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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... less true of the mind. The faculty with which we ponder the world has no ability to peer inside itself or our other faculties to see what makes them tick. That makes us the victims of an illusion: that our own psychology comes from some ...
... less and less clear that they were really moral at all. Macintosh explained why he did not simply tie a rope around the self-sacrificing robot to make it easier to retrieve: “I don't want it to know that it's going to be saved. It would ...
... less important than we used to think. The mind is an adaptation designed by natural selection, but that does not mean that everything we think, feel, and do is biologically adaptive. We evolved from apes, but that does not mean we have ...
... less, met the even-illumination assumption for eons, natural selection would have done well by building the assumption in. The surface-perception module solves an unsolvable problem, but at a price. The brain has given up any pretense ...
... less. Yet the reply captures how centuries of commentators have reacted to the idea of a richly structured, high-tech mind. And the “interactionist” position, with its phobia of ever specifying the innate part of the interaction, is not ...