How the Mind Works

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Binding: Paperback Dewey Decimal Number: 153 EAN: 9780965838047 ISBN: 0393318486 Label: W. W. Norton & Company Manufacturer: W. W. Norton & Company Number Of Items: 1 Number Of Pages: 672 Publication Date: 1999-01-01 Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company Studio: W. W. Norton & Company
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Editorial Reviews: In this extraordinary bestseller, Steven Pinker, one of the world's leading cognitive scientists, does for the rest of the mind what he did for language in his 1994 book, The Language Instinct. He explains what the mind is, how it evolved, and how it allows us to see, think, feel, laugh, interact, enjoy the arts, and ponder the mysteries of life. And he does it with the wit that prompted Mark Ridley to write in the New York Times Book Review, "No other science writer makes me laugh so much. . . . [Pinker] deserves the superlatives that are lavished on him." The arguments in the book are as bold as its title. Pinker rehabilitates some unfashionable ideas, such as that the mind is a computer and that human nature was shaped by natural selection, and challenges fashionable ones, such as that passionate emotions are irrational, that parents socialize their children, and that nature is good and modern society corrupting.
Spotlight customer reviews: Customer Rating: Summary: Good, but with some minor faults Comment: I also read Steven Pinker's `the Blank Slate', which had been recommended by a friend who knew of my interest in the brain and brain-mind area. I was also, as many other reviewers here, impressed again by Pinker's prose style. The witty asides are often apropos and lighten what might otherwise be a dry description of the findings of neuroscience. However, though I like his style, I don't always agree with Pinker and in the cases where I perceive him being wrong, this witty and cheeky style can verge on the snide or smarmy. There is nothing like a dismissive, cynical remark to deal with those who do not share your point of view. But it's a cheap shot and not worthy of Pinker, who can be much smarter when it suits him. E.g. he does this in his critique of two writers who he implies are almost heretical in daring to challenge the computational theory of the mind: John Searle and Roger Penrose. His cynical put down of these 2 writers implies that they were foolish and justly criticized by the majority of philosophers who favor the computational theory. However, the majority was not as large as implied by Pinker. There are quite a few philosophers who argued for the ideas of Searle with his Chinese Room thought experiment or Penrose with his application of Gödel's theorem to the non-algorhythmic side of thought. Pinker thinks that Searle was only exploring meanings of the word `understand' with his Chinese Room: my own take there is that on the contrary Searle omitted an aspect that didn't sit well with his conscious-brain/digestion-stomach analogy: what was missing in the room was a light floating round the library corresponding to the qualia of understanding the Chinese queries which the western librarian did not understand. Also, the book, being written in 1998, can be excused for putting so much emphasis on identical twins whose behavior is bizarrely similar. But since the Human Genome Project completed in 2003, we know that there are only 22,000 genes corresponding to about 10 megabytes of data. But this data is scarcely sufficient to specify the complexity of the 200 different types of cell in the body, it's 12 or more physiological subsystems and all the (rough) structure of the brain. That is true even if the non-coding RNA is considered to have a control function Thus it is ludicrous to suggest that genes could be responsible for the remarkable synchronization between separated twins as reported by Pinker. Indeed, Pinker's detested ghost in the machine might be a more reasonable explanation for this synchronization - via non-local mind or telepathy. So maybe a new edition of this book is due where some of these anachronisms are tidied up. There are some good points about the book: I like his dismissal of the behaviourists: his jokes about their predilection for rats etc. are justified. And though he pushes the computational theory further than he should, and re-hashes some older findings from cognitive psychology, his position, though mechanist, is less extreme than that of Skinner & co. and he acknowledges the 'residual' mystery of subjective consciousness and in this sense is justified to call himself a sort of 'mysterian'. This is more than can be said of Dennett or his ilk. Customer Rating: Summary: A Logical Mind Interprets and Sees a Logical Mind Comment: I found this book to be excellent and a fun read. It goes into detail about how one can view the human mind from a logical and behaviorist stand-point. He discusses a computer program type analogy for how a mind can work with a minimum of sub-programs or data types. I did find the book a little too heavy on the logical and strictly behaviorist point of view. The human mind or any mind for that matter seems a bit more than a simple set of instructions - but this may not be the case. All in all, I thought this book was excellent and was a good introduction on how to think about how the mind works or could work based on a simplified set of programs and data types and instructions - if you will. I highly recommend it to anyone interest in psychology or logic. Customer Rating: Summary: A treatise on evolutionary psychology Comment: Steven Pinker, director of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at MIT, argues that the mind is a computational computer. He uses Darwin's concept of reverse engineering to show how most of man's mental and emotional traits evolved. Pinker also shows how the mind was designed by natural selection to solve the kinds of problems our ancestors faced in their hunter/gatherer existence, which may be why we have such trouble explaining such esoteric concepts as consciousness and sentience. Pinker does not have a whole lot of respect for Freud, B.F. Skinner, or the Standard Social Science Model, which views the mind as a blank slate at birth. He disdains a moral approach when discussing natural selection, which gets him in trouble with feminists among other value-laden "isms". Instead, he argues for a "module-packed mind" that "allows both for innate motives that lead to evil acts and for innate motives that can avert them." When discussing the computational mind, Pinker spends a lot of time on the eye. He shows how the eye evolved from light sensitive skin tissue, how humans developed stereoscopic vision leading to a bigger brain, how the brain tricks us into believing that matter is solid, and how seeing in color and in three dimensions led to more brain capacity. Pinker even shows us how the "Mind's eye" works. The eye connects to the brain, but the brain also connects to the eye. Emotions began with the family and extended to non-family because foragers lived in groups. We love people who carry our genes. Pinker shows how the emotions evolve from the family to non-family relationships using reciprocal altruism. If you grant a favor to another (such as supplying him with meat) and he later returns the favor, you like him. If he cares for you when you are sick with no apparent compensation, you grow to love him. Cheaters inspire other emotions such as anger and resentment and the list grows. Guilt happens when we're cheating and we know it. Sympathy is an emotion for gaining gratitude. Body language ensures that emotions are hard to fake. Most people have scam detectors; you can tell the difference between a real smile and that of a beauty contestant. Pinker also discusses bi-products of natural selection such as religion, music, philosophy and art. As mentioned earlier, we are blessed (or cursed) with a forager's brain. "The intellect evolved to crack the defense of things in the natural and social world," not answer such questions as "Why do bad things happen to good people?" We are lucky our stone-age minds do as well as they do when tackling complex scientific problems. Customer Rating: Summary: dense read Comment: this was the first book of steven pinker's that i've read. it was very interesting at times, but the material was a bit too dense in some parts. it was difficult to glean a point very easily. and not all of the diagrams were helpful in elucidating whatever the text was trying to say. it was an okay, long, read. nevertheless, that hasnt discouraged me from tackling pinker's "the language instinct" next. Customer Rating: Summary: Going Backwards Comment: I bought this book to gain insight. Instead I found an alchemist trying to discuss chemistry. I should have known from the title. We have/are a brain not a mind. Reading this book is painful. One of his first tasks Pnker undertakes is to criticize behavioral science. He calls it stimulus response. Behavioral science gives six causes for human behavior: 1. Genetic Endowment 2. Pre-natal chemical environment 3. Post-natal chemical environment 4. Classical conditioning(Pavlov) 5. Operant conditioning(Skinner) 6. Traumatic factors Even Skinnerian conditioning, which he singles out for being stimulus response involves consequences as a major determinant. Behaviorism is a science that like evolution it is selective. Anyone who calls this stimulus response shows complete misunderstanding. Pinker then carries on his ignorance by saying that if a person runs from a burning building it is because they "Believed" they were in danger. He basically uses what he would believe and puts it in the brain of his example. First of all he knows nothing of what another person believes. Second thinking a person that would have to escape any dangerous situation by formulating a belief and then acting on it is just ludicrous. A brain couldn't evolve to function this way. Beliefs are effects. Belief's are conditioned and behavior is conditioned. Just because a belief goes along with a behavior doesn't mean it causes it. Thinking that is superstitious behavior. Our education system is really pathetic. Glad behavioral techniques that were 100% effective in increasing learning skills and self confidence were shelved to fund teaching techniques that saw dramatic declines in learning skills and self confidence. Of course this could only happen in a society where worldviews are conditioned and logic is never automatic, but Pinker hasn't learned observational skills to recognize this. Back to the example. Just because you didn't see all the variables that caused the girl to run from the burning building doesn't mean they don't exist. Your criticism of behaviorism because it can't predict behavior is so inane it is beyond words. Like people that criticize evolution it is because they have no understanding. Behaviorism never would claim to predict behavior. There are billions of variables that determine every unique behavior and the science is a framework to make effective changes through trial and error. You continue your archaic catalog of already answered criticisms by saying Skinner said men don't think. He never said this. Thoughts are superfluous. If they were causes as you claim then what people thought and what they did would be the same. They aren't and never will. Thoughts are unverbalized speech that are triggered and sometimes go along with behavior. It is real world stimuli(experiences) and their interaqction with the brain that determines behavior. If you weren't conditioned to swallow all the cultural BS maybe you could see science always disproves the presuppositions our culture conditons many to accept. No the Sun doesn't revolve around the Earth. Yes we are products of our environment. This may be predictably dismissed by a culture conditioned to shiver at these words, but understanding this is the only way we will ever make effecdtive, positive changes to improve the human condition. A shame your book is doing everything one can to set us back hundreds of years. What is your real name? Nim Chimpsky. BTW your language book is another pathetic exercise in ignorance. B.F. Skinner's book is definitive and actually creates a philosphy that allows for effective changes. Time will expose your ignorance, but I am living now, so I want to let everyone know B.F. Skinner was the only person that was right and did useful work. His science is evolutionarily sound and hope our culture has of making effective, postive changes. This book is sad. More Reviews