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.
Daniel DennettRead
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.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote suggests that despite advancements in technology and understanding of the mind, there will always be individuals who believe human consciousness and thought are beyond scientific explanation.
In this quote, Daniel Dennett reflects on the ongoing resistance against the idea that human thought processes can be fully understood or replicated by machines. He suggests that even as we achieve greater scientific advancements and see machines matching or exceeding human intellect, there will persist a belief in the uniquely mysterious nature of the human mind that may resist scientific analysis. This speaks to a broader philosophical debate about the nature of consciousness and the limits of scientific explanation.
Themes
DarwinianThinkingHuman MindScienceConsciousness
In practice
Example use cases
During a lecture on the philosophy of mind, this quote can illustrate the ongoing debate about consciousness.
More from Daniel Dennett
All quotes →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.
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Words have a genealogy and it's easier to trace the evolution of a single word than the evolution of a language.
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The secret of happiness is: Find something more important than you are and dedicate your life to it.
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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.
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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.
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