"The presumption that any cultural item that spreads widely will at least be deemed (rightly or wrongly) to be worth having must be set aside, as it may instead be an unappreciated or even detested item that is just too well entrenched for the local coalition of cultural antibodies to remove." (Dennett, p. 354)
"Only a theory with the logical shape of Darwin's could explain how designed things came to exist, because any other sort of explanation would be either a vicious circle or an infinite regress." (Dennett 1995, Darwin's Dangerous Idea, p. 70)
"When you are actually challenged to think of pre-Darwinian answers to the questions 'What is man?' 'Is there a meaning to life?' 'What are we for?', can you, as a matter of fact, think of any that are not now worthless except for their (considerable) historic interest? There is such a thing as being just plain wrong, and that is what, before 1859, all answers to those questions were." (Dawkins 2009, The Selfish Gene, p. 267)
"Locke's a priori proof of the inconceivability of Design without Mind [...] is now as obsolete as the quill pen with which it was written, a fascinating museum piece, a curiosity that can do no real work in the intellectual world today." (Dennett 1995, Darwin's Dangerous Idea, p. 83)
"We must distinguish reductionism, which is in general a good thing, from greedy reductionism, which is not. The difference, in the context of Darwin's theory, is simple: greedy reductionists think that everything can be explained without cranes; good reductionists think that everything can be explained without skyhooks." (Dennett 1995, Darwin's Dangerous Idea, pp. 81-82)
"Why is the sky blue? Because apples are red and grapes are purple, not the other way around." (Dennett 1991, Consciousness Explained, p. 378)
"...too many of us cannot grasp that words are only tools for our use..."
(Dawkins 1976, The Selfish Gene, p. 18)
"We meme-users..."
(Dennett 1995, Darwin's Dangerous Idea, p. 469)
"...we use memes so much..."
(Blackmore 1999, The Meme Machine, p. 15)
"Our selves have been created out of the interplay of memes exploiting and redirecting the machinery Mother Nature has given us. [...] The 'indepdentent' mind struggling to protect itself from alien and dangerous memes is a myth." (Dennett 1995, Darwin's Dangerous Idea, pp. 365-366)Terrence Deacon deelt deze opvatting:
"We are not just a species that uses symbols. The symbolic universe has ensnared us in an inescapable web. [...] we have become the means by which it unceremoniously propagates itself throughout the world." (Deacon 1997, The Symbolic Species, p. 436)Hieruit blijkt:
"Woorden zijn niet maar zo gebruiksvoorwerpen. Ze openen hele werelden en sluiten die af. Ze geven en ontnemen mensen hun identiteit." (Oudemans 2012, In Natura, p. 39)De moeilijkheid waar iedere darwinist zodoende mee te kampen heeft is dat hij niet in staat is de natuur ondubbelzinnig, als een buitenstaander, adequaat te beschrijven. Doordat hij zelf aan de natuur overgeleverd is, spreekt de natuur door hem heen op het moment dat zijn pen het papier raakt.
"One of the weaknesses of Deacon’s book flows from his decision to coin a host of new terms— absential, entention, contragrade, orthograde, and teleodynamic— piled on top of the usual jargon— emergence, attractor— in which to couch his arguments. This burdens readers with the extra task of rehearsing these not obviously obligatory novelties." (Dennett 2013, Aching Voids and Making Voids, p. 323)Deacons poging een nieuwe ontologie te lanceren wordt door Dennett dus niet geapprecieerd. Het zou de lezer maar verwarren met lastige begrippen. Volgens mij slaat Dennett hiermee de plank echter volledig mis. Zolang men namelijk blijft hangen in een vertrouwde semantiek verwerft men geen substantieel nieuwe inzichten. Pas wanneer het daarentegen lukt de versteende talige kaders te doen schuiven kan het tij daadwerkelijk keren. En dan wordt het pas echt leuk.
"De stilste woorden zijn het, welke de storm brengen. Gedachten, die op duivenvoeten komen, richten de wereld." (Nietzsche 1993, Aldus sprak Zarathoestra, p. 123)
"I myself have been trying in recent years to say quite a few of the things Deacon says more clearly here. So close and yet so far! I tried; he succeeded, a verdict I would apply to the other contenders in equal measure. Alicia Juarrero (1999) and Evan Thompson (2007) have both written excellent books on neighboring and overlapping topics, but neither of them managed to win me over to the Romantic side (see, e.g., Dennett 2011), whereas Deacon, with his more ambitious exercise of reconstruction, has me re-examining my fundamental working assumptions. I encourage others who see versions of their own pet ideas emerging more clearly and systematically in Deacon’s account to join me in applauding." (Dennett 2013, Aching Voids and Making Voids, p. 324)
"Karl Marx was exultant: "Not only is a death blow dealt here for the first time to 'Teleology' in natural sciences but their rational meaning is empiracally explained." Friederich Nietzsche saw 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." (Dennett 1995, Darwin's Dangerous Idea, p. 62)
"What foundation can we stand on as we struggle to keep our feet in the meme-storm in which we are engulfed? If replicative might does not make right, what is the eternal ideal relative to which 'we' will judge the value of memes? We should note that the memes for normative concepts - for ought and good and truth and beauty - are among the most entrenched denizens of our minds. Among the memes that constitute us, they play a central role. Our existence as us, as what we as thinkers are, is not independent of these memes." (Ibid., p. 366)
According to Robyn (or, more precisely, according to the writers who have influenced her thinking on these matters), there is no such thing as the "Self" on which capitalism and the classic novel are founded — that is to say, a finite, unique soul or essence that constitutes a person's identity; there is only a subject position in an infinite web of discourses — the discourses of power, sex, family, science, religion, poetry, etc. And by the same token, there is no such thing as an author, that is to say, one who originates a work of fiction ab nihilo. in the famous words of Jacques Derrida... "il n'y a pas de hors-texte", there is nothing outside the text. There are no origins, there is only production, and we produce our "selves" in language. Not "you are what you eat" but "you are what you speak," or, rather "you are what speaks you," is the axiomatic basis of Robyn's philosophy, which she would call, if required to give it a name, "semiotic materialism."Semiotic materialism? Must I call it that? Aside from the allusions to capitalism and the classic novel, about which I have kept my counsel, this jocular passage is a fine parody of the view I'm about to present. (Like all parody, it exaggerates; I wouldn't say there is nothing outside the text. There are, for instance, all the bookcases, buildings, bodies, bacteria...)" (Dennett 1991, Consciousness Explained, pp. 410-411)
"Natural selection favours some genes rather than others not because of the nature of the genes themselves, but because of their consequences-their phenotypic effects." (Dawkins 2006, The Selfish Gene, p. 235)
"It is these chromosomes that contain in some kind of code-script the entire pattern of the individual's future development and of its functioning in the mature state. Every complete set of chromosomes contains the full code. The term code-script is, of course, too narrow. The
chromosome structures are at the same time instrumental in bringing about the development they foreshadow. They are law-code and executive power - or, to use another simile, they
are architect's plan and builder's craft - in one." (Schrödinger 1944, What is Life?, pp. 21-22)
"Deconstructionists will tell you that no two readers of a text will come up with the same reading, and something similar is undoubtedly true when we consider the relationship between a genome and the embryonic environment in which it has its informational effects." (Dennett 1995, Darwin's Dangerous Idea, p. 113)
"Life is just bytes and bytes and bytes of digital information." (Dawkins 1995, River Out of Eden, p. 19)
"Tekst, beeld, spraak, communicatie, vriendschap, liefde en haat zij gedigitaliseerde databestanden. Wie daarbuiten zoekt naar iets onberekenbaars, iets geestelijks, iets emotioneels, iets cultureels, die zoekt vergeefs." (Oudemans 2007, Echte Filosofie, p. 16)
"When you light a candle, the flame flares up but quickly settles into a steady state, burning as long as there is wick an wax. Life is a similar phenomenon - a controlled burning, a pattern of energy flow. Looking at life as a material process, Schrödinger analyzed it both as energy and as information. On the one hand we have words such as chaos, disorder, and entropy. On the other hand we have terms like order, organization, information and complexity. Life is not just a genetic entity. Genes by themselves do nothing more than salt crystals. Life is an open, cycling system organized by the laws of thermodynamics." (Schneider & Sagan 2005, Into the Cool, pp. xi-24)
"We are built as gene machines and cultured as meme machines, but we have the power to turn against our creators. We, alone on earth, can rebel aginst the tyranny of the selfish replicators." (Dawkins 1976, The Selfish Gene, p. 201)
"It cannot be 'memes versus us,' because earlier infestations of memes have already played a major role in determining who or what we are. The 'independent' mind struggling to protect itself from alien and dangerous memes is a myth." (Dennett 1995, Darwin's Dangerous Idea, p. 365)
"To live honestly, I must just get out of the way and allow decisions to make themselves." (Blackmore 1999, The Meme Machine, p. 244)
"We can carry on our lives as most people do, under the illusion that there is a persistent conscious self inside who is in charge, who is responsible for my actions and who makes me me. Or we can live as human beings, body, brain, and memes, living out our lives as a complex interplay of replicators and environment, in the knowledge that that is all there is. Then we are no longer victims of the selfish selfplex. In this sense we can be truly free - not because we can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators but because we know that there is no one to rebel." (Ibid., p. 246)
"Zo nemen we in de mens een voortdurend heen en weer gaan waar tussen de menselijk noodzakelijke hybris in de aanspraak, de geschiedenis te overstijgen, en besef van geringheid, dat de mens terugwerpt op zijn eindigheid en historiciteit, maar dat zelf tot hybris verwordt, zodra de mens meent, zich in zijn historiciteit te kunnen schikken: de mens is zo eindig, dat hij zijn eindigheid niet op zich kan nemen." (Oudemans 1980, De Verdeelde Mens, p. 149)
