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

Good Ideas 321top, which leans without falling, is an object of wonder to all of us, evenphysicists.It is not surprising to find that the mind is non-Newtonian. The idealizedmotions of classical mechanics are visible only in perfectly elasticpoint masses moving in vacuums on frictionless planes. In the real world,Newton's laws are masked by friction from the air, the ground, and theobjects' own molecules. With friction slowing everything that moves andkeeping stationary objects in place, it's natural to conceive of objects ashaving an inherent tendency toward rest. As historians of science havenoted, it would be hard to convince a medieval European struggling tofree an oxcart from the mud that an object in motion continues at a constantspeed along a straight line unless acted upon by an external force.Complicated motions like spinning tops and rolling wheels have a doubledisadvantage. They depend on evolutionarily unprecedented machineswith negligible friction, and their motions are governed by complex equationsthat relate many variables at once; our perceptual system can handleonly one at a time even in the best of circumstances.Even the brainiest baby has a lot to learn. Children grow up in aworld of sand, Velcro, glue, Nerf balls, rubbed balloons, dandelion seeds,boomerangs, television remote controls, objects suspended by near-invisiblefishing line, and countless other objects whose idiosyncratic propertiesoverwhelm the generic predictions of Newton's laws. Theprecociousness that infants show in the lab does not absolve them oflearning about objects; it makes the learning possible. If children did notcarve the world into objects, or if they were prepared to believe thatobjects could magically disappear and reappear anywhere, they wouldhave no pegs on which to hang their discoveries of stickiness, fluffiness,squishiness, and so on. Nor could they develop the intuitions capturedin Aristotle's theory, the impetus theory, Newton's theory, or Wile E. Coyote'stheory. An intuitive physics relevant to our middle-sized world hasto refer to enduring matter and its lawful motions, and infants see theworld in those terms from the beginning.Here is the plot of a movie. A protagonist strives to attain a goal. Anantagonist interferes. Thanks to a helper, the protagonist finally succeeds.This movie does not feature a swashbuckling hero aided by a