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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... sentence: The mind is a system of organs of computation, designed by natural selection to solve the kinds of problems our ancestors faced in their foraging way of life, in particular, understanding and outmaneuvering objects, animals ...
... sentence for rape and murder because he had committed his crimes under the influence of pornography. The Pornography-MadeMe-Do-It Defense is an irony for the schools of feminism that argue that biological explanations of rape reduce the ...
... sentence in solitary confinement on a barren asteroid nine million miles from Earth. Allenby, the captain of a supply ship that services the asteroid, takes pity on him and leaves a crate containing “Alicia,” a robot that looks and acts ...
... sentences. The equivalence among Turing machines, calculable mathematical functions, logics, and grammars, led the logician Alonzo Church to conjecture that any well-defined recipe or set of steps that is guaranteed to produce the ...
... sentences. To the extent that thought consists of applying any set of well-specified rules, a machine can be built that, in some sense, thinks. Turing showed that rational machines—machines that use the physical properties of symbols to ...