Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ

“But recently I have learned from discussions with a variety of scientists and other non-philosophers (e.g., the scientists participating with me in the Sean Carroll workshop on the future of naturalism) that they lean the other way: free will, in their view, is obviously incompatible with naturalism, with determinism, and very likely incoherent against any background, so they cheerfully insist that of course they don't have free will, couldn’t have free will, but so what? It has nothing to do with morality or the meaning of life. Their advice to me at the symposium was simple: recast my pressing question as whether naturalism (materialism, determinism, science...) has any implications for what we may call moral competence. For instance, does neuroscience show that we cannot be responsible for our choices, cannot justifiably be praised or blamed, rewarded or punished? Abandon the term 'free will' to the libertarians and other incompatibilists, who can pursue their fantasies untroubled. Note that this is not a dismissal of the important issues; it’s a proposal about which camp gets to use, and define, the term. I am beginning to appreciate the benefits of discarding the term 'free will' altogether, but that course too involves a lot of heavy lifting, if one is to avoid being misunderstood.”
― Daniel C. Dennett, Consciousness Explained

“Philosophers' Syndrome: mistaking a failure of the imagination for an insight into necessity.”
― Daniel C. Dennett, Consciousness Explained

“Our fundamental tactic of self-protection, self-control, and self-definition is not spinning webs or building dams, but telling stories, and more particularly connecting and controlling the story we tell others - and ourselves - about who we are.”
― Daniel C. Dennett, Consciousness Explained

“There is a species of primate in South America more gregarious than most other mammals, with a curious behavior.The members of this species often gather in groups, large and small, and in the course of their mutual chattering , under a wide variety of circumstances, they are induced to engage in bouts of involuntary, convulsive respiration, a sort of loud, helpless, mutually reinforcing group panting that sometimes is so severe as to incapacitate them. Far from being aversive,however, these attacks seem to be sought out by most members of the species, some of whom even appear to be addicted to them.

...the species in Homo sapiens (which does indeed inhabit South America, among other places), and the behavior is laughter.”
― Daniel C. Dennett, Consciousness Explained

“This 'web of discourses' as Robyn called it...is as much a biological product as any of the other constructions to be found in the animal world. (Clothes too, are part of the extended phenotype of Homo Sapiens almost every niche inhabited by that species.An illustrated encyclopedia of zoology should no more picture Homo Sapiens naked than it should picture Ursus arctus-the black bear- wearing a clown suit and riding a bicycle.”
― Daniel C. Dennett, Consciousness Explained

“Conscious human minds are more-or-less serial virtual machines implemented—inefficiently—on the parallel hardware that evolution has provided for us.”
― Daniel C. Dennett, Consciousness Explained

“But as Descartes observed, even an infinitely powerful evil demon couldn’t trick him into thinking he himself existed if he didn’t exist: cogito ergo sum, “I think, therefore I am.”
― Daniel C. Dennett, Consciousness Explained

“The amount of information obtainable in short order by an inquisitive human being is staggeringly large.”
― Daniel C. Dennett, Consciousness Explained

“The very fact that we should so much like to say: ‘This is the important thing’—while we point privately to the sensation—is enough to shew how much we are inclined to say something which gives no information.â€� Wittgenstein (1953), i298.”
― Daniel C. Dennett, Consciousness Explained

“one part of the environment that matters to us is our belief environment.”
― Daniel C. Dennett, Consciousness Explained

“understanding could be a property that emerges from lots of distributed quasi-understanding in a large system.”
― Daniel C. Dennett, Consciousness Explained

“Because people don’t actually imagine the case in the detail that it requires.”
― Daniel C. Dennett, Consciousness Explained

“Since my friend found it hard to imagine how a robot could be conscious, he was reluctant to imagine a robot to be conscious—though he could easily have done so. There is all the difference in the world between these two feats of imagination, but people tend to confuse them.”
― Daniel C. Dennett, Consciousness Explained

“There is no Cartesian Theater; there are just Multiple Drafts composed by processes of content fixation playing various semi-independent roles in the brain’s larger economy of controlling a human body’s journey through life. The astonishingly persistent conviction that there is a Cartesian Theater is the result of a variety of cognitive illusions that have now been exposed and explained. “Qualiaâ€� have been replaced by complex dispositional states of the brain, and the self (otherwise known as the Audience in the Cartesian Theater, the Central Meaner, or the Witness) turns out to be a valuable abstraction, a theorist’s fiction rather than an internal observer or boss.”
― Daniel C. Dennett, Consciousness Explained

“The only “momentumâ€� that accrues to the trajectory of a self, or a club, is the stability imparted to it by the web of beliefs that constitute it, and when those beliefs lapse, it lapses, either permanently or temporarily.”
― Daniel C. Dennett, Consciousness Explained

“selves are not independently existing soul-pearls, but artifacts of the social processes that create us, and, like other such artifacts, subject to sudden shifts in status.”
― Daniel C. Dennett, Consciousness Explained

“when we let in these words, these meme-vehicles, they tend to take over, creating us out of the raw materials they find in our brains.”
― Daniel C. Dennett, Consciousness Explained

“My existence is explained by the fact that there are these capacities in this body.”
― Daniel C. Dennett, Consciousness Explained

“not only because we simply like to become informed but because we like the particular ways we come to be informed.”
― Daniel C. Dennett, Consciousness Explained

“Paradoxically, our sense of continuity comes from our marvelous insensitivity to most kinds of changes rather than from any genuine perceptiveness”
― Daniel C. Dennett, Consciousness Explained

“The discontinuity of consciousness is striking because of the apparent continuity of consciousness.”
― Daniel C. Dennett, Consciousness Explained

“One of the most striking features of consciousness is its discontinuity”
― Daniel C. Dennett, Consciousness Explained

“The fundamental flaw in the idea of “filling inâ€� is that it suggests that the brain is providing something when in fact the brain is ignoring something.”
― Daniel C. Dennett, Consciousness Explained

“my episodic thought that this is how it is with me.”
― Daniel C. Dennett, Consciousness Explained

“The price one pays for making certain things “easy to sayâ€� is making other things “hard to sayâ€� or even impossible.”
― Daniel C. Dennett, Consciousness Explained

“language isn’t something we invented but something we became, not something we constructed but something in which we created, and recreated, ourselves.”
― Daniel C. Dennett, Consciousness Explained

“in a distributed, asynchronous, multilevel fashion.”
― Daniel C. Dennett, Consciousness Explained

“The evidence to date supports the view that we use a mixed strategy, getting some of the benefits of visual analysis of arrays, but also incorporating shortcut labels, telling without showing.”
― Daniel C. Dennett, Consciousness Explained

“Thus the issue for the standard computer is how to be interrupted, whereas the issue for Soar and ACT* (and presumably for human cognition) is how to keep focused”
― Daniel C. Dennett, Consciousness Explained

“the philosophers, as we all know, just take in each other’s laundry, warning about confusions they themselves have created,”
― Daniel C. Dennett, Consciousness Explained