mistaking A Failure Of The Imagination For An Insight Into Necessity.
Philosophy
Imagination
Philosopher
Yes We Have A Soul But It's Made Of Lots Of Tiny Robots
Soul
Tiny
Robots
I Have Shown That Those Who Deplore Artificial Intelligence Are Also Those Who Deplore The Evolutionary Accounts Of Human Mentality: If Human Minds Are Non-miraculous Products Of Evolution, Then They Are, In The Requisite Sense, Artifacts, And All Their Powers Must Have An Ultimately Mechanical Explanation. We Are Descended From Macros And Made Of Macros, And Nothing We Can Do Is Beyond The Power Of Huge Assemblies Of Macros.
Mind
Evolution
Assembly
Cost Is Always An Object - The Second Law Of Thermodynamics Sees To That
Law
Cost
Economics
It Stands To Reason That We Love Chocolate Cake Because It Is Sweet. Guys Go For Girls Like This Because They Are Sexy. We Adore Babies Because They're So Cute. And, Of Course, We Are Amused By Jokes Because They Are Funny. This Is All Backwards. It Is. And Darwin Shows Us Why.
Cute
Girl
Sexy
Homunculi Are Bogeymen Only If They Duplicate Entire The Talents They Are Rung In To Explain. If One Can Get A Team Or Committee Of Relatively Ignorant, Narrow-minded, Blind Homunculi To Produce The Intelligent Behaviour Of The Whole, This Is Progress.
Team
Intelligent
Ignorant
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.
Dog
Commitment
Simple
The Earth Has Grown A Nervous System, And It's Us.
Earth
Nervous
Nervous System
I Don't Myself Need That Role For God. My View Is That Creation Itself, The Universe Itself, Is The Most Wonderful Thing Deserving Awe And Respect. And That Satisfies Me As My Substitute For God.
Views
Roles
Needs
Cults And Prophets Proclaiming The Imminent End Of The World Have Been With Us For Several Millennia, And It Has Been Another Sour Sort Of Fun To Ridicule Them The Morning After, When They Discover That Their Calculations Were A Little Off. But, Just As With Marxists, There Are Some Among Them Who Are Working Hard To "hasten The Inevitable," Not Merely Anticipating The End Days With Joy In Their Hearts, But Taking Political Action To Bring About The Conditions They Think Are The Prerequisites For That Occasion.
Morning
Fun
Heart
If The Best The Roboticists Can Hope For Is The Creation Of Some Crude, Cheesy, Second-rate, Artificial Consciousness, They Still Win.
Winning
Cheesy
Consciousness
The Task Of The Mind Is To Produce Future, As The Poet Paul Valery 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.
Past
Expectations
Mind
The Evidence For Evolution Pours In, Not Only From Geology, Paleontology, Biogeography, And Anatomy, But Of Course From Molecular Biology And Every Other Branch Of The Life Sciences.
Paleontology
Branches
Molecular Biology
Atheism, A Term Which Will, I'm Sure, Eventually Become As Unnecessary As Round-earthism.
Atheism
Unnecessary
Term
You Don't Get To Advertise All The Good That Your Religion Does Without First Scrupulously Subtracting All The Harm It Does And Considering Seriously The Question Of Whether Some Other Religion, Or No Religion At All, Does Better.
Atheist
Atheism
Doe
The Idea That God Is A Worthy Recipient Of Our Gratitude For The Blessings Of Life But Should Not Be Held Accountable For The Disasters Is A Transparently Disingenuous Innovation Of The Theologians.
Gratitude
Blessing
Ideas
Are Zombies Possible? They're Not Just Possible, They're Actual. We're All Zombies. Nobody Is Conscious — Not In The Systematically Mysterious Way That Supports Such Doctrines As Epiphenomenalism. *it Would Be An Act Of Desperate Intellectual Dishonesty To Quote This Assertion Out Of Context!
Support
Zombie
Intellectual
The Chief Trick To Making Good Mistakes Is Not To Hide Them-especially Not From Yourself.
Mistake
Chiefs
Tricks
Go Ahead And Believe In God , If You Like, But Don't Imagine That You Have Been Given Any Grounds For Such A Belief By Science.
Believe
Belief
Imagine
It's A No Win Situation. It's A Mug's Game. The Religions Have Contrived To Make It Impossible To Disagree With Them Critically Without Being Rude. They Play The Hurt Feelings Card At Every Opportunity.
Hurt
Winning
Opportunity
I Think That What One Can See From A Darwinian Account Is How The Addition Of Culture In Our Species Turns Us Into A Very Special Sort Of Animal, An Animal That Can Be A Moral Agent In A Way That No Other Animal Can Be.
Thinking
Animal
Special
It's This Expandable Capacity To Represent Reasons That We Have That Gives Us A Soul. But What's It Made Of? It's Made Of Neurons. It's Made Of Lots Of Tiny Robots. And We Can Actually Explain The Structure And Operation Of That Kind Of Soul, Whereas An Eternal, Immortal, Immaterial Soul Is Just A Metaphysical Rug Under Which You Sweep Your Embarrassment For Not Having Any Explanation.
Giving
Soul
Robots
There Are No Good Reasons To Believe In God.
Believe
Religion
Reason
There May Be Things That Are Completely Unknowable To Us, So We Must Be Careful Not To Treat The Limits Of Our Knowledge As Sure Guides To The Limit Of What There Is.
Knowledge
May
Limits
Religion Is Defined As Social Systems Whose Participants Avow A Supernatural Agent Or Agents Whose Approval Is To Be Sought.
Religion
Agents
Approval
The Juvenile Sea Squirt Wanders Through The Sea Searching For A Suitable Rock Or Hunk Of Coral To Cling To And Make Its Home For Life. For This Task, It Has A Rudimentary Nervous System. When It Finds Its Spot And Takes Root, It Doesn't Need Its Brain Anymore So It Eats It!
Home
Rocks
Sea
Some Of The Greatest, Most Revolutionary Advances In Science Have Been Given Their Initial Expression In Attractively Modest Terms, With No Fanfare.
Expression
Revolutionary
Given
True, You Don't Have To Be Religious To Be Crazy, But It Helps.
Religious
Atheist
Crazy
The Only Meaning Of Life Worth Caring About Is One That Can Withstand Our Best Efforts To Examine It.
Caring
Best Effort
Society
A Scholar Is Just A Library's Way Of Making Another Library.
Knowledge
Library
Way
We Should Get Used To The Idea That We'll Probably Never Be Able To Find - And Confirm - A Good Explanation Of The Ultimate Origin Of The Universe, Though I See No Reason To Believe That We Can't Press Much Further On This Question Than We Have Managed To Date.
Believe
Ideas
Able
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?
Dream
Appreciation
Pain
In Fact, If You Are Faced With The Prospect Of Running Across An Open Field In Which Lightning Bolts Are Going To Be A Problem, You Are Much Better Off If Their Timing And Location Are Determined By Something, Since Then They May Be Predictable By You, And Hence Avoidable. Determinism Is The Friend, Not The Foe, Of Those Who Dislike Inevitability.
Running
May
Fields
Human Consciousness Is Just About The Last Surviving Mystery... A Topic That Often Leaves Even The Most Sophisticated Thinkers Tongue-tied And Confused. And, As With All Of The Earlier Mysteries, There Are Many Who Insist - And Hope - That There Will Never Be A Demystification Of Consciousness.
Confused
Lasts
Tongue
The Theoretical Fruits Of Deliberate Oversimplification Through Idealization Are Not To Be Denied... Reality In All Its Messy Particularity Is Too Complicated To Theorize About, Taken Straight. The Issue Is, Rather (since Every Idealization Is A Strategic Choice), Which Idealizations Might Really Shed Some Light... Which Will Just Land Us... Diverting Fairy Tales.
Taken
Reality
Land
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.
Talking
Issues
Long
There Is No Reality Of Consciousness Independent Of The Effects Of Various Vehicles Of Content On Subsequent Action (and Hence, Of Course, On Memory).
Memories
Independent
Reality
Isn't It True That Whatever Isn't Determined By Our Genes Must Be Determined By Our Environment? What Else Is There? There's Nature And There's Nurture. Is There Also Some X, Some Further Contributor To What We Are? There's Chance. Luck. This Extra Ingredient Is Important But Doesn't Have To Come From The Quantum Bowels Of Our Atoms Or From Some Distant Star. It Is All Around Us In The Causeless Coin-flipping Of Our Noisy World, Automatically Filling In The Gaps Of Specification Left Unfixed By Our Genes, And Unfixed By Salient Causes In Our Environment.
Stars
Luck
Important
The Traditional View Of Purpose Says It Comes From On High, From God, From The Creator. Darwin's Idea Of Natural Selection Makes People Uncomfortable Because It Reverses The Direction Of Tradition. Whereas People Used To Think Of Meaning Coming From On High And Being Ordained From The Top Down, Now We Have Darwin Saying, "no, All Of This Design Can Happen, All Of This Purpose Can Emerge From The Bottom Up Without Any Direction At All."
Thinking
Views
Ideas
Most People In The West Who Say They Believe In God Actually Believe In Belief In God.
Believe
People
Atheism
There's No Polite Way To Say To Somebody (religious Followers) 'do You Realize You've Wasted Your Life?
Religious
Atheism
Followers
An Inert Historical Fact Is Any Fact About A Perfectly Ordinary Arrangement Of Matter In The World At Some Point In The Past That Is No Longer Discernible, A Fact That Has Left No Footprints At All In The World Today.
Past
Historical
Ordinary
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.
Decision
World
Quests
Minds Are In Limited Supply, And Each Mind Has A Limited Capacity For Memes, And Hence There Is Considerable Competition Among Memes For Entry In As Many Minds As Possible.
Competition
Mind
Capacity
I Think That There Are No Forces On This Planet More Dangerous To Us All Than The Fanaticisms Of Fundamentalism, Of All The Species: Protestantism, Catholicism, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, And Buddhism, As Well As Countless Smaller Infections. Is There A Conflict Between Science And Religion Here? There Most Certainly Is.
Buddhism
Thinking
Religion
There’s Simply No Polite Way To Tell People They’ve Dedicated Their Lives To An Illusion.
People
Way
Illusion
Words Are Memes That Can Be Pronounced.
Memes
No Matter How Smart You Are, You're Smarter If You Take The Easy Ways When They Are Available.
Smart
Effort
Matter
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.
Writing
People
Doubt
I Even Agree That The Concept Of God Helps Some People Lead Better Lives. That Does Happen. Don't Ever Forget It. I Just Think There Are Better Ways To Help People Lead Better Lives.
Thinking
People
Religion
Is He A Dread Genetic Determinist, Or A Dread Environmental Determinist? He Is Neither, Of Course, For Both These Species Of Bogeyman Are As Mythical As Werewolves. By Increasing The Information We Have About The Various Causes Of The Constraints That Limit Our Current Opportunities, He Has Increased Our Powers To Avoid What We Want To Avoid, Prevent What We Want To Prevent. Knowledge Of The Roles Of Our Genes, And The Genes Of The Other Species Around Us, Is Not The Enemy Of Human Freedom, But One Of Its Best Friends.
Opportunity
Enemy
Environmental
Keep Darwinian Thinking Out Of Cosmology, Out Of Psychology, Out Of Human Culture, Out Of Ethics, Politics, And Religion!
Thinking
Psychology
Religion
The Haven All Memes Depend On Reaching Is The Human Mind, But A Human Mind Is Itself An Artifact Created When Memes Restructure A Human Brain In Order To Make It A Better Habitat For Memes.
Order
Brain
Mind
Postmodernism, The School Of 'thought' That Proclaimed 'there Are No Truths, Only Interpretations' Has Largely Played Itself Out In Absurdity, But It Has Left Behind A Generation Of Academics In The Humanities Disabled By Their Distrust Of The Very Idea Of Truth And Their Disrespect For Evidence, Settling For 'conversations' In Which Nobody Is Wrong And Nothing Can Be Confirmed, Only Asserted With Whatever Style You Can Muster.
School
Ideas
Disrespect
There Is No Such Thing As Philosophy-free Science, Just Science That Has Been Conducted Without Any Consideration Of Its Underlying Philosophical Assumptions.
Honesty
Integrity
Philosophy
Religions Have Depended On The Relative Isolation And Ignorance Of Their Flocks, Forever And This Is All Breaking Down.
Ignorance
Forever
Religion
Problems In Science Are Sometimes Made Easier By Adding Complications.
Problem
Sometimes
Easier
In Short, We Need To Recover The Courage We Celebrate In Our Heroes, And In Particular, The Courage To Tolerate, For The Sake Of A Free Society, A Level Of Risk We Hardly Ever Imagined In The Past.
Hero
Past
Risk
I Should Emphasize This, To Keep Well-meaning But Misguided Multiculturalists At Bay: The Theoretical Entities In Which These Tribal People Frankly Believe — The Gods And Other Spirits — Don't Exist. These People Are Mistaken, And You Know It As Well As I Do. It Is Possible For Highly Intelligent People To Have A Very Useful But Mistaken Theory, And We Don't Have To Pretend Otherwise In Order To Show Respect For These People And Their Ways.
Believe
Intelligent
Order
I Don't Think There Is Any Religious Revival. I Think What We Are Hearing, The Furor, Is Merely The Hysterical Response Of The Churches The Handwriting On The Wall That They Are Seeing.
Religious
Wall
Thinking
True, You Don't Have To Be Religious To Be Crazy, But It Helps. Indeed, If You Are Religious, You Don't Have To Be Crazy In The Medically Certifiable Sense In Order To Do Massively Crazy Things.
Religious
Crazy
Order
There Are No Forces On This Planet More Dangerous To All Of Us Than The Fanaticisms Of Fundamentalism.
Religion
Atheism
Force
I Am Inclined To Think That Nothing Could Matter More Than What People Love. At Any Rate, I Can Think Of No Value That I Would Place Higher. I Would Not Want To Live In A World Without Love.
Love
Thinking
People
Up Till Now, We Can Suppose, Nervous Systems Solved The 'now What Do I Do?' Problem By A Relatively Simple Balancing Act Between A Strictly Limited Repertoire Of Actions - If Not The Famous Four F's (fight, Flee, Feed, Or Mate), Then A Modest Elaboration Of Them.
Fighting
Simple
Four
The Best Thing About Saying Thank Goodness In Place Of Thank God This That Here Really Are Lots Of Ways Of Repaying Your Debt Of Goodness - By Setting To Create More Of It, For The Benefit Of Those To Come.
Religion
Thank God
Debt
The Point Of Asking Questions Is To Find True Answers; The Point Of Measuring Is To Measure Accurately; The Point Of Making Maps Is To Find Your Way To Your Destination... In Short, The Goal Of Truth Goes Without Saying, In Every Human Culture.
Truth
Asking Questions
Goal
If You Can Approach The World's Complexities, Both Its Glories And Its Horrors, With An Attitude Of Humble Curiosity, Acknowledging That However Deeply You Have Seen, You Have Only Scratched The Surface, You Will Find Worlds Within Worlds, Beauties You Could Not Heretofore Imagine, And Your Own Mundane Preoccupations Will Shrink To Proper Size, Not All That Important In The Greater Scheme Of Things.
Beauty
Attitude
Humble
People Are Afraid Of Being More Ignorant Than Their Children―especially, Apparantly, Their Daughters.
Daughter
Children
People
If The History Of Resistance To Darwinian Thinking Is A Good Measure, We Can Expect That Long Into The Future, Long After Every Triumph Of Human Thought Has Been Matched Or Surpassed By 'mere Machines,' There Will Still Be Thinkers Who Insist That The Human Mind Works In Mysterious Ways That No Science Can Comprehend.
Thinking
Long
Mind
The Mind Is The Effect, Not The Cause.
Mind
Causes
Effects
Now That Mobile Phones And The Internet Have Altered The Epistemic Selective Landscape In A Revolutionary Way, Every Religious Organisation Must Scramble To Evolve Defences Or Become Extinct.
Religious
Phones
Way
It Is Not So Much That We, Using Our Brains, Spin Our Yarns, As That Our Brains, Using Yarns, Spin Us.
Humility
Yarn
Brain
I Look Around The World And See So Many Wonderful Things That I Love And Enjoy And Benefit From, Whether It's Art Or Music Or Clothing Or Food And All The Rest. And I'd Like To Add A Little To That Goodness.
Atheist
Art
Atheism
The Chief Trick To Making Good Mistakes Is Not To Hide Them - Especially Not From Yourself. Instead Of Turning Away In Denial When You Make A Mistake, You Should Become A Connoisseur Of Your Own Mistakes, Turning Them Over In Your Mind As If They Were Works Of Art, Which In A Way They Are.
Art
Mistake
Mind
How Good Are The Best Musical Imaginations? Can A Trained Musician, Swiftly Reading A Score Tell Just How That Voicing Of Dissonant Oboes And Flutes Over The Massed Strings Will Sound?
Music
Reading
Imagination
We Have Had Plenty Of Atheist Presidents; They Just Wouldn't Admit It.
Atheist
Religion
President
Some Cultural Phenomena Bear A Striking Resemblance To The Cells Of Cell Biology, Actively Preserving Themselves In Their Social Environments, Finding The Nutrients They Need And Fending Off The Causes Of Their Dissolution.
Cells
Bears
Needs
After Darwin, God's Role Changes From Being The Designer Of All Creatures Great And Small To Being The Designer Of The Laws Of Nature, From Which Natural Selection Can Unfold, To Being Perhaps Just The Chooser Of The Laws. By The Time God's Role Has Been So Diminished, He Becomes A Bit Like A Constitutional Monarch, Presiding Ceremonially But Not Having Any More Work To Do. That's A Place For God If It Makes People Comfortable To Keep God As The Presider Over The Universe. I Suppose That Is Satisfying For Many.
Law
People
Roles
Not A Single One Of The Cells That Compose You Knows Who You Are, Or Cares.
Cells
Care
Knows
People Ache To Believe That We Human Beings Are Vastly Different From All Other Species - And They Are Right! We Are Different. We Are The Only Species That Has An Extra Medium Of Design Preservation And Design Communication: Culture.
Believe
Communication
People
Ai Makes Philosophy Honest
Philosophy
Honest
There Is No Polite Way To Suggest To Someone That They Have Devoted Their Life To A Folly.
Way
Polite
Folly
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.
Stupid
Worst Enemy
Self
In The Beginning, There Were No Reasons; There Were Only Causes. Nothing Had A Purpose, Nothing Has So Much As A Function; There Was No Teleology In The World At All.
Religion
Purpose
World
Let Me Lay My Cards On The Table. If I Were To Give An Award For The Single Best Idea Anyone Ever Had, I'd Give It To Darwin, Ahead Of Even Newton Or Einstein And Everyone Else. In A Single Stroke, The Idea Of Evolution By Natural Selection Unifies The Realm Of Life, Meaning, And Purpose With The Realm Of Space And Time, Cause And Effect, Mechanism And Physical Law. It Is Not Just A Wonderful Idea. It Is A Dangerous Idea.
Ideas
Space
Awards
Reasons For Declaring Belief Is Not Are Not The Same As Reasons For Believing In God.
Believe
Religion
Belief
I Think Many People Are Terribly Afraid Of Being Demoted By The Darwinian Scheme From The Role Of Authors And Creators In Their Own Right Into Being Just Places Where Things Happen In The Universe.
Thinking
People
Roles
My Faith In The Expertise Of Physicists Like Richard Feynman, For Instance, Permits Me To Endorse—and, If It Comes To It, Bet Heavily On The Truth Of—a Proposition That I Don't Understand. So Far, My Faith Is Not Unlike Religious Faith, But I Am Not In The Slightest Bit Motivated To Go To My Death Rather Than Recant The Formulas Of Physics. Watch: E Doesn't Equal Mc2, It Doesn't, It Doesn't! I Was Lying, So There!
Religious
Lying
Richard Feynman
Every Living Thing Is, From The Cosmic Perspective, Incredibly Lucky Simply To Be Alive. Most, 90 Percent And More, Of All The Organisms That Have Ever Lived Have Died Without Viable Offspring, But Not A Single One Of Your Ancestors, Going Back To The Dawn Of Life On Earth, Suffered That Normal Misfortune. You Spring From An Unbroken Line Of Winners.
Life
Spring
Perspective
Virtually Every Major Technological Advance In The History Of The Human Species- Back To The Invention Of Stone Tools And The Domestication Of Fire Has Been Ethically Ambiguous. If You Want To Reason About Faith, And Offer A Reasoned (and Reason Responsive) Defense Of Faith As An Extra Category Of Belief Worthy Of Special Consideration, I'm Eager To Play. I Certainly Grant The Existence Of The Phenomenon Of Faith; What I Want To See Is A Reasoned Ground For Taking Faith Seriously As A Way Of Getting To The Truth , And Not, Say, Just As A Way People Comfort Themselves And Each Other
Play
Fire
People
I Am Confident That Those Who Believe In Belief Are Wrong. That Is, We No More Need To Preserve The Myth Of God In Order To Preserve A Just And Stable Society Than We Needed To Cling To The Gold Standard To Keep Our Currency Sound. It Was A Useful Crutch, But We've Outgrown It. Denmark, According To A Recent Study, Is The Sanest, Healthiest, Happiest, Most Crime-free Nation In The World, And By And Large The Danes Simply Ignore The God Issue. We Should Certainly Hope That Those Who Believe In Belief Are Wrong, Because Belief Is Waning Fast, And The Props Are Beginning To Buckle.
Faith
Believe
Order
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.
Children
Growing Up
Scary
Whereas Religions May Serve A Benign Purpose By Letting Many People Feel Comfortable With The Level Of Morality They Themselves Can Attain, No Religion Holds Its Member To The High Standards Of Moral Responsibility That The Secular World Of Science And Medicine Does!
Responsibility
Medicine
People
A Child Raised On A Desert Island, Alone, Without Social Interaction, Without Language, And Thus Lacking Empathy, Is Still A Sentient Being.
Children
Islands
Empathy
The Secret Of Happiness Is: Find Something More Important Than You Are And Dedicate Your Life To It.
Motivation
Inspiration
Secret
Has It Ever Occurred To You How Lucky You Are To Be Alive? More Than 99 Percent Of All The Creatures That Have Ever Lived Have Died Without Progeny, But Not A Single One Of Your Ancestors Falls Into That Group! ... Not A Single One Of Your Ancestors, All The Way Back To The Bacteria, Succumbed To Predation Before Reproducing, Or Lost Out In The Competition For A Mate.
Fall
Competition
Atheism
Imagination Is Cheap As Long As You Don't Have To Worry About The Details.
Long
Imagination
Worry
... There Could Be Talking Bunny Rabbits, Spiders Who Write English Messages In Their Webs, And For That Matter, Melancholy Choo-choo Trains. There Could Be, I Suppose, But There Aren't-so My Theory Doesn't Have To Explain Them.
Writing
Talking
Religion
If I Were To Give A Prize For The Single Best Idea Anybody Ever Had, I'd Give It To Darwin For The Idea Of Natural Selection - Ahead Of Newton, Ahead Of Einstein - Because His Idea Unites The Two Most Disparate Features Of Our Universe: The World Of Purposeless, Meaningless Matter And Motion, Particles Jostling On The One Side, And The World Of Meaning And Purpose, Design On The Other.
Ideas
Two
Giving
Sometimes You Don’t Just Want To Risk Making Mistakes; You Actually Want To Make Them - If Only To Give You Something Clear And Detailed To Fix.
Mistake
Giving
Risk
There Is A Time For Politeness And There Is A Time When You Are Obliged To Be Rude.
Rude
Politeness
Obliged
Try To Acquire The Weird Practice Of Savoring Your Mistakes, Delighting In Uncovering The Strange Quirks That Led You Astray. Then, When You Have Sucked Out All The Goodness To Be Gained From Having Made Them, You Can Cheerfully Forget Them And Go On To The Next Big Opportunity.
Mistake
Opportunity
Practice
For More Than A Century, People Have Often Thought That The Conclusion To Draw From Darwin's Vision Is That Homo Sapiens, Our Species - And We're Just Animals Too, We're Just Mammals - That There Is Nothing Morally Special About Us. I Myself Don't Think This Follows At All From Darwin's Vision, But It Is Certainly The Received View In Many Quarters.
Animal
Thinking
Views
I Am A Philosopher, Not A Scientist, And We Philosophers Are Better At Questions Than Answers.
Answers
Philosopher
Scientist
In The Long Run I Certainly Hope Information Is The Cure For Fanaticism, But I Am Afraid Information Is More The Cause Than The Cure.
Running
Long
Information
The Kindly God Who Lovingly Fashioned Each And Every One Of Us And Sprinkled The Sky With Shining Stars For Our Delight - That God Is, Like Santa Claus, A Myth Of Childhood, Not Anything [that] A Sane, Undeluded Adult Could Literally Believe In. That God Must Either Be Turned Into A Symbol For Something Less Concrete Or Abandoned Altogether.
Stars
Believe
Sky
If Nobody Cares, Then It Doesn't Matter What Happens To Flowers.
Flower
Care
Matter
Moreover, The Eye Contains A Big Flaw: The Retina Is Inside Out. Why Would An Almighty Designer Do Such A Thing? No Intelligent Designer, .. Would Put Such A Clumsy Arrangement In A Camcorder, And This Is Just One Of The Hundreds Of Accidents Frozen In Evolutionary History That Confirm The Mindlessness Of The Historical Process.
Eye
Intelligent
Historical
Words Have A Genealogy And It's Easier To Trace The Evolution Of A Single Word Than The Evolution Of A Language.
Evolution
Language
Genealogy
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Category
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