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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... law of his native Abu Dhabi to have three wives. He currently has two and is interested in meeting another potential fiancée. Father Gregory is the bishop of the Catholic cathedral at Groton upon Thames. The list, which comes from the ...
... Law. 3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second ... laws is far from obvious. Why give a robot an order to obey orders—why aren't the original orders Standard Equipment 15.
... laws of the universe. Man's capacity for evil is never far from our minds, and it is easy to think that evil just comes along with intelligence as part of its very essence. It is a recurring theme in our cultural tradition: Adam and Eve ...
... laws of the natural world, in this case an inverse of the ordinary laws of genetics. Family feelings are designed to help our genes replicate themselves, but we cannot see or smell genes. Scientists use forward genetics to deduce how ...
... converge on it. The one that most impresses me is the Robot Challenge. Each of the major engineering problems solved by the mind is unsolvable without built-in assumptions about the laws that hold in that Standard Equipment 31.