- Email: [email protected]
How the Mind Works
Books etcetera
How the Mind Works by Steven Pinker, W.W. Norton & Co., 1997. $29.95 (xii + 660 pages) ISBN 0 393 04535 8
Here is the easy part. This book is beautifully written, engaging at every turn, hilariously funny, and devilishly clever. The hard part is finding enough time to consider truly each of Steven Pinker’s points. He has a huge agenda. He wants to educate not only the public at large about how one should think about how the mind works; he also wants to educate his colleagues. The jig is up. Wallowing around in one’s subdiscipline won’t work any more. Pinker lays out why evolution and computation are the keys to figuring out how the brain enables mind. Pinker states right at the beginning that this book is largely about the ideas of others. He pays tribute to the pioneering work of John Tooby and Leda Cosmides, and to David Marr, to mention a few. He tangles with others, such as Stephen Gould, Roger Penrose and John Searle. Overall, he whisks the reader up into a new level of understanding and criticism that is not possible to attain simply by reading each of these scientists alone. His ‘bird’s eye view’ of the field of mind science impacts on anyone interested in the problem and enlightens the complexities of the issues. The fundamental mission is a tough sell. The claims of early behaviorism have been defeated once, in scientific terms, with the birth of the cognitive revolution. That was almost 40 years ago, but like buttons on an old mechanical calculator, behaviorism and all that it implies keeps popping up every time any one of its claims gets pushed down. Putting aside the return of behaviorism in the guise of some kind of computational modeling, Pinker directs our attention to the hold it has on us in everyday life issues. If behaviorism is read as environmentalism he lets it rip on those that believe only social policy is preventing us from being the happy species: ‘Like many species, Homo sapiens is a nasty business. Recorded history from the Bible to the present is a story of murder, rape, and war, and honest ethnography shows that foraging peoples, like the rest of us, are more savage than noble. The !Kung San of the Kalahari Desert are often held out as a relatively peaceful people, and so they are, compared with other foragers: their murder rate is only as high as Detroit’s. A linguist friend of mine who studies the Wari in the Amazon rainforest learned that their language has a term for edible things, which includes anyone who isn’t a Wari. Of course humans don’t have an “instinct for war” or a “violent brain” as the Seville Statement assures
us, but humans don’t exactly have an instinct for peace or a nonviolent brain, either. We cannot attribute all of human history and ethnography to toy guns and superhero cartoons’. Of course, we are soon deep into the evolutionary biology of mind with a catalog of the number and kind of adaptations that the human brain possesses. Importantly, Pinker is not a knee-jerk evolutionist. He sees the limits of its power and states, ‘Natural selection is not a guardian angel that hangs over us making sure that our behavior always maximizes biological fitness’. Evolution is powerful, but not paralyzing. I don’t know why Stephen Gould and others keep bashing Pinker on this point. He has it right. If evolution is the source for our structure, computation is the mechanism by which the neural nets interact to produce the organism’s dazzling array of capacities. Pinker explains the concepts and then goes into an analysis of its critics. The views of both John Searle and Roger Penrose are reviewed and, in dispensing with their positions, Pinker is specific as to why. This is vintage Pinker. He doesn’t ‘diss’ – he confronts and makes his case clearly and upfront. It is because of this quality that the book is not only lively, it is useful as a text. I go a long way down Pinker’s road but not the whole way. He believes the problem of consciousness is too hard for us mortals to figure out, and that nothing yet has been said that enlightens us about one aspect of conscious experience – subjective awareness. He is surely right on the last point, but I don’t yet want to run up the white flag. He does. The evolutionary/computational view of mind always sounds as though its proponents are squeezing the soul, the meaning out of our personal lives. Those seeking refutable hypotheses about how the mind works are always charged with such an agenda. Pinker puts it well: ‘Does science dehumanize people? Only if one is so literal-minded that one cannot shift among different
stances in conceptualizing people for different purposes. A human being is simultaneously a machine and a sentient free agent, depending on the purpose of the discussion, just as he is also a taxpayer, an insurance salesman, a dental patient, and two hundred pounds of ballast on a commuter airplane, depending of the purpose of the discussion. The mechanistic stance allows us to understand what makes us tick and how we fit into the physical universe. When those discussions wind down for the day, we go back to talking about each other as free and dignified human beings’. This book is to be read, reread, studied and discussed. The deceptive ease with which it can be enjoyed masks the depths of the message it communicates. Upon full consideration of its message, cognitive scientists can examine what it is they are trying to do with greater clarity and neuroscientists can begin to ask a different kind of question. The human brain is a Rube Goldberg device built by natural selection and exists to compute. The message for the neuroscientist is to figure out how it does it, not where it does it. Grasp that the brain is a decision-maker that only seeks information from the environment. Its factory-installed devices do not need to be fueled by brains that represent the world veridically. It is a strong message.
Michael S. Gazzaniga Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH 03755-3547, USA. tel: +1 603 646 1182 fax: +1 603 646 1181 e-mail: [email protected]
BOOK REVIEWS Publishers: send copies of books you would like to be reviewed in TICS to the Editor. Readers: would you like to review a particular book for the journal? Contact the Editor to discuss the project. Other types of publications (software, CD-ROMs, films, art exhibitions, etc.) will be considered as well. Send any ideas or proposals for reviews to the Editor.
38 Trends in Cognitive Sciences – Vol. 2, No. 1,
January 1998
How the Mind Works by Steven Pinker, W.W. Norton & Co., 1997. $29.95 (xii + 660 pages) ISBN 0 393 04535 8
Here is the easy part. This book is beautifully written, engaging at every turn, hilariously funny, and devilishly clever. The hard part is finding enough time to consider truly each of Steven Pinker’s points. He has a huge agenda. He wants to educate not only the public at large about how one should think about how the mind works; he also wants to educate his colleagues. The jig is up. Wallowing around in one’s subdiscipline won’t work any more. Pinker lays out why evolution and computation are the keys to figuring out how the brain enables mind. Pinker states right at the beginning that this book is largely about the ideas of others. He pays tribute to the pioneering work of John Tooby and Leda Cosmides, and to David Marr, to mention a few. He tangles with others, such as Stephen Gould, Roger Penrose and John Searle. Overall, he whisks the reader up into a new level of understanding and criticism that is not possible to attain simply by reading each of these scientists alone. His ‘bird’s eye view’ of the field of mind science impacts on anyone interested in the problem and enlightens the complexities of the issues. The fundamental mission is a tough sell. The claims of early behaviorism have been defeated once, in scientific terms, with the birth of the cognitive revolution. That was almost 40 years ago, but like buttons on an old mechanical calculator, behaviorism and all that it implies keeps popping up every time any one of its claims gets pushed down. Putting aside the return of behaviorism in the guise of some kind of computational modeling, Pinker directs our attention to the hold it has on us in everyday life issues. If behaviorism is read as environmentalism he lets it rip on those that believe only social policy is preventing us from being the happy species: ‘Like many species, Homo sapiens is a nasty business. Recorded history from the Bible to the present is a story of murder, rape, and war, and honest ethnography shows that foraging peoples, like the rest of us, are more savage than noble. The !Kung San of the Kalahari Desert are often held out as a relatively peaceful people, and so they are, compared with other foragers: their murder rate is only as high as Detroit’s. A linguist friend of mine who studies the Wari in the Amazon rainforest learned that their language has a term for edible things, which includes anyone who isn’t a Wari. Of course humans don’t have an “instinct for war” or a “violent brain” as the Seville Statement assures
us, but humans don’t exactly have an instinct for peace or a nonviolent brain, either. We cannot attribute all of human history and ethnography to toy guns and superhero cartoons’. Of course, we are soon deep into the evolutionary biology of mind with a catalog of the number and kind of adaptations that the human brain possesses. Importantly, Pinker is not a knee-jerk evolutionist. He sees the limits of its power and states, ‘Natural selection is not a guardian angel that hangs over us making sure that our behavior always maximizes biological fitness’. Evolution is powerful, but not paralyzing. I don’t know why Stephen Gould and others keep bashing Pinker on this point. He has it right. If evolution is the source for our structure, computation is the mechanism by which the neural nets interact to produce the organism’s dazzling array of capacities. Pinker explains the concepts and then goes into an analysis of its critics. The views of both John Searle and Roger Penrose are reviewed and, in dispensing with their positions, Pinker is specific as to why. This is vintage Pinker. He doesn’t ‘diss’ – he confronts and makes his case clearly and upfront. It is because of this quality that the book is not only lively, it is useful as a text. I go a long way down Pinker’s road but not the whole way. He believes the problem of consciousness is too hard for us mortals to figure out, and that nothing yet has been said that enlightens us about one aspect of conscious experience – subjective awareness. He is surely right on the last point, but I don’t yet want to run up the white flag. He does. The evolutionary/computational view of mind always sounds as though its proponents are squeezing the soul, the meaning out of our personal lives. Those seeking refutable hypotheses about how the mind works are always charged with such an agenda. Pinker puts it well: ‘Does science dehumanize people? Only if one is so literal-minded that one cannot shift among different
stances in conceptualizing people for different purposes. A human being is simultaneously a machine and a sentient free agent, depending on the purpose of the discussion, just as he is also a taxpayer, an insurance salesman, a dental patient, and two hundred pounds of ballast on a commuter airplane, depending of the purpose of the discussion. The mechanistic stance allows us to understand what makes us tick and how we fit into the physical universe. When those discussions wind down for the day, we go back to talking about each other as free and dignified human beings’. This book is to be read, reread, studied and discussed. The deceptive ease with which it can be enjoyed masks the depths of the message it communicates. Upon full consideration of its message, cognitive scientists can examine what it is they are trying to do with greater clarity and neuroscientists can begin to ask a different kind of question. The human brain is a Rube Goldberg device built by natural selection and exists to compute. The message for the neuroscientist is to figure out how it does it, not where it does it. Grasp that the brain is a decision-maker that only seeks information from the environment. Its factory-installed devices do not need to be fueled by brains that represent the world veridically. It is a strong message.
Michael S. Gazzaniga Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH 03755-3547, USA. tel: +1 603 646 1182 fax: +1 603 646 1181 e-mail: [email protected]
BOOK REVIEWS Publishers: send copies of books you would like to be reviewed in TICS to the Editor. Readers: would you like to review a particular book for the journal? Contact the Editor to discuss the project. Other types of publications (software, CD-ROMs, films, art exhibitions, etc.) will be considered as well. Send any ideas or proposals for reviews to the Editor.
38 Trends in Cognitive Sciences – Vol. 2, No. 1,
January 1998