Daniel Dennett |
An old joke about behaviorists is that they don't believe in beliefs, they think that nothing can think, and in their opinion nobody has opinions.
I am a philosopher, not a scientist, and we philosophers are better at questions than answers.
One of the surprising discoveries of modern psychology is how easy it is to be ignorant of your own ignorance.
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 going back millions of generations, and those winners were, in every generation, the luckiest of the lucky, one out of a thousand or even a million. So however unlucky you may be on some occasion today, your presence on the planet testifies to the role luck has played in your past.
The more we learn about what we are, the more options we will discern about what to try to become.
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. Making mistakes is the key to making progress.
The history of philosophy is in large measure the history of very smart people making very tempting mistakes, and if you don`t know the history, you are doomed to making the same darn mistakes all over again.
Evolution is all about processes that almost never happen. 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 copyings - 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.
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!"
Animals are not just herbivores or carnivores. They are, in the nice coinage of the psychologist George Miller, informavores.