Steven Pinker -- How the Mind Works - Hampshire High Italian ...

316 | HOW THE MIND WORKSCalculator can add and multiply a vast number of vast numbers, but itwill never spell a sentence. A dedicated word processor can type Borges'infinite library of books with all combinations of characters, but it cannever add the numbers it spells out. Modern digital computers can do alot with a little, but that "little" still includes distinct, hard-wired vocabulariesfor text, graphics, logic, and several kinds of numbers. When thecomputers are programmed into artificial intelligence reasoning systems,they have to be innately endowed with an understanding of the basic categoriesof the world: objects, which can't be in two places at once, animals,which live for a single interval of time, people, who don't like pain,and so on. That is no less true of the human mind. Even a dozen innatemental vocabularies—a wild and crazy idea, according to critics^wouldbe a small number with which to spell the entirety of human thoughtand feeling, from the meanings of the 500,000 words in the Oxford EnglishDictionary to the plots of Scheherazade's 1,001 tales.We live in the material world, and one of the first things in life we mustfigure out is how objects bump into each other and fall down elevatorshafts. Until recently, everyone thought that the infant's world was akaleidoscope of sensations, a "blooming, buzzing confusion," in WilliamJames' memorable words. Piaget claimed that infants were sensorimotorcreatures, unaware that objects cohere and persist and that the worldworks by external laws rather than the infants' actions. Infants would belike the man in the famous limerick about Berkeley's idealist philosophy:There once was a man who said, "GodMust think it exceedingly oddIf he finds that this treeContinues to beWhen there's no one about in the Quad."Philosophers are fond of pointing out that the belief that the world isa hallucination or that objects do not exist when you aren't looking atthem is not refutable by any observation. A baby could experience theblooming and buzzing all its life unless it was equipped with a mentalmechanism that interpreted the blooms and buzzes as the outward signs