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.
When you are Real, shabbiness doesn't matter.
Do not fix hopes on your health, and do not laugh away life. Remember how they walked and now all their joints lie separately, and the tongue with which they talked lightly is eaten away by the worms
I am free, no matter what rules surround me. If I find them tolerable, I tolerate them; if I find them too obnoxious, I break them.
In ancient, prehistoric times, the temples of the spirit were outwardly visible, but today, when our life has become so unspiritual, they no longer exist where we can see them with our physical eyes. Yet spiritually they are still present everywhere, and whoever seeks can find them.
We only confess our little faults to persuade people that we have no big ones.
Two or three angels Came near to the earth. They saw a fat church. Little black streams of people Came and went in continually. And the angels were puzzled To know why the people went thus, And why they stayed so long within.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.