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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... give off light, painting in the bright areas of the picture. But the other dots do not suck light and paint in the dark areas; they just stay gray. The areas that you see as black are in fact just the pale shade of the picture tube when ...
... give it motives. What should a robot want? The classic answer is Isaac Asimov's Fundamental Rules of Robotics, “the three rules that are built most deeply into a robot's positronic brain.” 1. A robot may not injure a human being or ...
... give rise to new symbols corresponding to another belief logically related to it, which can give rise to symbols corresponding to other beliefs, and so on. Eventually the bits of matter constituting a symbol bump into bits of matter ...
... give us a hint of the finesse and power of which computation is capable. Human thought and behavior, no matter how subtle and flexible, could be the product of a very complicated program, and that program may have been our endowment ...
... mysterious, then either scientists must be prepared to fudge their data or all of us must be prepared to give up our values. Scientific arguments would turn into the National Lampoon cover showing a puppy with a gun at Standard Equipment ...