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Review:How the Mind Works
Book reviews often start "If you only read one book this year...", but considering the slashdot readership, I'll amend that to: "If you only read one non-fiction book not published by O'Reilly this year, this one would be a good choice." The second chapter is about computers, and the second to last chapter is about sex, so a geek's gotta love it.
Though to be honest, the computer bits aren't terribly technical. They focus on the computational theory of the mind, and how as a theory, it gives us a useful, but woefully incomplete understanding of the human mind. There is, however, a fascinating technical explanation of stereo vision and how stereograms (magic-eye pictures) work, why some people can't see them, and a great explanation of how to do the trick with your eyes that you need to see them - the stereogram in the book is the first one I've ever been able to see, and it's almost worth the cover price just for that.
Reading Stephen Pinker, I always get the impression that his style comes from years of trying to keep his first-year university psychology class awake on a Monday morning at 9am. He does this with a combination of some very challenging ideas and highly entertaining writing.
In the first chapter, he makes the somewhat radical claim that innate biology has an equal, if not greater role than culture in shaping our desires, thoughts, and actions. He then spends the next 500 pages convincing us with a combination of well reasoned arguments and the results of rigorous scientific studies. He is, however, careful to remind us regularly of the limits of scientific enquiry, and of how much we still don't know "Virtually nothing is known about the functioning microcircuitry of the human brain, because there is a shortage of volunteers willing to give up their brains to science before they are dead." (p. 184)
His main thrust throughout much of the book is to debunk the "natural = good" equation that is quoted to so often these days. Aggressiveness, for instance, especially in male humans, is 'natural' in the sense that it was once adaptive (i.e. a trait that allowed it's organism to reproduce more successfully). Aggressiveness, is therefore 'natural' to male humans. This doesn't mean that men "can't help" being aggressive, or that men who beat their wives are somehow not at fault because it is "in their genes". As Pinker puts it:
"...happiness and virtue have nothing to do with what natural selection designed us to accomplish in the ancestral environment. They are for us to determine. In saying this, I am no hypocrite even though I am a conventional straight white male. Well into my procreating years I am, so far, voluntarily childless, having squandered my biological resources reading and writing, doing research, helping out friends, and jogging in circles, ignoring the solemn imperative to spread my genes. By Darwinian standards I am a horrible mistake, a pathetic looser, not one iota less than if I were a card-carrying member of Queer Nation. But I am happy to be that way, and if my genes don't like it, they can go jump in the lake."Having explained how the brain thinks and how the eyes see, he goes on to consider how the capacity for emotion may have been adaptive (and therefore selected for) in our early evolution, and starts with a great example: "the yuck factor". We get a very cool theory of why we find certain things disgusting, why what's considered disgusting is highly cultural, and why the thing that elicits the strongest "yuck factor" response is food.
The first six chapters have covered key aspects of the human condition:
Chapter 1: The Standard Equipment talks about how the brain is wired Chapter 2: Thinking Machines covers the "human mind as computer" and the computational theory of the mind Chapter 3: Revenge of the Nerds explains Pinker's theory of how early humans prospered by exploiting what he calls the "cognitive niche" Chapter 4: The Mind's Eye explains the role that vision, and in particular colour, stereo vision as one of the factors that allowed humans to evolve such prodigious brain-power Chapter 5: Good Ideas is about how we use logic, comparison, and statistics in interpersonal relationships Chapter 6: Hotheads deals with the gamut of human emotions from altruism to envy
All this has laid the groundwork for the second to last chapter, which he calls "Family Values". Some theories in the social sciences claim that people are born as virtually "blank slates" and that their upbringing, socialisation, education, etc. accounts for the way they 'turn out'. Criminality, substance abuse, and even the more petty human failings such as greed and vanity are assumed to have psychological underpinnings that come from one's childhood experiences. Pinker claims instead that some parts of the 'dark side' of being human is genetically encoded. He emphasises that this does not in any way excuse anti-social behaviour, but is simply another way of looking at what our conscience is up against when we feel the urge to take the credit for another's idea, sneak onto the subway without paying, help ourselves to the larger piece of cake, or cheat on our partner.
It's a long book, and it may take a little perserverence to get though it, but it's worth the effort because Pinker's ideas are interesting, challenging, and thought provoking. I don't agree with everything he says, and I think he sometimes over-simplifies an example to the point where it's no longer valid. Often, I found myself thinking "But human being are more complicated than that!" when he was explaining some facet of modern human behaviour in terms of the selection pressures of hunter-gatherers on the savannah. But all-in-all it is well worth reading. And at the end of it either you'll be able to see stereograms or you'll know exactly why you can't. To pick this book, head over to Amazon.
Posted by FascDot Killed My Previous Use:
I suggest you read "Consciousness Explained" by Dennett for an excellent debunking of Cartesian dualism (especially the modern, silent variety).
Posted by FascDot Killed My Previous Use:
I didn't realize anyone besides Searle actually still clung to that argument.
You should read some of Hofstadter's (or even Pinker's) material regarding The Chinese Room--I think you'll find that in order for Searle to be as wrong as he is, he'd almost have to be trying to deliberately mislead people.
The basic counter-argument is: The whole analogy is false since it presupposes a homunculus in my brain that does the understanding "for me". I think it should already be obvious that "understanding" is not the function of some part of the brain, but a whole brain function. Thus, mapping back to the Chinese Room we might be able to say that the entire system (man, books, paper, pencils, door, etc) does in fact "understand" Chinese.
Of course, the many many concommittant "implementation" problems of Searle's formulation make this a difficult proposition at best. For instance, just how big would The Chinese Room have to be? And how long would it take the man inside to craft a response?
BTW, neither Dennett nor I am a "functionalist" if by that you mean "operationalist".
Stephen Pinker is a very good scientist; however, lest everything he say be taken at face value, it should be noted that there are some other perspectives on cognition and language that don't always get represented by the Chomsky/Pinker/MIT school.
They tend to be modularist in their perspective - claiming that the ability to perform syntax is a product of the development of specialized structures that organically develop to do them. While there's definitely a component of syntactic ability that is modular, there's also room for questioning how extensive that modularity is. Also, Chomsky/Pinker et al tend to leave semantic ability out of the picture.
Structured connectionism offers a plausible explanation for semantic ability - see Terry Regier's "The Human Semantic Potential" for some viable models using neural networks, that do excellent jobs of understanding, for example, the difference between "on," "above" and "over" with fairly quick learning, and distinguishing between the German "auf" and "an". Also, I recommend the work of George Lakoff, especially "Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things - What Categories Reveal About The Mind."
Hear hear, thank you for a delightful review of a truly captivating book; I'm glad to see the academic athiests finally getting some coverage of their books, as I am terribly sick of reading all the /. reviews of books like "finding god in the web" and other such drivel.
As for the tragedy yesterday and how an understanding of it can be approached from an "evolutionary psychology" perspective, I'll take the first stab at it:
After immediate survival, the next most important goal of the human psyche is to increase social status among peers, which in turn results in increased mating opportunity. There are many tools in the "mental warchest" that humans employ to achieve this goal. Arguably, it is for these very reasons that the human brain has exploded in size over the last million years or so (see Dawkins, Unweaving the Rainbow): Not as a tool of survival in "the wild", but as a tool to manipulate and influence other humans.
The willingness to employ physical violence is one of the natural tools with which we are endowed; particularly among men, there is a certain thrill to the kill of another man, powerful, confidence inspiring, and impressive amongst others (usually both male and female). Witness professional sports, or Quake: A stage upon which to play out all of the symbols of violence, without the actual death. Why do we love to play out these symbols? Because jocks get laid.
And these kids didn't get laid. (Seen their pictures?). And they targeted jocks in their killing spree.
Consider what would have been the outcome of their carefully planned attacked in the "ancestral environment", in which your world consisted of 100-200 persons, all of whom you knew and would likely live your entire life with.
The jocks, who had all of the mating opportunity in your little community, would be conveniently removed from society, while at the same time the killers would wear new mantles of (fearful) respectability.
From natural selection's standpoint, what happened yesterday was a viable and intelligent career move.
From "our" standpoint, however, the evolutionist's mantra must be repeated: " "is" does not mean "ought" ", in other words, to say that we ARE a certain way (in a "natural sense") does not mean we SHOULD be that way, or that we SHOULDN'T bother to try to work against our "natural" inclinations in order to foster a more amicable society. This is why we have laws, against killing for example.
Reason clearly shows anyone who reflects upon it that the "strategy" employed yesterday, although instinctive and "natural" from an animal sense, would be pointless in modern society, in which we have arranged things such that those who commit physical violence are guaranteed to have zero future mating opportunity. And, not seeing any other solution to their "problem", they concluded that their own lives were not worth continuing, thus ending the day in suicide.
There, I hope I have done a decent job "spinning" yesterday's awful events in a style congruent with Pinker's "How the Mind Works". If anyone else (who has actually read the book, please!) can do better, I'd love to hear it.
Stephen Pinker is notorious in many circles for his sometimes wild speculation about innate knowledge, predispositions, reactions, etc. (cf. his recent New York Times article explaining exactly why, in evolutionary terms, women might discard newborn babies (as has happened in a few very publicised cases).)
There are a few problems with the arguments used to support all of this innateness (or:nativism). Most importantly, it's generally based on questionable assumptions about the data (e.g. the language samples to which children are exposed) and the power of the learning device (the brain) which has to extract patterns from the data. Jeffrey Elman et. al. present a very interesting criticism of this common nativist argument in "Rethinking Innateness: A Connectionist Perspective on Development". Basically, they show that many of the functions that are supposedly impossible, and many of the strange patterns in learning which supposedly can only be accounted for by innate predispositions and knowledge can actually be simulated very well in neural networks which don't build in -any- knowledge of the subject area (e.g., they aren't born knowing Universal Grammar, yet Elman provides an example of a network which has managed to sort linguistic data according to grammatical category. This ability was not programmed in--it was independently learned by the network). Of course, all this is preliminary--we certainly don't have neural nets that can simulate human behaviour in total, or even close. But the assumption that we -need- innate knowledge to account for this type of stuff just doesn't fly.
An interesting point that Elman et. al. mention is that the genome just doesn't contain enough information to specify brain representations--it's not possible for this sort of knowledge to be encoded in the genes. 'Wiring of the microcircuitry'--i.e. specification of synaptic connections--'is essential if language, the quintessential higher cognitive process, is an instinct...' (Pinker, The Language Instinct, 93, 97). But, genetic prespecification of synaptic weights in the brain is just too much information for genes to carry--such specification could reasonably require on the order of 10 trillion base pairs of DNA just for our brain--and that's more than we have for our whole body.
Elman et.al. make another major contribution to the debate by describing an interactionist framework, where outcomes may be highly constrained and universal, but not themselves directly contained in the genes (or the brain) in any domain-specific way. (Notice that this is exactly the faulty inference of which Pinker and many other nativists are guilty.)
In sum, I think that Rethinking Innateness is an extremely valuable contribution to the old nativist/empiricist debate, most especially for their dissection of the concept 'innateness', which nativists use with abandon, but which really is ambiguous between a large number of possible interpretations.