Tag Archives: Science

How the Mind Works – Steven Pinker

“The mind is a system of organs of computation designed by natural selection to solve the problems faced by our evolutionary ancestors in their foraging way of life.”

Books bemoaning how irrational people are have become increasingly popular in recent years. We believe that after a series of sixes a dice is ‘due’ for a different number, or that basketball players can have ‘hot hands’; we are incapable of properly updating Bayesian probabilities, such as when we calculate the likelihood of actually having a disease given a positive test; and when Kahneman asked people whether a young woman active around issues of discrimination and social justice was more likely to be a bank teller or a bank teller active in the feminist movement, they said the second, a logical impossibility.

With such dismal news, one might be forgiven from assuming human intelligence is something to be pitied. For that reason, How the Mind Works is a welcome change. In it, Pinker argues that though we certainly do have inborn biases and weaknesses, many of them make sense from an evolutionary perspective, even providing an evolutionary advantage. Most events do demonstrate reversion to the mean, for example: dice or basketball players might not be due for a change, but weather is. More broadly, Pinker uses the computational theory of the mind to explain human reason, emotion, the senses, consciousness, social relations, humour, and in the final chapter, the meaning of life. It was a finalist for the Pulitzer prize when it was published in 1997.

As with all Pinker books, it is filled with amusing anecdotes, illustrative examples, and incisive analysis. Still, I found it less compelling than his others, though that’s partly due to personal taste rather than inherent quality: I preferred the focus of Blank Slate, which covers some of the same material but with particular emphasis to societal implications, rather than the descriptive approach given here. It also shares significant content with some of his other books, including the Language Instinct and Better Angels. That said, if you’re interested in an overview of the computational theory of the mind, or are hoping to brush up on your knowledge of cognitive psychology, the book is useful and entertaining.

David Suzuki

Not a book review today, I’m afraid – a talk review instead!

I happened to attend a talk by David Suzuki this morning, the Canadian academic, media personality, and environmental activitist. He’s a strong proponent of environmental sustainability and preserving our forests, waters, and other natural resources, instead of exploiting them into oblivion. To achieve this, he’s currently launching an attempt to change the Canadian constitution to guarantee access to a healthy environment, as is true in 110 other countries, as well as unite with other groups to change the Canadian culture more generally.

I’m very sympathetic to his aims: we need to do a far better job protecting the environment than we currently do, and let me say I enjoyed his talk generally: he’s very funny and makes some good poings. What I found striking, though, was that I just don’t believe his solutions will work. Constitutional change in Canada is a morass of unpleasantness, evoking as it does divisions over language and culture, and past attempts to change it in any way have failed: no matter how popular his suggestions might be, opening up a constitutional reform will lead to a huge argument with no consensus likely.

More generally, though, I think he falls into a common error in environmentalist thinking. To me, environmentalism actually makes more sense as a right wing issue than a left wing: ideals of conservation and Christian stewardship have a long history on the right. The left, however, having decided the right is evil, simply dismiss them out of hand, and in so doing lose the opportunity to find allies that could really make a difference. This morning, a young guy identified himself as Christian, and asked how Suzuki’s arguments could motivate Christians to save the environment. Rather than engage, Suzuki insulted Christianity and shut him down, managing to change what was a supporter into an annoyed and defensive critic. Christianity and the environmentalist movement surely have their differences, perhaps particularly over science, but dismissing others motivations to achieve your goals seems narrow-minded at best. Even business has more in common with the environmentalist movement than the environmentalist movement seems to recognize: what environmentalists call sustainability business calls preservation of capital, and both see them as the highest possible good. I’m always amazed they can’t seem to see that in each other.

I think it’s true of a lot of our causes in general: we identify with a side, and so we fail to reach out to others who, though on opposite ‘sides’, might easily agree with us on a given issue. The far left and the far right have a lot in common on issues of government intervention, environmental activism, and even decentralization of power, but they’re so busy hating each other they never get anything done. It seems a shame.

The Art of Happiness – Epicurus

“Not what we have, but what we enjoy, constitutes our abundance.” – Epicurus

What do the theory of atoms, utilitarianism, atheism, egalitarianism, Thomas Jefferson, and Karl Marx’s doctoral thesis all have in common? All were influenced by the writings of Epicurus, a Greek philosopher from around 300 BC, who has the rare distinction of being both enormously influential and almost entirely non-extant: all that survives of his extensive writings are three brief letters, two groups of quotes, and some fragments.

Somewhat oddly to modern ears, in order to talk about happiness Epicurus spends considerable time talking about astronomy, the weather, and death. Epicurus argued that pleasure is “freedom from bodily pain and mental agitation:” mental agitation is caused by fear of the gods and fear of death. He turned therefore to science as the only way to eliminate these fears and achieve a happy life.

His empirical attempts to use science to explain eclipses, earthquakes, weather, phases of the moon, and other phenomena as natural events, not bad omens, are actually extremely impressive given it was the 4^th century BCE. He correctly explains eclipses and rainbows, for example, and suggests an infinite, eternal universe filled with ever moving atoms making up matter: on the other hand, we’re reasonably sure that earthquakes are not caused by wind getting stuck in the ground. His also suggests that death is the end of all sensation, and since we cannot experience pain or pleasure without sensation, death should not be feared.

With the science out of the way, his recommendation is simple: avoid pain and enjoy pleasure. In practice though, he recommended as simple a life as possible, limiting wants so that you could be just as happy poor as rich. If this sounds a bit Buddhist, it’s because it likely was; several Greeks had traveled to India, including some who likely influenced Epicurus. Friendship, he believed, was the biggest single ingredient of happiness; many physical pleasures might be pleasurable in the short term, but in the long term caused more pain than pleasure.

Given how little exists, reading Epicurus is hardly going to take you long, and there’s significant room for interpretation, as the bastardized Epicurus-unapproved modern connotations of Epicurean suggests. Still, if you’re looking for the roots of the empirical method in science, some perspective on religion and death, or just some thoughts on happiness, he’s worth a look.

The Knowledge – Lewis Dartnell

If you were one of the few survivors of some sort of global apocalypse, what sort of knowledge would you need to rebuild a functioning society? Building an iphone isn’t exactly easy, and I think most of us would struggle with even more basic things like a lens (for science), a bike (for transportation), or a system of crop rotation that would keep sufficient nitrogen in the fields (essential for food), never mind something like a pottery kiln or steam engine.

The Knowledge has two goals. One, to teach future survivors how to rebuild a technologically advanced civilization, ideally advancing them as far as possible without creating things too difficult to repair or maintain (there’s no point in jets if you can’t repair jet engines). Two, to examine the fundamentals of science and technology that are very remote from most of us. To do so, Dartnell covers the basics of food, shelter, and water plus some more ambitious projects, explaining to the reader how to get an arc furnace going to work metals; recover antibiotics, X-rays, steam engines, and photography; and reproduce electricity and cement, trying to strike a balance between useful detail for the survivor and overwhelming a casual reader.

The book is interesting even given the low odds of an apocalypse (depending on time scale – just ask this documentary produced by Stephen Hawking), and it’s even better as a way to provoke a thought experiment on what you think should be passed on. Theory of atoms? Evolution? How to make cement or grow food? Chemistry? As a social scientist myself, something I wondered is the role of social invention in all this. Are there social technologies that should be passed on? The Knowledge mentions only physical tech, but what about how to design a democracy, the importance of trade, or a la Steven Pinker, how to restrain violence? Overall, though sometimes a bit heavy into the detail of engineering that I must confess I skimmed, the basics of the technologies that underpin our society have shaped the way we live, the way we talk, and the way we think. Dartnell does an excellent job highlighting all of these, from how we say o’clock to show we mean clock time, not solar time, to the advantages of golf cart batteries over car batteries. Read it to learn more about the basic technologies we use, but whether you read it or not it’s interesting to think about what you would want to pass on.

Disclosure: I read The Knowledge as a free advance reader copy – it is released on April 3rd. You can get it here (or in the UK or Canada). You never know when such knowledge might be handy!

The Blank Slate 2 – Steven Pinker

Having reviewed The Blank Slate earlier this week, I’d thought I’d share a few choice quotes.

On the influence of genetics:

“Familiar categories of behaviour – marriage customs, food taboos, folk superstitions, and so on – certainly do vary across cultures and have to be learned, but the deeper mechanisms of mental computation that generate them may be universal and innate.”

“When it comes to explaining human thought and behavior, the possibility that heredity plays any role at all still has the power to shock. To acknowledge human nature, many think, is to endorse racism, sexism, war, greed, genocide, nihilism, reactionary politics, and neglect of children and the disadvantaged. Any claim that the mind has an innate organization strikes people not as a hypothesis that might be incorrect but as a thought it is immoral to think.”

“‘Nature is a hanging judge,’ goes an old saying. Many tragedies come from our physical and cognitive makeup. Our bodies are extraordinarily improbable arrangements of matter, with many ways for things to go wrong and only a few ways for things to go right. We are certain to die, and smart enough to know it. Our minds are adapted to a world that no longer exists, prone to misunderstandings correctable only by arduous education, and condemned to perplexity about the deepest questions we can ascertain.”

On the modern emphasis on culture:

“Much of what is today called “social criticism” consists of members of the upper classes denouncing the tastes of the lower classes (bawdy entertainment, fast food, plentiful consumer goods) while considering themselves egalitarians.”

“The foundation of individual rights is the assumption that people have wants and needs and are authorities on what those wants and needs are. If people’s stated desires were just some kind of erasable inscription or reprogrammable brainwashing, any atrocity could be justified.”

The Blank Slate – Steven Pinker

“Yes, science is, in a sense, “reducing” us to the physiological processes of a not-very-attractive three-pound organ. But what an organ!”

Where else can you find out, to misquote Tolstoy, how unhappy families are all unhappy in the same way? (Evolutionarily speaking, parents want to allocate resources amongst their children equally. Children want a 2:1 ratio: they share half their genes with a sibling, but all their genes with themselves. The two groups disagree. So much for Tolstoy). Or that herding cultures are the most prone to honour violence? (They are both far from law enforcement and have assets that are easy to move and steal – they have to be prickly, as the Hatfields and McCoys found out). Or even that studies of boys raised as girls generally show that subjects display traditional ‘male’ behaviour?

Yes, it’s another Steven Pinker book, this time The Blank Slate, with opinions on how we think about children, fine art, morality, nihilism, and feminism. In it, Pinker argues that we vastly underestimate the importance genetics plays in human nature. We like to assume everything is culture because that means it’s under our control, but that simply isn’t the case. The dislike of evolutionary biology, he argues, stems from confusing ‘is’ and ‘ought’: people object to some biological imperatives, and so argue they are false. But genetics are not destiny, and simply because someone has a predisposition for selfish behaviour doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be criticized if they submit to it, or lauded if they overcome it. Parents should not abandon their children just because genetics explains half their variance, after all.

Pinker’s careful to stay in the middle; he certainly doesn’t deny the role of environment, but only wants the role of genetics to be recognized as well. I found the first third of the book a bit slow, in part perhaps because the nurture-is-all argument is less popular than it was, but the rest focused on his analysis of the implications of the science for morality, politics, and various social movements: all was excellent.

Pinker is always fun to read, definitely one of the wise we so like here at Subtle Illumination, and this book is no exception. Still, I wouldn’t start with it: I think Better Angels, for example, is even better. If you’re looking for a nice overview of evolutionary biology’s implications, though, The Blank Slate is a great start. If you do pick it up, though, I recommend reading it with someone else nearby; Pinker is at his best when excerpted and read out loud, if only to test the reaction of the listener and provoke yourself to think.