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Quotes from Consciousness Explained — Daniel Dennett

1942–2024 United States

← All quotes by Daniel Dennett

4 quotes

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)

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)

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)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Daniel Dennett (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.