Steven Pinker Quotes
Art works because it appeals to certain faculties of the mind. Music depends on details of the auditory system, painting and sculpture on the visual system. Poetry and literature depend on language.
Why are empirical questions about how the mind works so weighted down with political and moral and emotional baggage?
All our behaviours are a result of neurophysiological activity in the brain. There is no reason to believe there is any magic going on.
I suspect music is auditory cheesecake, an exquisite confection crafted to tickle the sensitive spots of... our mental faculties.
Evolutionary psychology is one of four sciences that are bringing human nature back into the picture.
Thanks to the redundancy of language, yxx cxn xndxrstxnd whxt x xm wrxtxng xvxn xf x rxplxcx xll thx vxwxls wxth xn "x" (t gts lttl hrdr f y dn't vn kn whr th vwls r)
Photography is a kind of virtual reality, and it helps if you can create the illusion of being in an interesting world.
Plants can't very well defend themselves by their behavior, so they resort to chemical warfare, and plants are saturated with toxins and irritants to deter creatures like us who want to eat them.
I would argue that nothing gives life more purpose than the realization that every moment of consciousness is a precious and fragile gift.
Babies are born with the instinct to speak, the way spiders are born with the instinct to spin webs. You don't need to train babies to speak; they just do. But reading is different.
We will never have a perfect world, but it's not romantic or naive to work toward a better one.
We're living in primate heaven. We're warm, dry, we're not hungry, we don't have fleas and ticks and infections. So why are we so miserable?
Photography is a demanding action sport. The light can change so quickly. I often find myself sprinting so that I can catch the perfect light falling on a photogenic subject.
The reason I'm not a neurobiologist but a cognitive psychologist is that I think looking at brain tissue is often the wrong level of analysis. You have to look at a higher level of organization.
Most wars are not fought over shortages of resources such as food and water, but rather over conquest, revenge, and ideology.
By exploring the political and moral colorings of discoveries about what makes us tick, we can have a more honest science and a less fearful intellectual milieu.
The great appeal of the doctrine that the mind is a blank slate is the simple mathematical fact that zero equals zero.
Most intellectuals today have a phobia of any explanation of the mind that invokes genetics.
Morality comes from a commitment to treat other as we wish to be treated, which follows from the realization that none of us is the sole occupant of the universe.
I think this confusion leads intellectuals and artists themselves to believe that the elite arts and humanities are a kind of higher, exalted form of human endeavor.
The theory that religion is a force for peace, often heard among the religious right and its allies today, does not fit the facts of history.
Cognitive psychology tells us that the unaided human mind is vulnerable to many fallacies and illusions because of its reliance on its memory for vivid anecdotes rather than systematic statistics.
Some people believe that the nuclear bomb should be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, since it scared the major powers away from war by equating it with doomsday.
The more you think about and interact with other people, the more you realize that it is untenable to privilege your interests over theirs.
The stirrings of morality emerge early in childhood. Toddlers spontaneously offer toys and help to others and try to comfort people they see in distress.
Commerce is a noble profession, and Jews should get over any self-hatred they might harbor from contemplating the capitalist spirit of diaspora Judaism.
If you give people literacy, bad ideas can be attacked and experiments tried, and lessons will accumulate.
Working out what it would take to program goodness into a robot shows not only how much machinery it takes to be good but how slippery the concept of goodness is to start with.
But the newest research is showing that many properties of the brain are genetically organized, and don't depend on information coming in from the senses.
M.I.T. has a reputation for turning out Dilberts. They may be brilliant in what they do, but no one can understand what they say.
Writers acquire their technique by spotting, savoring, and reverse-engineering examples of good prose.
Democracy is an imperfect way of steering between the violence of anarchy and the violence of tyranny, with the least violence you can get away with.
People consider the harms they inflict to be justified and forgettable, and the harms they suffer to be unprovoked and grievous.
People today sometimes get uncomfortable with empirical claims that seem to clash with their political assumptions, often because they haven't given much thought to the connections.
It Begins with skepticism. The history of human folly, and our own susceptibility to illusions and fallacies, tell us that men and women are fallible.
As many political writers have pointed out, commitment to political equality is not an empirical claim that people are clones.
Many artists and scholars have pointed out that ultimately art depends on human nature.
Human nature is complex. Even if we do have inclinations toward violence, we also have inclination to empathy, to cooperation, to self-control.
Reading is a technology for perspective-taking. When someone else's thoughts are in your head, you are observing the world from that person's vantage point.
Tom Hanks, who starred in 'The Da Vinci Code,' turns out to be related to a number of the historic characters that feature in 'The Da Vinci Code,' including William the Conqueror and Shakespeare.
