Daniel Dennett

Here is a well-known trajectory: You begin with a heartfelt desire to help other people and the conviction, however well or ill founded, that your guild or club or church is the coalition that can best serve to improve the welfare of others. If times are particularly tough, this conditional stewardship — I'm doing what's good for the guild because that will be good for everybody — may be displaced by the narrowest concern for the integrity of the guild itself, and for good reason: if you believe that the institution in question is the best path to goodness, the goal of preserving it for future projects, still unimagined, can be the most rational higher goal you can define. It is a short step from this to losing track of or even forgetting the larger purpose and devoting yourself singlemindedly to furthering the interests of the institution, at whatever costs. A conditional or instrumental allegiance can thus become indistinguishable in practice from a commitment to something "good in itself." A further short step perverts this parochial summum bonum to the more selfish goal of doing whatever it takes to keep yourself at the helm of the institution ("who better than I to lead us to triumph over our adversaries?")We have all seen this happen many times, and may even have caught ourselves in the act of forgetting just why we wanted to be leaders in the first place.

Every human mind you've ever looked at … is a product not just of natural selection but of cultural redesign of enormous proportions.

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.

Unpredictability is in general a fine protective feature, which should never be squandered but always spent wisely. There is much to be gained from communication if it is craftily doled out — enough truth to keep one's credibility high but enough falsehood to keep one's options open. (This is the first point of wisdom in the game of poker: he who never bluffs never wins; he who always bluffs always loses.)

[T]here are no forces on this planet more dangerous to us all than the fanaticisms of fundamentalism, of all species: Protestantism, Catholicism, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism, as well as countless smaller infections.

[T]he Capgras delusion [is] a bizarre affliction that occasionally strikes human beings who have suffered brain damage. The defining mark of the Capgras delusion is the sufferer's conviction that a close acquaintance (usually a loved one) has been replaced by an impostor who looks like (and sounds like, and acts like) the genuine companion, who has mysteriously disappeared! … What is particularly surprising about these cases is that they don't depend on subtle disguises and fleeting glimpses. On the contrary, the delusion persists even when the target individual is closely scrutinized by the [Capgras sufferer], and is even pleading for recognition. Capgras sufferers have been known to murder their spouses, so sure are they that these look-alike interlopers are trying to step into their shoes — into whole lives — that are not rightfully theirs! There can be no doubt that in such a sad case, the [sufferer] in question has deemed true some very specific proposition of nonidentity: This man is not my husband; this man is a qualitatively similar to my husband as ever can be, and yet he is not my husband. Of particular interest to us is the fact that people suffering from such a delusion can be quite unable to say why they are so sure.

A faith, like a species, must evolve or go extinct when the environment changes. It is not a gentle process in either case. … It's nice to have grizzly bears and wolves living in the wild. They are no longer a menace; we can peacefully co-exist, with a little wisdom. The same policy can be discerned in our political tolerance, in religious freedom. You are free to preserve or create any religious creed you wish, so long as it does not become a public menace. We're all on the Earth together, and we have to learn some accommodation. … The message is clear: those who will not accommodate, who will not temper, who insist on keeping only the purest and wildest strain of their heritage alive, we will be obliged, reluctantly, to cage or disarm, and we will do our best to disable the memes they fight for. Slavery is beyond the pale. Child abuse is beyond the pale. Discrimination is beyond the pale. The pronouncing of death sentences on those who blaspheme against a religion (complete with bounties or reward for those who carry them out) is beyond the pale. It is not civilized, and it is owed no more respect in the name of religious freedom than any other incitement to cold-blooded murder. … That is — or, rather, ought to be, the message of multiculturalism, not the patronizing and subtly racist hypertolerance that "respects" vicious and ignorant doctrines when they are propounded by officials of non-European states and religions.

Evolution embodies information in every part of every organism. … This information doesn't have to be copied into the brain at all. It doesn't have to be "represented" in "data structures" in the nervous system. It can be exploited by the nervous system, however, which is designed to rely on, or exploit, the information in the hormonal systems just as it is designed to rely on, or exploit, the information embodied in your limbs and eyes. So there is wisdom, particularly about preferences, embodied in the rest of the body. By using the old bodily systems as a sort of sounding board, or reactive audience, or critic, the central nervous system can be guided — sometimes nudged, sometimes slammed — into wise policies. Put it to the vote of the body, in effect. ...When all goes well, harmony reigns and the various sources of wisdom in the body cooperate for the benefit of the whole, but we are all too familiar with the conflicts that can provoke the curious outburst "My body has a mind of its own!" Sometimes, apparently, it is tempting to lump together some of the embodied information into a separate mind. Why? Because it is organized in such a way that it can sometimes make independent discriminations, consult preferences, make decisions, enact policies that are in competition with your mind. At such time, the Cartesian perspective of a puppeteer self trying desperately to control an unruly body-puppet is very powerful. Your body can vigorously betray the secrets you are desperately trying to keep — by blushing and trembling or sweating, to mention only the most obvious cases. It can "decide" that in spite of your well-laid plans, right now would be a good time for sex, not intellectual discussion, and then take embarrassing steps in preparation for a coup d'etat. On another occasion, to your even greater chagrin and frustration, it can turn a deaf ear on your own efforts to enlist it for a sexual campaign, forcing you to raise the volume, twirl the dials, try all manner of preposterous cajolings to persuade it.

Animals are not just herbivores or carnivores. They are, in the nice coinage of the psychologist George Miller, informavores.

..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.

[W]hat good to us is the gods' knowledge if we can't get it from them? How could one communicate with the gods? Our ancestors (while they were alive!) stumbled on an extremely ingenious solution: divination.We all know how hard it is to make the major decisions of life: should I hang tough or admit my transgression, should I move or stay in my present position, should I go to war or not, should I follow my heart or my head? We still haven't figured out any satisfactory systematic way of deciding these things. Anything that can relieve the burden of figuring out how to make these hard calls is bound to be an attractive idea.Consider flipping a coin, for instance. Why do we do it? To take away the burden of having to find a reason for choosing A over B. We like to have reasons for what we do, but sometimes nothing sufficiently persuasive comes to mind, and we recognize that we have to decide soon, so we concoct a little gadget, an external thing that will make the decision for us. But if the decision is about something momentous, like whether to go to war, or marry, or confess, anything like flipping a coin would be just too, well, flippant.In such a case, choosing for no good reason would be too obviously a sign of incompetence, and, besides, if the decision is really that important, once the coin has landed you'll have to confront the further choice: should you honor your just-avowed commitment to be bound by the flip of the coin, or should you reconsider? Faced with such quandaries, we recognize the need for some treatment stronger than a coin flip. Something more ceremonial, more impressive, like divination, which not only tells you what to do, but gives you a reason (if you squint just right and use your imagination).Scholars have uncovered a comically variegated profusion of ancient ways of delegating important decisions to uncontrollable externalities. Instead of flipping a coin, you can flip arrows (belomancy) or rods (rhabdomancy) or bones or cards (sortilege), and instead of looking at tea leaves (tasseography), you can examine the livers of sacrificed animals (hepatoscopy) or other entrails (haruspicy) or melted wax poured into water (ceroscopy). Then there is moleosophy (divination by blemishes), myomancy (divination by rodent behavior), nephomancy (divination by clouds), and of course the old favorites, numerology and astrology, among dozens of others.

It is commonly observed — but not commonly enough! — that old folks removed from their homes to hospital settings are put at a tremendous disadvantage, even though their basic bodily needs are well provided for. They often appear to be quite demented — to be utterly incapable of feeding, clothing, and washing themselves, let alone engaging in any activities of greater interest. Often, however, if they are returned to their homes, they can manage quite well for themselves. How do they do this? Over the years, they have loaded their home environments with ultrafamiliar landmarks, triggers for habits, reminder of what to do, where to find the food, how to get dressed, where the telephone is, and so forth. An old person can be a veritable virtuoso of self-help in such a hugely overlearned world, in spite of his or her brain's increasing imperviousness to new bouts of learning... Taking them out of their homes is literally separating them from large parts of their minds — potentially just as devastating a development as undergoing brain surgery.