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bigbookslilreads's review against another edition
Dropped at ~70%. While I overall liked the book when I was reading it on audio, I think I was a bit too forgiving of it. Switching to ebook made me realise how monotonous it is, and also how "old" it is in its arguments. When I got to the part stating women don't seek out pornography, I laughed and quietly set it down, probably to never pick it up again.
kimball_hansen's review against another edition
4.0
Fascinating.
Anything who calls itself a human being will benefit by reading this book. I loved that it branched from the science of how an eye works to selecting a spouse. It was fairly easy to understand for someone with a non-neurological background.
Anything who calls itself a human being will benefit by reading this book. I loved that it branched from the science of how an eye works to selecting a spouse. It was fairly easy to understand for someone with a non-neurological background.
bupdaddy's review against another edition
4.0
I appreciate that Pinker doesn't pretend that his exploration and analysis of the brain doesn't really explain consciousness, self-awareness, and that he admits that nobody has explained them, even if they claim to. So right away, I get that he gets it's a tough problem, and it's too easy to say consciousness doesn't exist.
It does.
The early chapters, then, are pretty interesting. So were the later chapters, but Pinker seemed to forget what his book was about when he got into the chapter about families and sexual behavior. Interesting, but too far away from how the brain works. And really long.
Then I liked the last chapter again, especially the ending. If philosophers for millennia haven't been able to reconcile self-awareness with meat and electrical impulses, maybe it's not the problem is unsolvable, but only that our brains aren't made to think like that. We evolved to do what we do well, and things that are visual (for instance, geometry, our understanding of time) are right up our alley. Maybe, just like most people can't really imagine 4 dimensions the way they are, because our brains just aren't made for it, so we can't really understand consciousness. I'll keep looking, but maybe that's correct, too.
It does.
The early chapters, then, are pretty interesting. So were the later chapters, but Pinker seemed to forget what his book was about when he got into the chapter about families and sexual behavior. Interesting, but too far away from how the brain works. And really long.
Then I liked the last chapter again, especially the ending. If philosophers for millennia haven't been able to reconcile self-awareness with meat and electrical impulses, maybe it's not the problem is unsolvable, but only that our brains aren't made to think like that. We evolved to do what we do well, and things that are visual (for instance, geometry, our understanding of time) are right up our alley. Maybe, just like most people can't really imagine 4 dimensions the way they are, because our brains just aren't made for it, so we can't really understand consciousness. I'll keep looking, but maybe that's correct, too.
branch_c's review against another edition
4.0
I first read this after it came out about 15 years ago and was already becoming a big fan of Pinker. Reading it again now, I see that I'd forgotten much about his forceful defense of evolutionary psychology - probably because it was only a few years ago that I recognized that it needed defending. It's such a powerful explanatory tool that there is clearly some truth to it, regardless of the exact details about the mind's modularity. So at the time I read this, it was a fascinating introduction to what I assumed would be the accepted state of the art of scientific thought in this area. Now, with critics bashing EP for reasons as much about political correctness as they are about rigorous science, it's worth re-reading Pinker's clear and confident assurances of its validity.
There is extensive discussion of and reliance on the knowledge of evolution in general, which of course is exactly how it must be - to understand why a body part looks or behaves the way it does, it has to be viewed in light of the process that it resulted from. The mind is not exempt from natural selection, and it's strange that many people who know better claim that it should be. While the basics of evolution may be already familiar to readers from other sources, and some of the material, such as the list of hominid ancestors, may have become outdated in recent years, Pinker's writing is so good that it's nevertheless a pleasure to read.
He also managed to brilliantly shut down the free will debate back when I was obviously still fuzzy on it (since I later went on to read Dennett's overly complicated attempts at justifying claims of its existence) on p. 55: "...ethical theory requires idealizations like free, sentient, rational, equivalent agents whose behavior is uncaused, and its conclusions can be sound and useful even though the world, as seen by science, does not really have uncaused events". Seems like I would have gotten the point if I'd been paying better attention!
There are numerous other surprisingly clear explanations of initially mysterious phenomena, from stereo vision to emotion to categorization. On the other hand, some of the explanations do seem a bit overly laborious now, either because some of what he explains really has become accepted and now goes without saying, or maybe just because the computation related explanations are common knowledge among software professionals. But you have to admire the well-structured way that the reader is led through the arguments to their logical conclusions.
Bottom line: as bluntly audacious as the book's title may seem, Pinker actually does achieve his goal. The explanation in this book really is, to the best of our knowledge, how the mind works.
There is extensive discussion of and reliance on the knowledge of evolution in general, which of course is exactly how it must be - to understand why a body part looks or behaves the way it does, it has to be viewed in light of the process that it resulted from. The mind is not exempt from natural selection, and it's strange that many people who know better claim that it should be. While the basics of evolution may be already familiar to readers from other sources, and some of the material, such as the list of hominid ancestors, may have become outdated in recent years, Pinker's writing is so good that it's nevertheless a pleasure to read.
He also managed to brilliantly shut down the free will debate back when I was obviously still fuzzy on it (since I later went on to read Dennett's overly complicated attempts at justifying claims of its existence) on p. 55: "...ethical theory requires idealizations like free, sentient, rational, equivalent agents whose behavior is uncaused, and its conclusions can be sound and useful even though the world, as seen by science, does not really have uncaused events". Seems like I would have gotten the point if I'd been paying better attention!
There are numerous other surprisingly clear explanations of initially mysterious phenomena, from stereo vision to emotion to categorization. On the other hand, some of the explanations do seem a bit overly laborious now, either because some of what he explains really has become accepted and now goes without saying, or maybe just because the computation related explanations are common knowledge among software professionals. But you have to admire the well-structured way that the reader is led through the arguments to their logical conclusions.
Bottom line: as bluntly audacious as the book's title may seem, Pinker actually does achieve his goal. The explanation in this book really is, to the best of our knowledge, how the mind works.
peelspls's review against another edition
4.0
This is fairly detailed analysis of several neural mechanisms and how they work. I also found the author's writing style engaging and his humor charming in most parts. The book taught me to look at different parts of the perceptive experience differently, and the computational effort underlying piecing together information from multiple stimuli.
bradchassse's review against another edition
5.0
The beginning and end were the most interesting. Some parts became pretty technical like how the eye works. I got bored half the time but some parts were really thought provoking. Like Pinkers other books, I definitely recommend it to anyone. Especially if you don't have a background in psychology.
zkendall's review against another edition
4.0
Nice introduction.
Edit: I just realized I listened to an abridged version. Damn!
Edit: I just realized I listened to an abridged version. Damn!
rebeccacider's review against another edition
4.0
Very interesting, well-written, and comprehensive. I appreciated the overview of both computational and evolutionary psychology in one tome of a book; computational psychology is pretty much awesome, and though I must confess that I skipped some of the technical examples in an effort to prevent my brain from breaking, Pinker's writing was for the most part clear and explanatory. I learned a lot!
I would be interested to find out whether any of the specific evolutionary theories have become passe over the last ten years, since a great deal of new research must have come out since then. A second edition would be great if necessary.
I still have reservations about the conclusion of the book. Basically, Pinker says that the computational view of the mind means that consciousness - the ability of the mind to actually experience stimulus and thought, like the taste of a strawberry or the redness of red - has no apparent function. People could go through the complex computational steps of mental activity without experiencing any of it. There is no way to prove that the person sitting next to you is not a "philosophical zombie," who acts like they think and feel but is really just a mechanical thing.
Not only does this mean I have no solid proof that all of you aren't just automatons, but no can explain why we experience things to begin with! Very perverse philosophers have attempted to argue that experience is an illusion, but of course this makes very little sense. Pinker is forced to conclude that our brains are just not smart enough to solve a peculiar problem like the nature of consciousness and self, along with some other potential philosophical problems like the possibility of absolute morality or the ability of language to refer to real things (don't understand the problem with this last one myself.)
I'm not saying that I can prove Pinker is absolutely wrong in this conclusion, but it is deeply unsatisfying. Our minds are, apparently, the product of a lawful universe. Logic is able to tackle, if not solve, every other problem with which we have been presented, from pulsars to microorganisms. The only exception is strange, peripheral problem of where the universe came from to begin with. Why should our minds be another such exception? If we can't explain our minds as a logical evolutionary adaptation, doesn't that call into question evolutionary psychology as a theory? How could human awareness not be the product of evolution (the ultimate logical process)?
Pinker tries to compare our failure to understand the mind to an autistic person's failure to understand the existence of other minds or a dog's colorblindness. But the problem with an autistic person, as I understand it, is not that they can't have the existence of other minds explained to them, but that they don't intuitively act as if they exist. Similarly, if the dog were more intelligent, they could obviously believe in and understand what color is, they just can't imagine what it is to see it. If we were blind to the nature of how sentience interacts with the rest of the universe, we should not realize that we have this blindness until it is explained to us. As it is, we are aware of a blindness and can't think of how to see what we know we know must be out there to be seen.
Finally, if Pinker is right that science has failed us regarding the problem of human consciousness, it's rather questionable for him to argue that religious or mystical explanations are out of the question, because if that were so, it wouldn't be an unsolvable problem after all. Either the logical forces of the universe to which we are all accustomed are responsible for consciousness, or Something Else is. Pinker is right; it would be presumptuous and unscientific to call the Something Else God or Divine Energies or what have you. But we cannot discount these hypotheses outright, and the notion that our consciousnesses apparently work apart from the causation that is evolution at least means that the universe is a much stranger place than we have been led to believe. Really I would rather believe that my mind is the result of scientifically knowable causes, I like science, but if I am to believe Pinker, then another, very weird solution is out there.
Very interesting read, but the ultimate difficulties brought up by the theories are much more frustrating than the elegant solutions they provide! Mostly I just don't like giving up on a scientific solution to a problem; it seems wrong.
I would be interested to find out whether any of the specific evolutionary theories have become passe over the last ten years, since a great deal of new research must have come out since then. A second edition would be great if necessary.
I still have reservations about the conclusion of the book. Basically, Pinker says that the computational view of the mind means that consciousness - the ability of the mind to actually experience stimulus and thought, like the taste of a strawberry or the redness of red - has no apparent function. People could go through the complex computational steps of mental activity without experiencing any of it. There is no way to prove that the person sitting next to you is not a "philosophical zombie," who acts like they think and feel but is really just a mechanical thing.
Not only does this mean I have no solid proof that all of you aren't just automatons, but no can explain why we experience things to begin with! Very perverse philosophers have attempted to argue that experience is an illusion, but of course this makes very little sense. Pinker is forced to conclude that our brains are just not smart enough to solve a peculiar problem like the nature of consciousness and self, along with some other potential philosophical problems like the possibility of absolute morality or the ability of language to refer to real things (don't understand the problem with this last one myself.)
I'm not saying that I can prove Pinker is absolutely wrong in this conclusion, but it is deeply unsatisfying. Our minds are, apparently, the product of a lawful universe. Logic is able to tackle, if not solve, every other problem with which we have been presented, from pulsars to microorganisms. The only exception is strange, peripheral problem of where the universe came from to begin with. Why should our minds be another such exception? If we can't explain our minds as a logical evolutionary adaptation, doesn't that call into question evolutionary psychology as a theory? How could human awareness not be the product of evolution (the ultimate logical process)?
Pinker tries to compare our failure to understand the mind to an autistic person's failure to understand the existence of other minds or a dog's colorblindness. But the problem with an autistic person, as I understand it, is not that they can't have the existence of other minds explained to them, but that they don't intuitively act as if they exist. Similarly, if the dog were more intelligent, they could obviously believe in and understand what color is, they just can't imagine what it is to see it. If we were blind to the nature of how sentience interacts with the rest of the universe, we should not realize that we have this blindness until it is explained to us. As it is, we are aware of a blindness and can't think of how to see what we know we know must be out there to be seen.
Finally, if Pinker is right that science has failed us regarding the problem of human consciousness, it's rather questionable for him to argue that religious or mystical explanations are out of the question, because if that were so, it wouldn't be an unsolvable problem after all. Either the logical forces of the universe to which we are all accustomed are responsible for consciousness, or Something Else is. Pinker is right; it would be presumptuous and unscientific to call the Something Else God or Divine Energies or what have you. But we cannot discount these hypotheses outright, and the notion that our consciousnesses apparently work apart from the causation that is evolution at least means that the universe is a much stranger place than we have been led to believe. Really I would rather believe that my mind is the result of scientifically knowable causes, I like science, but if I am to believe Pinker, then another, very weird solution is out there.
Very interesting read, but the ultimate difficulties brought up by the theories are much more frustrating than the elegant solutions they provide! Mostly I just don't like giving up on a scientific solution to a problem; it seems wrong.