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

The Meaning of Life 563lems of philosophy. It does not say that there is some paradox of self-referenceor infinite regress in a mind's trying to understand itself. Psychologistsand neuroscientists don't study their own minds; they study someoneelse's. Nor does it imply some principled limitation on the possibility ofknowledge by any knower, like the Uncertainty Principle or Godel's theorem.It is an observation about one organ of one species, equivalent toobserving that cats are color-blind or that monkeys cannot learn longdivision. It does not justify religious or mystical beliefs but explains whythey are futile. Philosophers would not be out of a job, because they clarifythese problems, chip off chunks that can be solved, and solve them orhand them over to science to solve. The hypothesis does not imply thatwe have sighted the end of science or bumped into a barrier on howmuch we can ever learn about how the mind works. The computationalaspect of consciousness (what information is available to whichprocesses), the neurological aspect (what in the brain correlates withconsciousness), and the evolutionary aspect (when and why did the neurocomputationalaspects emerge) are perfectly tractable, and I see noreason that we should not have decades of progress and eventually acomplete understanding—even if we never solve residual brain-teaserslike whether your red is the same as my red or what it is like to be a bat.In mathematics, one says that the integers are closed under addition:adding two integers produces another integer; it can never produce afraction. But that does not mean that the set of integers is finite.Humanly thinkable thoughts are closed under the workings of our cognitivefaculties, and may never embrace the solutions to the mysteries ofphilosophy. But the set of thinkable thoughts may be infinite nonetheless.Is cognitive closure a pessimistic conclusion? Not at all! I find itexhilarating, a sign of great progress in our understanding of the mind.And it is my last opportunity to pursue the goal of this book: to get you tostep outside your own mind for a moment and see your thoughts andfeelings as magnificent contrivances of the natural world rather than asthe only way that things could be.First, if the mind is a system of organs designed by natural selection,why should we ever have expected it to comprehend all mysteries, tograsp all truths? We should be thankful that the problems of science areclose enough in structure to the problems of our foraging ancestors thatwe have made the progress that we have. If there were nothing we werebad at understanding, we would have to question the scientific world-