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
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!
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote illustrates the idea of adaptation and the loss of unnecessary traits over time.
Daniel Dennett uses the juvenile sea squirt's journey and eventual loss of its brain after finding a suitable home as a metaphor for evolution and the idea that living beings often shed traits that are no longer useful for their survival. This quote highlights the nature of growth and the transformations that life undergoes, suggesting that sometimes, in the pursuit of stability and security, we may discard parts of ourselves that were once vital for navigating the world.
Themes
EvolutionAdaptationTransformationGrowthSurvival
In practice
Example use cases
In a speech on personal growth, one might say, 'As Daniel Dennett noted, sometimes we must shed our old selves to truly thrive.'
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.
Daniel DennettRead
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.
Daniel DennettRead
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When we awake it is the animal, the plant, that thinks in us. Primitive thought without the least disguise. We see a terrible universe, because we see clearly. A little later, intelligence introduces its impeding contrivances. It brings the little toys which man invents in order to hide the void. It is then that we think we are seeing clearly. We attribute our uneasiness to the miasmas of the brain as it passes from dream to reality.
Jean CocteauRead