How the Mind Works"A model of scientific writing: erudite, witty, and clear." —New York Review of Books In this Pulitzer Prize finalist and national bestseller, one of the world's leading cognitive scientists tackles the workings of the human mind. What makes us rational—and why are we so often irrational? How do we see in three dimensions? What makes us happy, afraid, angry, disgusted, or sexually aroused? Why do we fall in love? And how do we grapple with the imponderables of morality, religion, and consciousness? How the Mind Works synthesizes the most satisfying explanations of our mental life from cognitive science, evolutionary biology, and other fields to explain what the mind is, how it evolved, and how it allows us to see, think, feel, laugh, interact, enjoy the arts, and contemplate the mysteries of life. This edition of Pinker's bold and buoyant classic is updated with a new foreword by the author. |
From inside the book
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... behavior intelligently. Clearly a thinker cannot apply just one rule at a time. A match gives light; a saw cuts wood; a locked door is opened with a key. But we laugh at the man who lights a match to peer into a fuel tank, who saws off ...
... behavior we take for granted, is a challenging engineering problem! But then, so are the kinder, gentler motives. How would you design a robot to obey Asimov's injunction never to allow a human being to come to harm through inaction ...
... behavior happens. The computational theory of mind thus allows us to keep beliefs and desires in our explanations of behavior while planting them squarely in the physical universe. It allows meaning to cause and be caused. The ...
... behavior is too subtle and flexible to be a product of evolution, they think; it must come from somewhere else—from, say, “culture.” But if evolution equipped us not with irresistible urges and rigid reflexes but with a neural computer ...