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Summary: Reverse engineering
Comment: Darwin initiated the trend of reverse engineering nature. Capek invented the term robot. Creating robots tests the theory of mind.
The computational theory of mind rests on the work of Alan Turing, Alan Newell, Herbert Simon, Marvin Minsky, Hilary Putnam, and Jerry Fodor. John Searle and Roger Penrose have attacked separately the computational theory of mind.
Mind is a system of organs. Humans entered the cognitive niche. What was needed includes intelligence, large groups, (communication), and hands. Intuition about essences is guided by a sense of categories. Moral emotions are designed by natural selection. Our modern minds remain baffled by consciousness, concepts of the self, free will, meaning, knowledge, and morality.
Notes, References, and Index form a conclusion to the work. It is excellent. The book is an expansive discussion of every possible subject coming under the heading of mind.
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Summary: Great Fun!
Comment: This is one of the most fun and interesting books ever. It's very informative too, even if the science may be a bit speculative at times. Where the science is weak, Pinker fills in with incredibly thoughtful good sense. Yeah, the title is a bit overblown, perhaps even illogical, but that's part of the fun. Why give a book a boring or wimpy title? I've seen Steven Pinker in person and he is a genius. I sleep through most lectures, but not his. He's a scientist, humorist, satirist, and an incredibly astute observer of humans and human society. He could be our Mark Twain, though with a very subtle sense of humor. He seizes the high ground and gives you the whole picture from there rather than boring you with pointless details. This is a long book full of details too, but he keeps it to the relevant ones.
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Summary: Steven Pinker vs. Robert Wright: Who said what first?
Comment: 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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Summary: Good, but with some minor faults
Comment: 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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Summary: A Logical Mind Interprets and Sees a Logical Mind
Comment: 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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