Until
next week,How the Mind Works.
Dateline: November 16, 1997
I’M sorry for the delay in posting this week’s article. I had ploughed/plowed through the first 200 pages of Steven Pinker’s book, How The Mind Works, over a weekend, and was confident of polishing off the remaining 365 (not including endnotes, references, and index) by Sunday. But stuff intervened.
As it is, even though I reached page 565 I cannot claim to have read the whole book. I leafed quickly through long sections, either because I was already familiar with the territory (as with a chapter on evolution) or found the going tedious (as with sections on vision and various aspects of psychology). And that’s my first complaint. The book is just too darned long for what it achieves. There’s no blinding revelation here, no original hypothesis, to make such a long journey worthwhile. This should—and with disciplined editing could—have been a 200 page book.
The book’s "key idea" is that "The mind is a system of organs of computation, designed by natural selection to solve the kinds of problems our ancestors faced in their foraging way of life." To flesh out this key idea, the bulk of the book attempts to flesh out the following statement (from page 524):
The mind is a neural computer, fitted by natural selection with combinatorial algorithms for causal and probabilistic reasoning about plants, animals, objects, and people. It is driven by goal states that served biological fitness in ancestral environments, such as food, sex, safety, parenthood, friendship, status, and knowledge.
Pinker tries to do what Daniel Dennett and others have done (i.e., explain how the mind works), and indeed the first part of his "key idea"—that "The mind is a system of organs of computation, designed by natural selection"—is no advance on Dennett’s thesis in Darwin’s Dangerous Idea. But Dennett is a philosopher, and wrote from a philosophical perspective. Pinker is a psychologist, and writes from a psychology perspective. Nothing wrong in that; in fact, perspectives from different angles generally help shed light on an issue.
Unfortunately, I personally consider the contribution of psychology to the understanding of mind and consciousness, both in general and as expressed by Pinker, to be minimal. Psychology relies so much on a relatively few and scientifically suspect human and animal experiments (with, in this case, a couple of anthropological studies thrown in) that I take its views less seriously than I take Grandma’s. I am not much given to smirking, but could hardly resist upon reading that:
Donald Campbell, an early evolutionary psychologist who studied the psychology of pleasure . . . echoed millennia of wise men and women when he summed up the research: "The direct pursuit of happiness is a recipe for an unhappy life."
By quoting Campbell, Pinker appears to have leanings more toward Grandma than to his discipline, and I was especially heartened to find this confirmed a few pages later (p. 63): "To predict the vast majority of human acts . . . you can just ask your grandmother." Hooray!
(While on the warpath, I might as well throw in that where psychology bemuses, anthropology stuns. Pinker quotes from a study of the—wait for it—!Xõ people of the Kalahari Desert. Now, what fool of an anthropologist could inflict such a spelling not only on the hapless !Xõ but also on the entire English-speaking world—and the French, German, Finnish, Malay/Indonesian, Chinese, and Japanese-speaking worlds, with all of which I have familiarity enough to know they could choke to death trying to pronounce !Xõ? No doubt there is a reason for the spelling; but whatever it is, it is not good enough.)
The above are my personal feelings/observations/biases about psychology, anthropology, and indeed the social sciences in general, and it goes without saying you are free to throw them out the window!
Peeves and biases out of the way (well, almost), what’s good about the book? Um . . . there’s a neat section explaining the value of music, including an analysis of its cognitive purposes (it conveys or augments messages, it helps us differentiate meaningful, coherent sound from background noise, it’s a way of expressing emotion, it helps us determine where to pitch camp (out of the howling wind, get it?) and it stimulates the innate sense of rhythm we need for walking, running, etc.).
Pinker’s explanations of disgust, fear, and other emotions are also engagingly written, though I have serious reservations about aspects of his analysis, particularly with respect to altruism and love. (And on these issues he is hardly more illuminating than Grandma. Apparently, we fear snakes because some of them are poisonous. Wow. We’re disgusted by faeces/feces because to eat it might kill us. You don’t say. Grandma knew nothing of microbiology and bacteriology, or snakes, for that matter; but she sure as heck knew at the macrobiology level why we fear snakes and don’t eat turds. Sorry, I’m off on a tangent again.)
Other good things about the book are interesting explanations (albeit from a psych perspective) of: neural networks and connectionism; various "features" of consciousness, such as sensory awareness, perception, emotion, and the will; SETI; whether we are still evolving (biologically, no; culturally, a doubtful maybe—and here he reverts to psych type in claiming "nothing in culture makes sense except in the light of psychology"); autostereograms (if you’re interested, as I, being blind to them, am); humour/humor (which he engagingly calls a "dignicide"—a poison to kill dominance by stripping away dignity—c.f. Winston Churchill jokes: "Sir, if you were my husband, I’d poison your tea." "Madam, if you were my wife, I’d drink it." "Sir, you are drunk!" "Madam, you are ugly. Tomorrow, I’ll be sober."
A particularly interesting passage (p. 164) describes how a genetic algorithm (GA) simulation of a light-sensitive spot of skin evolved over 400,000 generations (an evolutionary blink) into an eye, complete with (simulated) cornea and lens. He follows this up on p. 177 with more on GAs in general and learning in particular, and it’s good, concise explanation.
Early in the book, Pinker hints that the jackpot for wading through all 565 pages is an explanation of sentience. Alas, not. The book ends in a whimper (bravely masked in defiantly optimistic terms) of failure: our minds are cognitively closed to such issues as sentience, self, free will, and morality. Rats. If I weren’t already here, I’d pack up and go home. If I agreed with him . . . which I don't.
As you might sense, I was disappointed with Pinker’s book, but please take my disappointment in the context of my biases and the fact that I skimmed quite a bit of it. It may be that most other readers will find a great deal of enlightenment in it, and I’d hate to deprive a well-written book of a reader. It is well written.
Until
next week,
NEXT WEEK: I will ask the questions: I want your help on something.