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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... culture, language, socialization, learning, complexity, self-organization, neural-network dynamics. I want to convince you that our minds are not animated by some godly vapor or single wonder principle. The mind, like the Apollo ...
... takes to be good but how slippery the concept of goodness is to start with. And what about the most caring motive of all? The weak-willed computers of 1960s pop culture were not tempted only by selfishness Standard Equipment 17.
Steven Pinker. puters of 1960s pop culture were not tempted only by selfishness and power, as we see in the comedian Allan Sherman's song “Automation,” sung to the tune of “Fascination”: It was automation, I know. That was what was ...
... culture,” “learning,” or “self-organization” begins to sound hollow, just not up to the demands of the pitiless universe we negotiate so successfully. The robot challenge hints at a mind loaded with original equipment, but it still may ...
... culture.” But if evolution equipped us not with irresistible urges and rigid reflexes but with a neural computer, everything changes. A program is an intricate recipe of logical and statistical operations directed by comparisons, tests ...