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

32 HOW THE MIND WORKSwithout built-in assumptions about the laws that hold in that arena ofinteraction with the world. All of the programs designed by artificialintelligence researchers have been specially engineered for a particulardomain, such as language, vision, movement, or one of many differentkinds of common sense. Within artificial intelligence research, the proudparent of a program will sometimes tout it as a mere demo of an amazinglypowerful general-purpose system to be built in the future, buteveryone else in the field routinely writes off such hype. I predict that noone will ever build a humanlike robot—and I mean a really humanlikerobot—unless they pack it with computational systems tailored to differentproblems.Throughout the book we will run into other lines of evidence that ourmental organs owe their basic design to our genetic prograim. I havealready mentioned that much of the fine structure of our personality andintelligence is shared by identical twins reared apart and hence chartedby the genes. Infants and young children, when tested with ingeniousmethods, show a precocious grasp of the fundamental categories of thephysical and social world, and sometimes command information thatwas never presented to them. People hold many beliefs that are at oddswith their experience but were true in the environment in which weevolved, and they pursue goals that subvert their own well-being butwere adaptive in that environment. And contrary to the widespread beliefthat cultures can vary arbitrarily and without limit, surveys of the ethnographicliterature show that the peoples of the world share an astonishinglydetailed universal psychology.But if the mind has a complex innate structure, that does not meanthat learning is unimportant. Framing the issue in such a way thatinnate structure and learning are pitted against each other, either asalternatives or, almost as bad, as complementary ingredients or interactingforces, is a colossal mistake. It's not that the claim that there is aninteraction between innate structure and learning (or between heredityand environment, nature and nurture, biology and culture) is literallywrong. Rather, it falls into the category of ideas that are so bad they arenot even wrong.Imagine the following dialogue:"This new computer is brimming with sophisticated technology. It has a500 megahertz processor, a gigabyte of RAM, a terabyte of disk storage, a3-D color virtual reality display, speech output, wireless access to theWorld Wide Web, expertise in a dozen subjects, and built-in editions of