if i could give it -3/5, i would

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.

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.

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.

The title of the book should have read "How the Mind Works (According to Steven Pinker)." The picture he paints is not wrong, per se, but vastly overestimates the power of current cognitive modeling.

There is quite a bit of good material here reviewing computational theory of mind, modularity, evolutionary psychology, and related material in cognitive science written in Pinker's usual conversational style. However, I have to hop off the bandwagon at the halfway point on this one. Sure, computational theory of mind has produced a lot of fruitful research. The mind is, to some degree, modular. The brain, like all our other organs, is shaped by evolution. My main problem is in his jump from the modularity at "low-level" cognition (e.g., basic sensory input, certain parts of language) posited by Jerry A. Fodor to "massive modularity." There are some functions that are very localized in the brain that fit with modularity, but we would expect the brain to look very different if massive modularity were true. The brain is actually very plastic with many higher-order functions that aren't strictly localized. The same thing goes for his evolutionary explanations. I will happily agree that many cognitive systems and functions are adaptive -- having eyes and a visual system is obviously beneficial! When it comes to more complex social behaviors, we're in far more speculative territory.

As an introduction to cognitive science, it does present the material in an accessible way. However, it will be difficult to for the layperson to pick apart where Pinker's description is backed by solid evidence and where it lapses into questionable claims and rank speculation. There's a bit of fluff, too, especially near the end when it begins to cross over into the more overt political rambling characteristic of The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature.

Fodor's The Mind Doesn't Work That Way: The Scope and Limits of Computational Psychology (http://cogweb.ucla.edu/Abstracts/Fodo...) makes for a decent corrective, though I have problems with it as well. I'm in total agreement on one point with Fodor, though: When it comes to cognitive science, we're just getting started.

VALUTAZIONE PERSONALE: 3,4

How Mind Works é senza dubbio uno dei saggi più lunghi e corposi che mi sia capitato di leggere: ho impiegato moltissimo tempo a terminarlo, un po' a causa dei mille impegni che, purtroppo, riducono sempre più il tempo da dedicare alla lettura, un po' per la sua lunghezza e, perché no, per la noia che alcune sezioni del libro mi hanno trasmesso, in particolar modo i primi capitoli, sebbene, col senno di poi, é risultato evidente che siano quelli più importanti e significativi nell'esporre al lettore la teoria di base dell'autore circa il funzionamento della mente umana.

Per i suddetti motivi, giunto al termine di questo libro, mi ritrovo senza dubbio in difficoltà nel ricordare tutti i passaggi: posso tuttavia cogliere il nocciolo della questione e sintetizzare dicendo che alla base di tutte le considerazioni che l'autore espone al lettore vi é la teoria computazionale della mente. A cosa si riferisce, nella sostanza? Non mi resta che citare direttamente un passo del libro:

"Lo speciale status del cervello deriva dalla sua speciale funzione, che ci permette di vedere, pensare, provare sensazioni, scegliere e agire. Questa funzione speciale è l’elaborazione di informazioni, o computazione. Informazione e computazione risiedono in pattern, o configurazioni, di dati e in rapporti di logica che sono indipendenti dal medium fisico che li trasporta. Quando telefono a mia madre in un’altra città, il messaggio rimane lo stesso che va dalle mie labbra alle sue orecchie, anche se cambia forma fisica: da aria in vibrazione a elettricità in un filo, a cariche nel silicio, a luce guizzante in un cavo a fibre ottiche, a onde elettromagnetiche, e ritorno seguendo il percorso inverso. Analogamente, il messaggio rimane lo stesso quando, dopo aver cambiato forma nella sua testa diventando una cascata di neuroni che si attivano e di sostanze chimiche che si diffondono attraverso sinapsi, lei lo ripete a mio padre seduto sul lato opposto del divano. Allo stesso modo, un dato programma può correre su computer fatti di tubi a vuoto, commutatori elettromagnetici, transistor, circuiti integrati, o piccioni viaggiatori ben addestrati, e ottiene gli stessi risultati per le stesse ragioni. Tale intuizione, espressa per la prima volta dal matematico Alan Turing, dagli informatici Allen Newell, Herbert Simon e Marvin Minsky e dai filosofi Hilary Putnam e Jerry Fodor, è ora detta teoria computazionale della mente".

Altro punto fondamentale é il seguente: l'ingegneria inversa.
Ancora, per dirla con le sue stesse parole:

"...la mente è un sistema di organi di computazione designato per selezione naturale a risolvere i problemi posti ai nostri antenati dalla loro condizione di cacciatori-raccoglitori, in particolare come capire e sfruttare oggetti, animali, piante e altre persone. Tale sintesi è scomponibile in più affermazioni. La mente è ciò che il cervello fa; in particolare, il cervello elabora informazioni, e pensare è una sorta di computazione. La mente è organizzata in moduli, o organi mentali, dotati ognuno di una specializzazione che ne fa un esperto in un singolo terreno d’interazione con il mondo. La logica base dei moduli è specificata dal nostro programma genetico. Il loro funzionamento si è modellato per selezione naturale in modo da risolvere i problemi della vita di cacciatori e raccoglitori condotta dai nostri antenati durante la maggior parte della nostra storia evoluzionistica. I vari problemi dei nostri antenati erano sottocompiti di un unico grande problema dei loro geni: massimizzare il numero di copie capaci di giungere alla generazione successiva. In quest’ottica, la psicologia è ingegneria inversa. Nell’ingegneria normale si costruisce una macchina per un certo scopo; nell’ingegneria inversa si cerca di capire per quale scopo una macchina è stata costruita. "

Posso dunque concludere dicendo che tutti i più grandi aspetti della psicologia umana progressivamente esposti nei vari capitoli vengono affrontati ed elaborati tenendo conto dei due capisaldi precedentemente citati, e non vi sono dubbi che moltissimi passaggi sono estremamente stimolanti per il lettore e che, almeno personalmente, mi hanno "convinto" nella loro semplicità quanto efficacia propositiva.

Tuttavia, alcune considerazioni mi hanno indotto a mantenere un atteggiamento tiepido, entusiasta ma al contempo sufficientemente distaccato e critico nei confronti di ciò che leggevo:

1) How Mind Works é un libro estremamente datato (la prima edizione risale ai primi anni Novanta), soprattutto per i temi trattati: campi come la neurobiologia e la neuropsicologia sono in rapida evoluzione. Sebbene nella prefazione a questa edizione l' autore afferma che l'impianto generale del saggio continua ad essere valido, non sono sufficientemente edotto su queste materie e sui suoi più recenti sviluppi per poter credere acriticamente ad una affermazione simile;
2) l'efficacia divulgativa di Pinker, su temi così opinabili e controversi, mi é parsa piuttosto limitata: non perché non sia capace nell'esporli ai non addetti ai lavori (sebbene alcuni passaggi non sono semplicissimi da capire per chi non ha almeno delle conoscenze basilari in questo campi, mentre altri li ho trovati mortalmente noiosi proprio per il modo in cui erano esposti), ma perché ho avuto l' impressione che l'autore non avesse potuto fare a meno di polemizzare, talvolta anche inopportunamente, con i suoi oppositori, nonché di apparire politically uncorrect ogni qualvolta se ne presentasse l' occasione.
Insomma, non mi ha fatto impazzire il suo stile divulgativo, per dirla in breve.

In conclusione, vale davvero la pena cimentarsi nella lettura di questo librone? Le idee proposte sono estremamente interessanti,e vale la pena approfondirle e tenerle in buona considerazione; il lavoro bibliografico é enorme e di certo non si può dire che sia qualitativamente scadente, tutt'altro.
É "l'anzianità" del libro, nonché lo stile espositivo dell' autore ( sempre secondo il mio umilissimo parere) che fanno pendere la bilancia dal lato opposto: insomma, andrei sicuramente alla ricerca di un testo piú aggiornato e più efficace nell' esposizione di questi argomenti.

I didn't enjoy this book. I struggled through to halfway because a friend insisted it gets better later on. However, the main thing I didn't like was his writing style and I'm pretty sure that doesn't change. In summary I'd say he waffles a lot, the book is poorly structured, he argues points poorly and I found the content uninformative.

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!

JAK DZIAŁA UMYSŁ? jest książką ryzykowną, bo po jej przeczytaniu, a nawet po przeczytaniu paru rozdziałów... nawet po przeczytaniu jednego rozdziału - czytelnika przejmuje dziwny, nieopisany lęk. Jest to strach przed zrozumieniem.
Choć instynktownie dążymy do odpowiedzi, to droga szukania jest milsza, od mety. Meta, to koniec, a ludzie nie lubią końców, ludzie lubią biec. Steven Pinker podsumowuje nasze wiadomości o umyśle i tworzy spójną całość, która zadziwia i (jak już wspomniałam) trochę straszy.
To wielkie tomiszcze odkrywa - w prosty i zrozumiały sposób - przed odbiorcą możliwości naszych umysłów. Oczywiście nie daje wszystkich odpowiedzi, bo już na wstępie zapowiedziano, że o UMYŚLE wiemy mniej niż o całym naszym organizmie, ale serwuje obfity posiłek.
Lubię książki o tej tematyce, zdecydowanie poszerzają horyzonty i zmieniają sposób patrzenia na siebie - w lustrze... niby zabawne, ale może niekoniecznie. Bo co tak naprawdę wiemy? Czego możemy się złapać? By nie zwariować...? Wszystko jest w głowie, nasze zachowanie, nasze poglądy, nasze wartości, etyka, moralność, preferencje... skąd się to bierze? Jak to kontrolować? Pytania bez odpowiedzi - lub z jedną odpowiedzią: UMYSŁ.
Zdecydowanie to książka na długie podczytywanie, bo wiadomości jest moc, ale czyta się to bardzo dobrze. Steven Pinker potrafi w zrozumiale przekazać dość skomplikowane tematy- to wieki atut. Przeczytałam sporo książek w tym temacie i mogę wstępnie ocenić, że ta jest jedną z lepszych. Może dlatego, że podchodzi do tematu holistycznie, przeplata zrozumiałe z niezrozumiałym i wyciąga najbardziej prawdopodobne wnioski - a może to przez styl, popularnonaukowy, który czasem staje się gawędziarki. Śą też anegdoty, przykłady i umysłowe zagadki - które wciągają.
Polecam zainteresowanym tematem. Będziecie zadowoleni i zdecydowanie wyciągniecie z tej pozycji coś dla siebie. Pewne rzeczy inaczej wam się poukładają w głowie i pewnie będziecie musieli przemyśleć swoje i innych zachowanie, ale to wszystko raczej na plus... prawda?

co nam siedzi w głowie? zagadka!
7/10
Wydawnictwo Zysk i S-ka

This was a big brain book!

I had this on my list for a while and kept putting it off, but it got a nudge when I was reading a review copy of A Skeptic’s Faith: Why Scientific Materialism Cannot Be the Whole Truth and the author didn’t even make it off the first page without misrepresenting Pinker twice, in a derivative (and incorrect) single sentence summation of this book and another from The Language Instinct. I’d read the latter, but not this one. So… (he sent me down a lot of other rabbit holes with his clever word twists; but this was the longest read.) One problem with someone of Pinker’s status is that there are people who take everything he says as gospel (pardon the non secular ref), dismiss everything, and as I learned, distort what he says. And, of course, there are those of us who read everything with two bookmarks: one for where I stop, and one in the Notes section for checking, and when I jump off the check the reference. Sometimes those are tedious, and sometimes they are hard to find (if at all).

I said of The Language Instinct, “Pinker could have made his point very well in 100 pages. I admire succinct conveyance of knowledge. Pinker sure has a way of complicating concepts with extraneous details. I didn't admire this book.” Now, I do admire Pinker. And he probably could have made all his points in this book in 200, not 660, pages. Tedious at times to sift the good stuff.

Now, this book is 25 years old and a lot of progress has been made in the fields Pinker discusses. Still, he makes good points, however prolix {grin}.

Curated highlights and notes:

“There are millions of animal species on earth, each with a different set of cognitive programs. The same basic neural tissue embodies all of these programs, and it could support many others as well. Facts about the properties of neurons, neurotransmitters, and cellular development cannot tell you which of these millions of programs the human mind contains. Even if all neural activity is the expression of a uniform process at the cellular level, it is the arrangement of neurons—into bird song templates or web-spinning programs—that matters.”
{A neuron is a neuron, and the arrangement matters. Those arrangements give rise to thought and without them, thought doesn’t exist.}

“When the first face recognizers are installed in buildings to replace doormen, they will not even try to interpret the chiaroscuro of your face but will scan in the hard-edged, rigid contours of your iris or your retinal blood vessels. ”
{Facial recognition isn’t a fiction anymore.}

“The hand can be configured into a hook grip (to lift a pail), a scissors grip (to hold a cigarette), a five-jaw chuck (to lift a coaster), a three-jaw chuck (to hold a pencil), a two-jaw pad-to-pad chuck (to thread a needle), a two-jaw pad-to-side chuck (to turn a key), a squeeze grip (to hold a hammer), a disc grip (to open ajar), and a spherical grip (to hold a ball). Each grip needs a precise combination of muscle tensions that mold the hand into the right shape and keep it there as the load tries to bend it back.”
{I liked this description.}

“An intelligent system, then, cannot be stuffed with trillions of facts. It must be equipped with a smaller list of core truths and a set of rules to deduce their implications. But the rules of common sense, like the categories of common sense, are frustratingly hard to set down. ”
And if they are set down, they can’t be immutable.}

“Why give a robot an order to obey orders—why aren’t the original orders enough? Why command a robot not to do harm—wouldn’t it be easier never to command it to do harm in the first place?”
{This is silly. New orders are different than preprogrammed orders. As to the second, somebody wishing harm may not have the restraint to not command such.}

“The computer running WordPerfect on your desk will continue to fill paragraphs for as long as it does anything at all. Its software will not insidiously mutate into depravity like the picture of Dorian Gray.”
{But Bing chat did.}

“The far-reaching effects of the genes have been documented in scores of studies and show up no matter how one tests for them: by comparing twins reared apart and reared together, by comparing identical and fraternal twins, or by comparing adopted and biological children. And despite what critics sometimes claim, the effects are not products of coincidence, fraud, or subtle similarities in the family environments (such as adoption agencies striving to place identical twins in homes that both encourage walking into the ocean backwards).”
{Uh oh. Genes driving actions and behaviors? Oh, the outcry from the religious, anti-determinists, and libertarians alike.}


“Cognitive science helps us to understand how a mind is possible and what kind of mind we have. Evolutionary biology helps us to understand why we have the kind of mind we have.”

“... the mind is not the brain but what the brain does, and not even everything it does, such as metabolizing fat and giving off heat.”
{Dualists have a hard time with the mind not being something separate instead of "what the brain does"}

“The computational theory of mind resolves the paradox. It says that beliefs and desires are information, incarnated as configurations of symbols. The symbols are the physical states of bits of matter, like chips in a computer or neurons in the brain. ”
{This is it. This will vex the philosophers, theo-folk, and anyone not understanding that the brain makes the mind.}

“Many of us have been puzzled by the takeover of humanities departments by the doctrines of postmodernism, poststructuralism, and deconstructionism, according to which objectivity is impossible, meaning is self-contradictory, and reality is socially constructed. ”

“Since the modern mind is adapted to the Stone Age, not the computer age, there is no need to strain for adaptive explanations for everything we do. Our ancestral environment lacked the institutions that now entice us to nonadaptive choices, such as religious orders, adoption agencies, and pharmaceutical companies, so until very recently there was never a selection pressure to resist the enticements”
{Spot on. We are not far enough removed from those Stone Age roots for them to be evolutionary decimal dust.}

“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 donors 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. ”
{Cue the old Jewish trope: ah-haaa!}

“[...] the mass of information processing in the nervous system falls into two pools. One pool, which includes the products of vision and the contents of short-term memory, can be accessed by the systems underlying verbal reports, rational thought, and deliberate decision making. The other pool, which includes autonomic (gut-level) responses, the internal calculations behind vision, language, and movement, and repressed desires or memories (if there are any), cannot be accessed by those systems. Sometimes information can pass from the first pool to the second or vice versa. When we first learn how to use a stick shift, every motion has to be thought out, but with practice the skill becomes automatic. With intense concentration and biofeedback, we can focus on a hidden sensation like our heartbeat.”

“The two deepest questions about the mind are “What makes intelligence possible?” and “What makes consciousness possible?” With the advent of cognitive science, intelligence has become intelligible.”
{Leaving, still, the question of what makes consciousness possible.}

“The chasm between what can be measured by a physicist and what can cause behavior is the reason we must credit people with beliefs and desires.
In our daily lives we all predict and explain other people's behavior from what we think they know and what we think they want. Beliefs and desires are the explanatory tools of our own intuitive psychology, and intuitive psychology is the most useful and complete science of behavior there is.”
{Complete? Uh, okay. Don't forget that it is still just a guess.}

“The traditional explanation of intelligence is that human flesh is suffused with a non-material entity, the soul, usually envisioned as some kind of ghost or spirit. But the theory faces an insurmountable problem: How does the spook interact with solid matter? ”
{This.}

“Of course, something about the tissue in the human brain is necessary for our intelligence, but the physical properties are not sufficient, just as the physical properties of bricks are not sufficient to explain architecture and the physical properties of oxide particles are not sufficient to explain music. Something in the patterning of neural tissue is crucial.”
{And this.}

“No, intelligence does not come from a special kind of spirit or matter or energy but from a different commodity, information. ”
{AND....this!}

“These are called the “causal” and the “inferential-role” theories, and philosophers hostile to each have had fun thinking up preposterous thought experiments to refute them. ”
{Pastime of philosophers is thinking if questions that can't be answered, then answering them (ostensibly)> And, it seems, knocking about with other philosophers.}

“We don’t need spirits or occult forces to explain intelligence. Nor, in an effort to look scientific, do we have to ignore the evidence of our own eyes and claim that human beings are bundles of conditioned associations, puppets of the genes, or followers of brutish instincts. We can have both the agility and discernment of human thought and a mechanistic framework in which to explain it. ”
{Yes.}

“If we could ever duplicate the information processing in the human mind as an enormous computer program, would a computer running the program be conscious?”

“One of the reasons God was invented was to be the mind that formed and executed life’s plans.”

“Mencken when he wrote, “Theology is the effort to explain the unknowable in terms of the not worth knowing.”

“For anyone with a persistent intellectual curiosity, religious explanations are not worth knowing because they pile equally baffling enigmas on top of the original ones. ”
{This goes in the quote pile.}

“Maybe philosophical problems are hard not because they are divine or irreducible or meaningless or workaday science, but because the mind of Homo sapiens lacks the cognitive equipment to solve them. ”

“And perhaps we cannot solve conundrums like free will and sentience.”

“It is easy to draw extravagant and unwarranted conclusions from the suggestion that our minds lack the equipment to solve the major problems of philosophy. It does not say that there is some paradox of self-reference or infinite regress in a mind’s trying to understand itself. Psychologists and neuroscientists don’t study their own minds; they study someone else’s. Nor does it imply some principled limitation on the possibility of knowledge by any knower, like the Uncertainty Principle or Gödel’s theorem. It is an observation about one organ of one species, equivalent to observing that cats are color-blind or that monkeys cannot learn long division. It does not justify religious or mystical beliefs but explains why they are futile.”
{I need to give Pinker more of his due.}

“The computational aspect of consciousness (what information is available to which processes), the neurological aspect (what in the brain correlates with consciousness), and the evolutionary aspect (when and why did the neurocomputational aspects emerge) are perfectly tractable, and I see no reason that we should not have decades of progress and eventually a complete understanding—even if we never solve residual brain-teasers like whether your red is the same as my red or what it is like to be a bat.”

“First, if the mind is a system of organs designed by natural selection, why should we ever have expected it to comprehend all mysteries, to grasp all truths? We should be thankful that the problems of science are close enough in structure to the problems of our foraging ancestors that we have made the progress that we have. ”
{And there again are the primitive roots we aren't so evolutionarily far from.}

In this book, Steven Pinker describes our mind - more precisely: our mental faculties - as a complex set of algorithms, sculpted by natural selection. Pinker uses two theories - the computational theory of mind and the theory of evolution by natural selection - to accomplish this amazing feat.

According to the computational theory of mind, our mental organs are composed of algorithms, built up out of simpler subroutines which are in turn built up out of subsubroutines. This goes all the way down to the most basic, simplest algorithms that are digital: yes/no, on/off, etc. What it means, in essence, is that we come equipped with pre-programmed mental software with which we perceive the world. This software works is based on certain assumptions - based on the stability and the continuity of physical laws - and it's in the moments that the assumptions don't hold that we are tricked or fooled by our own mind (i.e. cognitive illusions).

The other building block of Pinkers story is evolution by natural selection. Evolution shaped all the organisms on this planet, including us. Homo sapiens is unique in its mental capabilities, even though our mind is just one way to solve the natural problems (some others being strong, quick, etc.). I think the theory of evolution by natural selection has been described by excellent writers such as Dawkins, Dennett, Ridley and Zimmer (not to mention Darwin himself, even though his theory of inheritence was flawed), so I will not dwell on it here.

Now to Pinkers main thesis: to understand our mind, we have to reverse-engineer our mental organs. In other words: for every psychological trait or phenomenon we have to ask the question 'what was its adaptive function in our ancestors' environment?' It is precisely this question that cuts deep through the delusional paradigms of modern day academicians and intellectuals. The mantra is "culture determines who we are". In other words: men rape because they are raised in a culture that's hostile to women. Instead of letting ideology guide science, Pinker approaches the problem from a scientific viewpoint: first describing the facts, then using the simplest theory as possible to explain the data and after this making moral statements. Some examples:

In the chapter on Family Values, Pinker tackles the conflicts of interests between parents and offspring, husbands and wives, men and women in general and siblings. He explains these conflicts in terms of different evolutionary strategies between men and women. It pays for men to seek out sex as much as possible; it pays for women to be very selective who to mate with. This is a biological truth that even feminists and neo-marxists/blank slaters can't deny. This fundamental difference leads to competition between men for sexual access to women and to the pursuit of looking young and fertile (i.e. beautiful) between women. One of the most overlooked facts that Pinker mentions in this chapter is that a lot of the incentives for war, rape and murder are sexual motives. Maybe the men joining the army are not so crazy after all: throughout history, one of the most important rewards of victorious armies has been the genocide of men and kids and the mass rape of women. Pinkers paradigm offers new insights into our urge for agression.

But this is not all, Pinkers paradigm also offers new insights into our urge to have friends and seek out honest reputations. Evolutionary speaking, it paid to cooperate. The only problem is that this presupposes cheater-detection mechanisms, which are prone to be exploited. One of the most important parts of our social life is the earning of an honest reputation; this shows others that you are a reliable cooperator.

A third interesting aspect was the chapter on vision. Pinker analyzes the geometry of paintings and other visual art forms. One of the common threads is the presence of open landscapes with a broad horizon and some places of shelter. This was the environment our ancestors evolved in, it explains our like for these sorts of paintings and surroundings and our dislike for thick forests and deserts.

A fourth insight is the way how our ideas are formed. We come equipped with mental software to perceive the world - including the other minds in this world - and to make decisions. These algorithms are heuristic in nature. In other words: they are based on assumptions that normally held in our ancestors' environment. Sometimes we encounter situations where these assumptions don't hold and we fall prey to cognitive illusions. For example, it is commonly known that the frame in which a logical problem is placed determines the effectivity of our judgments.

A final important subject to note is the function of our emotions. Our emotions guide are actions, they are the incentives that lead us to chase pleasure and avoid pain. The objects of pleasure and pain are goals, set by evolution. We enjoy sex because organisms (i.e. our ancestors) that enjoyed sex had more sex and thereby had more offspring than organisms that didn't enjoy sex. We enjoy certain foods because our ancestors enjoyed those foods - and those that didn't had less offspring. In a sense, Hume was right when he wrote "reason is the slave of our passions." Our passions motive us to seek out the things we enjoy and avoid the things we hate.

To summarize: Pinker tries to show that by looking at our psychology as mental organs, consisting of algorithms, that were sculpted by natural selection in the past eons, we have a new paradigm to understand our mind. A paradigm based on two of the most accepted theories in science and one that excludes ideology. Only a realistic understanding of our mental constitution can lead us to appreciate what is good and what should be changed for the better. An informed ethics presupposes evolutionary psychology.

Even though I completely agree with Pinker's message and am interested in evolutionary psychology, I can't really recommend this book to laypeople. It would be better, before reading How the Mind Works, to school yourself in evolutionary biology and psychology, because Pinker's style of explaining is not for the faint hearted; he makes use of many terms that presuppose a lot of prior knowledge about the subjects involved. And a thing that annoyed me is the sheer mass of this book: 660 pages. Some chapters contained 90+ pages, which is way too long (in my opinion).

But I should not end this review on a sour note, this was a pleasant read and value the various insights I gained from this.

On a sidenote: Pinker's treatment of free will and consciousness is confusing. On the one hand, he makes valuable distinctions. So when he deals with consciousness, he makes a distinction between self knowledge, access to information and sentience and explains that the first to senses are in theory explainable by science. This is helpful. On the other hand, Pinker offers no route to answers himself and seems to retreat in a very un-academic mindset with regard to these topics. So in the example of consciousness, even though the first two aforementioned senses are explainable in scientific terms, sentience is not. Even stronger: our mind has been shaped by natural selection to deal with everyday problems and situations, offering the solution to the riddle of sentience not being one of them. In other words: the problem of consciousness is unsolvable in principle and we should not waste any more intellectual effort on this futile search. A very un-scientific mindset. (In 1542 people thought the earth was the centre of the cosmos; in 1543 Copernicus showed the earth to be just another mass of iron orbiting the sun; in the 20th century we discovered that even our sun is not so special: we live in an increasingly expanding universe in which we are just a temporary spec of dust).