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

The Meaning of Life 559success rate predicts that I will choose what at this point looks like theworse alternative. Should I continue to agonize, or should I save timeand do what's inevitable?A fourth puzzle is meaning. When I talk about flanets, I can refer toall planets in the universe, past, present, and future. But how could I,right now, here in my house, be standing in some relationship to a planetthat will be created in a distant galaxy in five million years? If I knowwhat "natural number" means, my mind has commerce with an infiniteset—but I am a finite being, who has tasted a tiny sample of the naturalnumbers.Knowledge is just as perplexing. How could I have arrived at the certaintythat the square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of thesquares of the other two sides, everywhere and for all eternity, here in thecomfort of my armchair with not a triangle or tape measure in sight?How do I know that I'm not a brain in a vat, or dreaming, or living a hallucinationprogrammed by an evil neurologist, or that the universe wasnot created five minutes ago complete with fossils, memories, and historicalrecords? If every emerald I have seen so far is green, why should Iconclude "all emeralds are green" rather than "all emeralds are grue,"where grue means "either observed before the year 2020 and green, ornot so observed and blue"? All the emeralds I have seen are green, butthen all the emeralds I've seen are grue. The two conclusions are equallywarranted, but one predicts that the first emerald I see in 2020 will bethe color of grass and the other predicts that it will be the color of thesky.A final conundrum is morality. If I secretly hatchet the unhappy,despised pawnbroker, where is the evil nature of that act registered?What does it mean to say that I "shouldn't" do it? How did ought emergefrom a universe of particles and planets, genes and bodies? If the aim ofethics is to maximize happiness, should we indulge a sicko who getsmore pleasure from killing than his victims do from living? If it is to maximizelives, should we publicly execute a framed man if it would deter athousand murderers? Or draft a few human guinea pigs for fatal experimentsthat would save millions?People have thought about these problems for millennia but havemade no progress in solving them. They give us a sense of bewilderment,of intellectual vertigo. McGinn shows how thinkers have cycled amongfour kinds of solutions over the ages, none satisfactory.Philosophical problems have a feeling of the divine, and the favorite