"The process of natural selection feeds on randomness, it feeds on accident and contingency, and it gradually improves the fit between whatever organisms there are and the environment in which they're being selected. But there's no predictability about what particular accidents are going to be exploited in this process."
"When we replace the traditional idea of God the creator with the idea of the process of natural selection doing the creating, the creation is as wonderful as it ever was. All that great design work had to be done. It just wasn't done by an individual, it was done by this huge process, distributed over billions of years."
"Whereas people used to think of meaning coming from on high and being ordained from the top down, now we have Darwin saying, No, all of this design can happen, all of this purpose can emerge from the bottom up, without any direction at all. And that's a very unsettling thought for many people."
"For more than a century, people have often thought that the conclusion to draw from Darwin's vision is that Homo sapiens--our species--that we're just animals, too, we're just mammals, that there is nothing morally special about us. I, in myself, don't think this follows at all from Darwin's vision, but it is certainly the received view in many quarters."
From Chapter 25, Self-Portrait in Brain Children: A collection of Essays, The MIT Press, 1998 is a quote that is fundamental to understanding Dennett's work:
"The first stable conclusion I reached … was that the only thing brains could do was to approximate the responsivity to meanings that we presuppose in our everyday mentalistic discourse. When mechanical push comes to shove, a brain was always going to do what it was caused to do by current, local, mechanical circumstances, whatever it ought to do, whatever a God's-eye view might reveal about the actual meaning of its current states. But over the long haul, brains could be designed - by evolutionary processes - to do the right thing (from the point of view of meaning) with high reliability. … [B]rains are syntactic engines that can mimic the competence of semantic engines. … The appreciation of meanings - their discrimination and delectation - is central to our vision of consciousness, but this conviction that I, on the inside, deal directly with meanings turns out to be something rather like a benign "user-illusion".
From Consciousness Explained, Back Bay Books, 1992 pg. 253-4:
"There is no single, definitive "stream of consciousness," because there is no central Headquarters, no Cartesian Theatre where "it all comes together" for the perusal of a Central Meaner. Instead of such a single stream (however wide), there are multiple channels in which specialist circuits try, in parallel pandemoniums, to do their various things, creating Multiple Drafts as they go. Most of these fragmantery drafts of "narrative" play short-lived roles in the modulation of current activity but some get promoted to further funtional roles, in swift succession, by the activity of a virtual machine in the brain. The seriality of this machine (its "von Neumannesque" character) is not a "hard-wired" design feature, but rather the upshot of a succession of coalitions of these specialists.
The basic specialists are part of our animal heritage. They were not developed to perform peculiarly human actions, such as reading and writing, but ducking, predator-avoiding, face-recognizing, grasping, throwing, berry-picking and other essential tasks. They are often opportunistically enlisted in new roles, for which their native talents more or less suit them. The result is not bedlam only because the trends that are imposed on all this activity are themselves the product of design. Some of this design is innate and is shared with other animals. But it is augmented, and sometimes even overwhelmed in importance, by microhabits of thought that are developed in the individual, partly idiosyncratic results of self-exploration and partly the predesigned gifts of culture. Thousands of memes, mostly borne by language, but also by wordless "images" and other data structures, take up residence in an individual brain, shaping its tendencies and thereby turning it into a mind."
