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
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.
Interpretation
The quote highlights humanity's innate desire for knowledge and understanding in an uncertain world.
Daniel Dennett emphasizes that humans are evolutionarily equipped to seek information and understanding about the world around us. This quest for knowledge is driven by our subjective experiences and the need to make informed decisions about an unpredictable future, suggesting that our capacity for learning and inquiry is crucial for navigating life's uncertainties.
In practice
In a lecture on personal development, one might say, 'As Daniel Dennett reminds us, our quest for information shapes our future.'
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.
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.
Words have a genealogy and it's easier to trace the evolution of a single word than the evolution of a language.
The secret of happiness is: Find something more important than you are and dedicate your life to it.
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.
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.
How do you know that you are not part of a book? That someone's not reading your story right now?
Yet I also suspected that what I was seeing was but a part of the truth and perhaps not even the most important part; beneath these faces, these clothes, accents, rudenesses, was power and sorrow, both unadmitted, unrealized, the power of inventors, the sorrow of the disconnected.
Although gold and silver are not by nature money, money is by nature gold and silver.
It is a principle incorporated into the settled policy of America, that as peace is better than war, war is better than tribute.
The only people who live in a post-black world are four people who live in a little white house on Pennsylvania Avenue. The idea that America is post-racial or post-black because a man I admire, Barack Obama, is president of the United States, is a joke. And I hope no one will even wonder about this crazy fiction again.
Life itself is but the shadow of death, and souls departed but the shadows of the living.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.