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
Results 1-5 of 7
There are, of course, robots that weld or spray-paint on assembly lines and that
roll through laboratory hallways; my question is about the machines that walk,
talk, see, Karel and Cˇapek think, coined often better the than their human
masters.
MACHINES. L. ike many baby boomers, I was first exposed to problems in
philosophy by traveling through another dimension, a dimension not only of sight
and sound but of mind, taking a journey into a wondrous land whose boundaries
are ...
Suppose one were to build a machine with parts that are affected by the physical
properties of some symbol. Some lever or electric eye or tripwire or magnet is set
in motion by the pigment absorbed by a tree ring, or the water trapped by a ...
How confident can we be that some machine will make marks that actually
correspond to some meaningful state of the world, like the age of a tree when
another tree was planted, or the average age of the tree's offspring, or anything
else, ...
obeys mathematical equations that can be solved step by step, a machine can be
built that simulates the world and makes predictions about it. To the extent that
rational thought corresponds to the rules of logic, a machine can be built that ...
What people are saying - Write a review
User ratings
| 5 stars |
| ||
| 4 stars |
| ||
| 3 stars |
| ||
| 2 stars |
| ||
| 1 star |
|
LibraryThing Review
User Review - SpaceyAcey - LibraryThingPinker explains the computational theory of the mind in easy to understand prose for the layman. It's not all literature summarizing, he also inserts some of his own ideas on all sorts of topics ... Read full review
LibraryThing Review
User Review - raschneid - LibraryThingVery interesting, well-written, and comprehensive. I appreciated the overview of both computational and evolutionary psychology in one tome of a book; computational psychology is pretty much awesome ... Read full review
Other editions - View all
Common terms and phrases
Bibliographic information
| Title | How the Mind Works |
| Author | Steven Pinker |
| Publisher | W. W. Norton & Company, 2009 |
| ISBN | 0393069737, 9780393069730 |
| Length | 672 pages |
| Subjects | › › Medical / Neuroscience Psychology / Cognitive Psychology & Cognition Science / Life Sciences / Anatomy & Physiology |
| Export Citation | BiBTeX EndNote RefMan |