How the Mind Works – Steven Pinker

I am pretty happy to be reading a book of Pinker’s that was written well before he went out to court controversy. It means that the book can, to some extent, for the science itself.

The past decade or so has been over run with techno-charlatans. All of them have repeatedly done roughly the same thing – over promised and under delivered. A decade ago google was carrying on as if it had solved the problem of translation.

Largely, it hasn’t.

Language is more complex than people give it credit for. We are nowhere near solving the problem. Idem for the mind. All the charlatans are saying that general AI is right around the corner and to those ideas I mostly just yawn. It isn’t, and if it were it will happen largely by accident. Why? Because we do not understand the mind. Which is why a book like this is so utterly fascinating.

So here is a questions then: do I buy this theory?

I have no idea. When clockwork was the new great technology, people saw the mind in those terms. The mind seems to be constantly metaphorized to the world we already understand. How interesting a coincidence that Pinker here compares it to the latest technological breakthrough: computation. We will see this change surely when the next big technologcial break through occurs.

But there are some truly interesting ideas here. This is the first time I saw in print the notion that the mind is not a thing in itself, but merely something that brains do. There seems to be a sense to that, though I should confess to being far, far too much of a lay person to be able to say whether or not there is any validity there. But no one reads this blog looking for answers to the deep dark questions.

What can be said is that I found the book interesting and easy to read. I think there should be a good amount of credit given to interesting information put simply. We all should strive to it more. I have a soft spot for casual science books though, and some reviews on Amazon / Goodreads seem to think that Pinker is far, far too anecdotal in his book. I get that. At some point I did ask myself why I was getting a review of Dawkins and the ‘selfish gene’ ilk, but the journey there didn’t seem to bother me as it was hapeneing.