Steven Pinker vs. Robert Wright: Who said what first?

books:


	• How the Mind Works Steven Pinker W. W. Norton & Company, 1999 - 672 pages average customer review:based on 165 reviews view larger image
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Good, but with some minor faults

I also read Steven Pinker's `the Blank Slate', which had been recommended by a friend who knew of my interest in the brain and brain-mind area. I was also, as many other reviewers here, impressed again by Pinker's prose style. The witty asides are often apropos and lighten what might otherwise be a dry description of the findings of neuroscience. However, though I like his style, I don't always agree with Pinker and in the cases where I perceive him being wrong, this witty and cheeky style can verge on the snide or smarmy. There is nothing like a dismissive, cynical remark to deal with those who do not share your point of view. But it's a cheap shot and not worthy of Pinker, who can be much smarter when it suits him. E.g. he does this in his critique of two writers who he implies are almost heretical in daring to challenge the computational theory of the mind: John Searle and Roger Penrose. His cynical put down of these 2 writers implies that they were foolish and justly criticized by the majority of philosophers who favor the computational theory. However, the majority was not as large as implied by Pinker. There are quite a few philosophers who argued for the ideas of Searle with his Chinese Room thought experiment or Penrose with his application of Gödel's theorem to the non-algorhythmic side of thought. Pinker thinks that Searle was only exploring meanings of the word `understand' with his Chinese Room: my own take there is that on the contrary Searle omitted an aspect that didn't sit well with his conscious-brain/digestion-stomach analogy: what was missing in the room was a light floating round the library corresponding to the qualia of understanding the Chinese queries which the western librarian did not understand. Also, the book, being written in 1998, can be excused for putting so much emphasis on identical twins whose behavior is bizarrely similar. But since the Human Genome Project completed in 2003, we know that there are only 22,000 genes corresponding to about 10 megabytes of data. But this data is scarcely sufficient to specify the complexity of the 200 different types of cell in the body, it's 12 or more physiological subsystems and all the (rough) structure of the brain. That is true even if the non-coding RNA is considered to have a control function Thus it is ludicrous to suggest that genes could be responsible for the remarkable synchronization between separated twins as reported by Pinker. Indeed, Pinker's detested ghost in the machine might be a more reasonable explanation for this synchronization - via non-local mind or telepathy. So maybe a new edition of this book is due where some of these anachronisms are tidied up.

There are some good points about the book: I like his dismissal of the behaviourists: his jokes about their predilection for rats etc. are justified. And though he pushes the computational theory further than he should, and re-hashes some older findings from cognitive psychology, his position, though mechanist, is less extreme than that of Skinner & co. and he acknowledges the 'residual' mystery of subjective consciousness and in this sense is justified to call himself a sort of 'mysterian'. This is more than can be said of Dennett or his ilk.

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Steven Pinker vs. Robert Wright: Who said what first?

In the spirit of brevity, Pinker completely reiterates Robert Wright in every sense of the word "reiterates." I won't bore anyone with arbitrary citations.
If you are a reader.
Read Pinker's "How the Mind Works" and then read Robert Wright's "The Moral Animal," I think anyone will agree after checking the publishing dates that Pinker's is at least not innovative or creative.

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dense read

this was the first book of steven pinker's that i've read. it was very interesting at times, but the material was a bit too dense in some parts. it was difficult to glean a point very easily. and not all of the diagrams were helpful in elucidating whatever the text was trying to say. it was an okay, long, read. nevertheless, that hasnt discouraged me from tackling pinker's "the language instinct" next.

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A Logical Mind Interprets and Sees a Logical Mind

I found this book to be excellent and a fun read.

It goes into detail about how one can view the human mind from a logical and behaviorist stand-point. He discusses a computer program type analogy for how a mind can work with a minimum of sub-programs or data types.

I did find the book a little too heavy on the logical and strictly behaviorist point of view. The human mind or any mind for that matter seems a bit more than a simple set of instructions - but this may not be the case.

All in all, I thought this book was excellent and was a good introduction on how to think about how the mind works or could work based on a simplified set of programs and data types and instructions - if you will.

I highly recommend it to anyone interest in psychology or logic.

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A treatise on evolutionary psychology

Steven Pinker, director of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at MIT, argues that the mind is a computational computer. He uses Darwin's concept of reverse engineering to show how most of man's mental and emotional traits evolved.

Pinker also shows how the mind was designed by natural selection to solve the kinds of problems our ancestors faced in their hunter/gatherer existence, which may be why we have such trouble explaining such esoteric concepts as consciousness and sentience.

Pinker does not have a whole lot of respect for Freud, B.F. Skinner, or the Standard Social Science Model, which views the mind as a blank slate at birth. He disdains a moral approach when discussing natural selection, which gets him in trouble with feminists among other value-laden "isms". Instead, he argues for a "module-packed mind" that "allows both for innate motives that lead to evil acts and for innate motives that can avert them."

When discussing the computational mind, Pinker spends a lot of time on the eye. He shows how the eye evolved from light sensitive skin tissue, how humans developed stereoscopic vision leading to a bigger brain, how the brain tricks us into believing that matter is solid, and how seeing in color and in three dimensions led to more brain capacity. Pinker even shows us how the "Mind's eye" works. The eye connects to the brain, but the brain also connects to the eye.

Emotions began with the family and extended to non-family because foragers lived in groups. We love people who carry our genes. Pinker shows how the emotions evolve from the family to non-family relationships using reciprocal altruism. If you grant a favor to another (such as supplying him with meat) and he later returns the favor, you like him. If he cares for you when you are sick with no apparent compensation, you grow to love him. Cheaters inspire other emotions such as anger and resentment and the list grows. Guilt happens when we're cheating and we know it. Sympathy is an emotion for gaining gratitude. Body language ensures that emotions are hard to fake. Most people have scam detectors; you can tell the difference between a real smile and that of a beauty contestant.

Pinker also discusses bi-products of natural selection such as religion, music, philosophy and art. As mentioned earlier, we are blessed (or cursed) with a forager's brain. "The intellect evolved to crack the defense of things in the natural and social world," not answer such questions as "Why do bad things happen to good people?" We are lucky our stone-age minds do as well as they do when tackling complex scientific problems.

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Popular cognitive scientist/linguist what the mind is, how it evolved,and how it allows us to see, think, feel and ponder the mysteries of life.