Daniel Dennett Quotes About Consciousness

Quotes about: Consciousness

• If I know better than you know what I am up to, it is only because I spend more time with myself than you do.

  Daniel Dennett

  Consciousness, More Time, Knows

  Daniel C. Dennett (2004). “Freedom Evolves”, p.218, Penguin

• If the concept of consciousness were to fall to science, what would happen to our sense of moral agency and free will? If conscious experience were reduced somehow to mere matter in motion, what would happen to our appreciation of love and pain and dreams and joy? If conscious human beings were just animated material objects, how could anything we do to them be right or wrong?

  Daniel Dennett

  Dream, Appreciation, Pain

• Human consciousness is just about the last surviving mystery.

  Daniel Dennett

  Lasts, Mystery, Consciousness

  "Consciousness Explained". Book by Daniel Dennett, 1991.

• There is no reality of consciousness independent of the effects of various vehicles of content on subsequent action (and hence, of course, on memory).

  Daniel Dennett

  Memories, Independent, Reality

• Human consciousness is just about the last surviving mystery... a topic that often leaves even the most sophisticated thinkers tongue-tied and confused. And, as with all of the earlier mysteries, there are many who insist - and hope - that there will never be a demystification of consciousness.

  Daniel Dennett

  Confused, Lasts, Tongue

• Consciousness is cerebral celebrity--nothing more and nothing less. Those contents are conscious that persevere, that monopolize resources long enough to achieve certain typical and "symptomatic" effects--on memory, on the control of behavior and so forth.

  Daniel Dennett

  Memories, Long, Typical

  Daniel Clement Dennett (1998). “Brainchildren: Essays on Designing Minds”, p.137, MIT Press

• While we tend to conceive of the operations of the mind as unified and transparent, they're actually chaotic and opaque. There's no invisible boss in the brain, no central meaner, no unitary self in command of our activities and utterances. There's no internal spectator of a Cartesian theater in our heads to applaud the march of consciousness across its stage.

  Daniel Dennett

  Self, Boss, Brain

• If the best the roboticists can hope for is the creation of some crude, cheesy, second-rate, artificial consciousness, they still win.

  Daniel Dennett

  Winning, Cheesy, Consciousness

  Daniel Clement Dennett (1998). “Brainchildren: Essays on Designing Minds”, p.158, MIT Press

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