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Steven Pinker Quotes

Steven Pinker quotes about mindfulness

Canadian Scientist September 18, 1954

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Quotes

At first happiness might seem like just desserts for biological fitness (more accurately, the states that would have led to fitness in the environment in which we evolved). We are happier when we are healthy, well-fed, comfortable, safe, prosperous, knowledgeable, respected, non-celibate, and loved. Compared to their opposites, these objects of striving are conducive to reproduction. The function of happiness would be to mobilize the mind to seek the keys to Darwinian fitness. When we are... Steven Pinker
In behaviorism, an infant's talents and abilities didn't matter because there was no such thing as a talent or an ability. Watson had banned them from psychology, together with other contents of the mind, such as ideas, beliefs, desires, and feelings. They were subjective and unmeasurable, he said, and unfit for science, which studies only objective and measurable things. To a behaviorist, the only legitimate topic for psychology is overt behavior and how it is controlled by the present and... Steven Pinker
Trivers, pursuing his theory of the emotions to its logical conclusion, notes that in a world of walking lie detectors the best strategy is to believe your own lies. You can’t leak your hidden intentions if you don’t think they are your intentions. According to his theory of self-deception, the conscious mind sometimes hides the truth from itself the better to hide it from others. But the truth is useful, so it should be registered somewhere in the mind, walled off from the parts that... Steven Pinker
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... Steven Pinker
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. Steven Pinker
Why do people believe that there are dangerous implications of the idea that the mind is a product of the brain, that the brain is organized in part by the genome, and that the genome was shaped by natural selection? Steven Pinker
Steven Pinker quote: "Why are empirical questions about how the mind works so..."
Why are empirical questions about how the mind works so weighted down with political and moral and emotional baggage? Steven Pinker
Steven Pinker quote: "The great appeal of the doctrine that the mind is a blank..."
The great appeal of the doctrine that the mind is a blank slate is the simple mathematical fact that zero equals zero. Steven Pinker
Steven Pinker quote: "Most intellectuals today have a phobia of any explanation of..."
Most intellectuals today have a phobia of any explanation of the mind that invokes genetics. Steven Pinker
Steven Pinker quote: "the mind is a neural computer"
the mind is a neural computer Steven Pinker

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