I have finished this book ever more certain that freewill is an illusion. The bigger the Asshole the narrower his options on moral choices. We are getting it wrong in our society on so many important areas. e treat people as if they are responsible for their bad choices when essentially they aren't. There is a lot more to this book and I thoroughly enjoyed reading it.

Het boek onthult veel over onszelf als individu en als soort.

This morning while swimming I thought of this book. And I thought also of a conversation I had recently with a friend. We were talking about human consciousness.

Swimming is a perfect thing to do when thinking about consciousness. While sliding along the water we are deprived of many things, in particular of the full powers of our senses. There is very little to hear; smellandtaste are also kept at bay; what we can look at is reduced to a wall and a straight line on the floor of the pool; and the pleasant and refreshing water assuages our touch. So, even if we stop being ourselves since we are not in our natural medium, we can however only be ourselves.

Consciousness runs galore.

I actually read this book a while ago, and I did so also some time after I interrupted my studies in neurobiology. I had to stop because of personal reasons. But I remember two things clearly about this book.

The first is that It was an excellent summary of what was known about the brain when the book was published, and which I had been studying in more detailed textbooks. Alas, I have not kept with further advances, but my guess is that it is still a very relevant read today.

The study is very well structured as a survey of the various considerations on how the mind works, and it is written in a very engaging style. It is also engaging because it addresses our immediate and commonsensical concerns about how our mind works. Why we forget, how do we recognize faces, what falling in love may entail, what it is to laugh.. etc.

The best part was the chapter on vision, may be because to me that is one of the most magical powers of our brain. How it can process what our light detecting organs perceive, and create vision in its rear part is a phenomenon that defies our senses.

Pinker does not deal with language in this book because he devoted another book, The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Languagewhich I have not read yet. He designed them to complement each other.

The second thing I remember is the conclusion.

After examining scientifically the various abilities of the brain, Pinker finally gets to the idea of Consciousness, the most perplexing aspect of the brain. But then he gives up and admits that our human capacities are unable to understand how consciousness has come to be, nor what it is. He proposes that probably only an entity with higher abilities than those of our brain would be able to look down upon human Consciousness and understand what it is (does he mean a god, or a machine, or martians?).

Of course, so far he is completely right. No one has, as yet, been able to explain Consciousness satisfactorily, and it has been approached from a myriad of fields. Is Consciousness created or has it evolved?. Is it only in our bodies, and therefore mortal, or can it transmigrate?. What is it anyway?

So, the missing star is not because of what Pinker has written in this book but for its title. He does not really explain, fully, what he promises: how our mind works.


In any case, I am going swimming tomorrow again, and my Consciousness is delighted with the idea, even if it does not know what it-self is.

So happy to have finally finished this book. It's a long and no an easy one but so worth it. Nowadays we know how the brain works, we know how the parts are connected and what they produce in our bodies but we still know nothing of how the human mind works. What parts of the brain makes us be aware of the world and ourselves? are we really aware of ourselves? do other animals with similar brains have different type of awareness? why does our brain makes us enjoy sex? how come we invented music, art or religion if it serves to nothing from an evolutionary perspective? or perhaps it does serve to something? why did evolution gave way to love, hate, embarrassment, sarcasm? what do these types of feelings really do behind the curtains of our awareness of them ? why do we really laugh at a joke?.... These and more are questions answered in this book and I'm so excited that we can now talk about all this thanks to the evolution of artificial intelligence and the "computational theory of mind".

As of this post, I am pursuing an M.A. in music and worship. My thesis is going to be something about music as language, so I was particularly interested in reading Pinker's "The Language Instinct." I stumbled upon HTMW before purchasing a copy of TLI, so I read HTMW first. It proved to be a valuable basis for understanding Pinker. I think Pinker might be surprised to hear that Scripture does not conflict with many of his beliefs (Scripture and science work well together - but that's another discussion). Here's an interesting issue: Pinker believes emotions to be adaptive (they were developed for survival and replication of the organism). He asserts that music is strictly a device for communicating emotions. He believes music is not adaptive (music does not aid in survival or replication of an organism). Does anyone see the problem here?

في هذا الكتاب يتحدث ستيفن بنكر أستاذ العلوم الإدراكية وعالم النفس بشكل أساسي عن نظرية العقل الحسابية
computational theory of the mind

بالعربي، الرجل يتحدث عن العقل (ليس المخ) من وجهة نظر أخرى غير اعتيادية. وجهة نظر تطورية. فيفسر العمليات الادراكية داخل العقل بقوى تطورية (داروينية) وبقوانين حاسويبة.

النظريات التي طرحها وتحدث عنها بنكر رائعة وطريقة شرحها أروع
قد يكون عنوان الكتاب مضلل بعض الشي. لكنه كتاب يستحق القراءة

Note: This book was read sporadically, sampling chapters throughout, but by no means read in its entirety.

Pinker is a big name in science, and perhaps I expected too much from such a reputable individual, but I found his writing lacking. It is easy to read, true, but the simpleness of his writing comes at the cost of rigor and depth, satisfying itself with easy answers and haphazard conclusions, which becomes more pronounced in the later chapters dealing with evolutionary psychology.

Pinker does raise good points, but unfortunately this does not absolve his poor reasoning, creating a "sugar with poison" problem that requires the reader to discern relevant information from utter bollocks, not unlike another Canadian Psychologist that comes to mind, who employs a similar rambling argumentative style instead of backing up his assertions with concise evidence.

Regardless, it is what it is, popular science, and I would argue that the sacrifices made are not worth the costs on this one, but that a critical reader will nonetheless be able to take some worthwhile ideas from it.

Language provides a window into the history of society, but this book also helps show how it has both formed and is a part of our consciousness and our own experience. I think a huge range of people would enjoy this book for many many reasons. Perhaps the only genre that would struggle with it would be possibly the very religious. Otherwise pick it up and have a read you are going to love it!

I prefer to hear the bad news before the good, so let’s begin with the negative feedback:
Through the whole book, Pinker often engages with a certain subject by stating the inaccurateness by thinkers that are not mentioned. For example (p.509):

”Many intellectuals believe that primitive warfare is rare, mild and ritualized, or at least was so until the noble savages we're contaminated by contact with the Westerners. But this is romantic nonsense.”

This argument is repeatedly used in the book as a way to introduce the various subjects. I would agree that we should directly mention other thinkers’ faults, instead of fabricating something less ”hurtful”.

Secondly, Pinker often falls in his own traps. In one of his later books, The Sense of Style (2014), he introduced the book by stating one of the primary reasons for bad writing; the Curse of Knowledge. This cognitive bias refers to the phenomena that the knowledge that we have gathered becomes obvious: you forget the time you weren’t yet aware of that particular information, so you rest on the assumption that others presumably know it as well.

In non-fiction books, we see this bias when the authors don’t explain concepts that are self-explanatory to them. You just can’t always predict what kind of readers will read your book. Just like (barely) every author of non-fiction books, Pinker also makes use of this bias. As a psychology student myself it’s less difficult (but I have to admit, I don’t know everything), but my dad who works in insurance had a hard time reading a few pages.

As you can see, I gave this book five stars. So it can’t be all bad. Firstly, most of the (psychological) knowledge is still very relevant in today's psychological (and more importantly, political) environment, even though it’s at least 20 years old. Whether you like it or not, Pinker deserves credit for this. Many of the ‘assumptions’ that reviewers mention, about are equally as valuable after two decades. Some of these assumptions can’t be classified as assumptions anymore. The now politically incorrect value that some of the paragraphs hold (mostly in the chapter: Family Values) are very effective in debates that for example show the (biological/psychological/reproductive/etc.) differences between men and women.

Lastly, as I’ve stated, I study psychology. This book was a great way to go over the different subjects and building on existing knowledge. The subjects can often be perceived as dull and technical. But Pinker does a great job by adding humor and information of different academic fields to make these subjects easily consumed. Incorporating various disciplines does not only tells you something about the interests of the author but also about (in this case) psychology itself: that psychology is not only composed of psychology. When Pinker writes about an economic concept, to me, it feels as like he is really interested in the whole discipline. This makes me want to read more different books on different subjects to increase my field of interest. The ’power’ to make you want to read more books is (for me) probably the most valuable feature of a book.

Have a great new year’s eve!

Enough already. I started reading this book in September, and for so long I was slogging it joylessly. Today I decided to abandon it, even though I was already at the last chapter.

Very interesting topic, but the book gets really obsessively detailed and repetitive at times. While Pinker have a way of explaining things, I am just frustrated that none of the things he explains have actual hard evidence backing it. It is fine to be able to come up with a seemingly logical explanation for certain human behaviour, but the lack of real evidence just don't cut it for me.

Pinker's treatise on the naturalist mind looks like a science textbook, but the combination of computer programming and physiology laid on top of sociological metaphors and applicable understandings makes it a fantastic read. His ability to diffuse archaic arguments about the nature of the mind without appearing argumentative is what defines him as a great academic, and his ability to explain things to individuals with only a high school education (like me) is what defines him as a great writer.

The assaults on the superstitions of Freud are particularly interesting, and his breaking down of the purely linguistic issue of Searle's "Chinese Box" problem leads you to come to the same conclusion that Pinker does as Pinker is unfolding the problem.

Anyone who likes to study the nature of mind, who enjoys reading authors ranging from Dennett to Proust will like this book, and those who like to discuss the topics will find themselves better informed and far more capable of explaining things with Pinker's metaphors.

This is a truly comprehensive treatment of the human mind. Pinker delves deeply into the reasons why the mind has evolved to make decisions in the way it does. There is very little discussion about the biology of the brain; the book points out that a good understanding of the origins of human behavior requires descriptions at a higher level--at the level of the mind, and how it evolved through natural selection. Pinker shows how natural selection has worked its way into every nook and cranny of the mind ... absolutely fascinating. Every chapter goes into great detail about how our belief system developed, our vision, our reasoning abilities, our family structures, and our emotions. Pinker describes how our minds are similar to computers and neural networks, and how they are different. I've read other books by Pinker, and they are all great. Highly recommended to every human with a mind!