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. |
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Steven Pinker. without built-in assumptions about the laws that hold in that arena of interaction with the world. All of the programs designed by artificial intelligence researchers have been specially engineered for a particular domain ...
... laws are to mechanical engineers. But almost everyone misunderstands the theory. Contrary to popular belief, the gene-centered theory of evolution does not imply that the point of all human striving is to spread our genes. With the ...
... laws of physics and chemistry. Tree rings carry information about age, but they also reflect light and absorb staining material. Footprints carry information about animal motions, but they also trap water and cause eddies in the wind ...
... law or relationship we find interesting; any heap of stuff can be given a contrived interpretation after the fact.) How confident can we be that some machine will make marks that actually correspond to some meaningful state of the world ...
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