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A review by branch_c
How the Mind Works by Steven Pinker
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to readers from other sources, and some of the material, such as the list of hominid ancestors, may have become outdated in recent years, Pinker's writing is so good that it's nevertheless a pleasure to read.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.