38 quotes
It is now quite clear that there is no single point in the brain where all information funnels in, and this fact has some far from obvious consequences.
Time and the observer (1995)
When a portion of the world comes in this way to compose a skein of narratives, that portion of the world is an observer. That is what it is for there to be an observer in the world, a something it is like something to be.
Consciousness Explained (1991)
[T]he only meaning of life worth caring about is one that can withstand our best efforts to examine it.
Darwin's Dangerous Idea (1995)
Experience teaches...that there is no such thing as a thought experiment so clearly presented that no philosopher can misinterpret it...
Darwin's Dangerous Idea (1995)
Philosophy — in every field of inquiry — is what you have to do until you figure out what questions you should have been asking in the first place.
Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking (2013)
Homunculi are bogeymen only if they duplicate entire the talents they are rung in to explain. If one can get a team or committee of relatively ignorant, narrow-minded, blind homunculi to produce the intelligent behaviour of the whole, this is progress.
Brainstorms (1978)
The more I considered this answer, the more obviously true it appeared. But, strange to say, the more true it appeared, the less important the question to which it could be the true answer seemed. A sad, but not unprecedented, fate for a philosophical question to suffer.
Brainstorms (1978)
As Akins observes, it is not the point of our sensory systems that they should detect "basic" or "natural" properties of the environment, but that they should serve our "narcissistic" purposes in staying alive; nature doesn't build epistemic engines.
Consciousness Explained (1991)
The middle ground, roughly halfway between poetry and mathematics, is where philosophers can make their best contributions, I believe, yielding genuine clarifications of deeply puzzling problems.
Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking (2013)
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.
Freedom Evolves (2003)
It is not "scientism" to concede the objectivity and precision of good science, any more than it is history worship to concede that Napoleon did once rule in France and the Holocaust actually happened. Those who fear the facts will forever try to discredit the fact-finders.
Darwin's Dangerous Idea (1995)
Friedrich Nietzsche saw—through the mists of his contempt for all things English—an even more cosmic message in Darwin: God is dead. If Nietzsche is the father of existentialism, then perhaps Darwin deserves the title of grandfather.
Darwin's Dangerous Idea (1995)
When comparing the time scales of genetic and cultural evolution, it is useful to bear in mind that we today — every one of us — can easily understand many ideas that were simply unthinkable by the geniuses in our grandparents' generation!
Darwin's Dangerous Idea (1995)
..the point of a randomizing device like a coin flip, [is] to make the result uncontrollable by making it sensitive to so many variables that no feasible, finite list of conditions can be singled out as the cause.
Freedom Evolves (2003)
Philosophers' Syndrome: mistaking a failure of the imagination for an insight into necessity.
Consciousness Explained (1991)
Are zombies possible? They're not just possible, they're actual. We're all zombies.* Nobody is conscious – not in the systematically mysterious way that supports such doctrines as epiphenomenalism. * It would be an act of desperate intellectual dishonesty to quote this assertion out of context!
Consciousness Explained (1991)
We now understand how very complex and even apparently intelligent phenomena, such as genetic coding, the immune system, and low-level visual processing, can be accomplished without a trace of consciousness. But this seems to uncover an enormous puzzle of just what, if anything, consciousness is for. Can a conscious entity do anything for itself that an unconscious (but cleverly wired up) simulation of that entity couldn't do for itself?
There’s simply no polite way to tell people they’ve dedicated their lives to an illusion.
Attributed