A very good book, albeit not the quickest read ever.

I’ve read a few popular science books and have been disappointed when they seem to rely more on anecdote than science -- ok, fine, what I really mean is I can’t stand Malcolm Gladwell. How the Mind Works certainly feels much more solidly founded in science while still maintaining the how-science-fits-into-real-life perspective of a popular science book.

It’s not a perfect book. Given the enormous breadth of the topic that Pinker is attempting to cover, it’s forgivable, but still the book does drift occasionally into generalizations that seem more a subjective (though plausible) opinion than convincing fact. Given the great complexity he describes in the lower-level workings of the human brain, I felt surprised at how often he seemed to be over-simplifying higher-level human psychology; at the the same time, of course, I did realize he couldn’t preface every sentence with, “As a generalization that obviously does’t account for all specific details, ...” All in all, it was quite a good, convincing book that felt comfortingly more bound to science than some others I’ve read.

I think this a great way of addressing a widespread misunderstanding about genetics, biological evolution and human thought & behavior.

Slight background story: I was having a discussion with a guy on goodreads.com within his comments on his review of Why I Am Not A Muslim and eventually it came to this:

Myself: "It’s a categorical mistake to think this about biological evolution. To put it bluntly: our genes are selfish, but we are not (not necessarily, unconditionally so at least)."

Him: "One last question, so how are we different than our genes?"

And my reply and the whole point of this post:

This may sound mean, but it’s simple. You are not a gene, nor am I. We’re animals, unique and beautiful and ugly and all qualities in between, both as a species and as individuals.

Here’s an explanation though:

"But almost everyone misunderstands this 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 exception of the fertility doctor who artificially inseminated patients with his own semen, the donor to the sperm bank for Nobel Prize winners, and other kooks, no human being (or animal) strives to spread his or her genes. Dawkins explained the theory in a book called The Selfish Gene, and the metaphor was chosen carefully. People don’t selfishly spread their genes, genes selfishly spread themselves. They do it by the way they build our brains. By making us enjoy life, health, sex, friends, and children, the gene buys a lottery ticket for representation in the next generation, with odds that were favorable in the environment in which we evolved. Our goals are subgoals of the ultimate goal of the genes, replicating themselves. But the two are different. As far as we are concerned, our goals, conscious or unconscious, are not about genes at all, but about health and lovers and children and friends."

That seems to be enough to get the point across, but I think this is such a good point that I’ll type the next paragraph up as well:

"The confusion between our goals and genes’ goals has spawned one muddle after another. A reviewer of a book about the evolution of sexuality protests that human adultery, unlike the animal equivalent, cannot be a strategy to spread genes because adulteres take steps to prevent pregancy. But whose strategy are we talking about? Sexual desire is not people’s strategy to progagate their genes. It’s people’s strategy to attain the pleasures of sex, and the pleasures of sex are the genes strategy to propagate themselves. If the genes don’t get propagated, it’s because we are smarter than they are. A book on the emotional life of animals complains that if altruism according to biologists is just helping kin or exchanging favors, both of which serve the interests of one’s genes, it would not really be altruism after all, but some kind of hypocrisy. This too is a mix up. Just as blueprints don’t necessarily specify blue buildings, selfish genes don’t necessarily specify selfish organisms. As we shall see, sometimes the most selfish thing a gene can do is build a selfless brain. Genes are a play with in a play, not the interior monologue of the players."

-Steven Pinker, How The Mind Works, pp. 43-44

Also, for anyone interested in listening to the audiobook version:

http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list...

The reader sounds like one of those prototypical 1950's or 60's educational film narrators. It works pretty well.

Lots of gud. Lots of meh

5/7. I liked this but I expected to like it more than I did. Some of that may be just because it was written a while ago, and I often felt like I was reading things I've already read about. Some parts I enjoyed more than others -- I enjoyed the later parts about relationships and humor more than the long chapter about the evolution of the eye, which was interesting but more in depth than I needed.

The book does not lack good qualities, but I generally dislike the technique of argumentation that is too often characterized by poor proof backed by a certain arrogance towards alternative explanations. The chapter on the sexes is particularly shoddily presented. The "proof" that Pinker refers to when trying to back his claims that (simply put) evolution and innateness alone explain the differences between the sexes when it comes to attitudes to sex (the male hunter/gatherer has logically a greater chance of spreading his genes since he doesn't have to carry the baby for nine months, and so on) is based on polls filled out by university students. That these students are also caught up in a social reality doesn't seem to have crossed Pinker's mind.

Good scholars know where to draw the boundaries between science and speculation. Chomsky has said that one can learn more about human nature from reading a novel than from scientific psychology. In other words, he knows that his scientific field is limited to a certain aspect of human nature and language, and thus doesn't try to explain more than can be deducted by reasoning from the facts presented. (One can have opinions as to how successful Chomskyan linguistic science actually is, but that's another matter.) Certainly, Pinker is allowed to speculate, as is any scientist. The problem is that Pinker's speculations are sometimes presented as truths. Therefore, this book does, despite some interesting facts being presented in it, leave me with a bitter taste in my mouth.

This book is amazing. I recommend everyone who loves psychology, neuroscience, and also philosophy. I recommend this also for people who are curious about why things are the way they are. This answers questions about why certain people think about certain things. I enjoyed mostly the chapter that mentioned how we would convince aliens that we are intelligent beings if they were to arrive. How they would differentiate us from cats and dogs and animals. It also answers questions about why robots cannot be created and I recommend it because it asks some questions that I have not really thought about before and it was very interesting to view the perspective of Steven Pinker since it very much is not similar to mine.

This is the book I've been needing to read for so long now, ever since I started questioning ecerything I've been told, or better said after learning that the answers I had about life and us humans were actually poor excuses of an answer.
This book is sharp, it's focused, well-balanced, and has humour, without it being in any way malitious to any other theories that have been proposed on the big questions we have in our minds: what and how does conscience work, what is moral, who is that "me" I feel, and where does it come from.
The authour wanted for us to get outside the framing of our minds and acknowledging it for what it is: a marvelous result of natural selection.

This book covers the computational theory of mind and evolutionary psychology. The former asserts that the mind is the computational product of the brain. The later examines how many aspects of human nature can be explained as biological adaptations. Both are crucial to understanding how the mind works. Both are explained in exquisite depth (read: this is a very long book).

Pinker gets one thing wrong at the end when he asserts what's known as the the "hard problem of consciousness" which his refers to as sentience. He also makes a misstatement about free will.

"Sentience is not a combination of brain events or computational states."

"Free will is not a causal chain of events and states by definition."

This is frustrating because I feel like he ran a 3 minute mile but stopped just shy of the finish line!

He's wrong on both counts. For more read Freedom Evolves by Daniel Dennett.

This is a huge book which cannot be skimmed. The basic idea is computational theory of mind rather than neurons, synapse, and chemical reactions. I found the computational sections interesting but really bogged down in the parts where he illustrates his theories on mind biology in terms of natural selection as reserved in the genes rather than any learned or taught via psychological response. "The mind is a neural computer, fitted by natural selection with combinatorial algorithms for causal and probalistic reasoning about plants, animals, objects, and people. It is driven by goal states that served biological fitness in ancestral environments, such as food, sex, safety, parenthood, friendship, status, and knowledge." p.524 What matters most is "mechanism that brings about effects that would increase the number of copies of the genes building the nechanism in the environment in which we evolved." p.526

The cultural references were age appropriate for a boomer and will date this book for younger audiences and in the near future. For example, Bob Dylan, "When you got nothing, you got nothing to lose."

I didn't like it. I have read two books by Steven Pinker so far (Enlightenment Now and The Better Angels of Our Nature) and had to struggle through both. I dislike the way Steven Pinker presents his arguments, I despise his arrogance and the way he dismisses different theories, I hate his chatty approach to popular science.

I really enjoyed the chapter in computational theory of mind and the discussions of intelligence and mental representations. Other chapters, not so much; low-level vision science is woefully boring (that’s a personal preference though) and using evolutionary theory still remains a “grand theory of everything” that can be used as a post-hoc explanation of some but not all interpersonal phenomena.

A good book for many new facts, ideas and theories, but jumpy and without radical new conclusions.

The title of the book is a misnomer. The author frequently gets excited about explaining evolution, whether in organs, thoughts or behaviours. He tries to justify these wanderings by vaguely linking to the mind but if there is any central theme in the book, it is less related to the workings of the mind than justifications of evolutionary theories.

That said, the book's rich details are exciting for anyone with patience and desire to learn. The book does get difficult for non-experts in parts (particularly the section on eye), but the breadth of the topics covered is still fascinating and shows the efforts put in by the author. While the author refrains from taking strong assertive stands (so are minds automatons with all experiences an illusion? something the author tries to support indirectly without taking a firm stand), the author - like most critics - has more fun poking holes in alternate theories including religious or Freudian varieties.