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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... physical medium that carries them. When you telephone your mother in another city, the message stays the same as it goes from your lips to her ears even as it physically changes its form, from vibrating air, to electricity in a wire, to ...
... physical events, as potent as any billiard ball clacking into another. The computational theory of mind resolves the paradox. It says that beliefs and desires are information, incarnated as configurations of symbols. The symbols are the ...
... physical organs. The robot challenge makes that clear. Building a robot poses many software engineering problems, and different tricks are necessary to solve them. Take our first problem, the sense of sight. A seeing machine must solve ...
... physical organs owe their complex design to the information in the human genome, and so, I believe, do our mental organs. We do not learn to have a pancreas, and we do not learn to have a visual system, language acquisition, common ...
... physical and social world, and sometimes command information that was never presented to them. People hold many beliefs that are at odds with their experience but were true in the environment in which we evolved, and they pursue goals ...