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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... Imagine trying to design a recognizer for a shirt, or a face! To be sure, after four decades of research in artificial intelligence, the technology of shape recognition has improved. You may own software that scans in a page, recognizes ...
... imagine having to do it in reverse: without looking at the shade, you must choreograph the sequence of twists around each joint that would send the shade along a straight path. The trigonometry is frightfully complicated. But your arm ...
... imagine that a friend asks you to invite some bachelors to her party. What would happen if you used the definition to decide which of the following people to invite? Arthur has been living happily with Alice for the last five years ...
... imagine a robot designed to fetch a spare battery from a room that also contained a time bomb. Version 1 saw that the battery was on a wagon and that if it pulled the wagon out of the room, the battery would come with it. Unfortunately ...
... Imagine. that we have somehow overcome these challenges and have a machine with sight, motor coordination, and common sense. Now we must figure out how the robot will put them to use. We have to give it motives. What should a robot want ...