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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... problems are crudely solved by a mechanical linkage that converts a rotating shaft into a stepping motion. But the ... problem is even harder than what I have described. The lamp flails under its weight as if it had a mind of its own ...
... problem,” come to light. Yet somehow we all solve the frame problem whenever we use our common sense. 5. Imagine. that we have somehow overcome these challenges and have a machine with sight, motor coordination, and common sense. Now we ...
... problem? In this case Asimov, like generations of thinkers, like all of us, was unable to step outside his own thought processes and see them as artifacts of how our minds were put together rather than as inescapable laws of the ...
... problem! But then, so are the kinder, gentler motives. How would you design a robot to obey Asimov's injunction never to allow a human being to come to harm through inaction? Michael Frayn's 1965 novel The Tin Men is set in a robotics ...
... problems of the hunting and gathering life led by our ancestors in most of our evolutionary history. The various problems for our ancestors were subtasks of one big problem for their genes, maximizing the number of copies that made it ...