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

564 J HOW THE MIND WORKSview that sees the mind as a product of nature. Cognitive closure shouldbe true if we know what we are talking about. Still, one might havethought that the hypothesis was merely a daydream, a logical possibilitythat could go no further than late-night dorm-room bull sessions.McGinn's attempt to identify the humanly unsolvable problems is anadvance.Even better, we can glimpse why certain problems are beyond ourken. A recurring theme of this book is that the mind owes its power to itssyntactic, compositional, combinatorial abilities (Chapter 2). Our complicatedideas are built out of simpler ones, and the meaning of thewhole is determined by the meanings of the parts and the meanings ofthe relations that connect them: part-of-a-whole, example-of-a-category,thing-at-a-place, actor-exerting-force, cause-of-an-effect, mind-holdinga-belief.These logical and lawlike connections provide the meanings ofsentences in everyday speech and, through analogies and metaphors,lend their structures to the esoteric contents of science and mathematics,where they are assembled into bigger and bigger theoretical edifices(see Chapter 5). We grasp matter as molecules, atoms, and quarks; lifeas DNA, genes, and a tree of organisms; change as position, momentum,and force; mathematics as symbols and operations. All are assemblies ofelements composed according to laws, in which the properties of thewhole are predictable from the properties of the parts and the way theyare combined. Even when scientists grapple with seamless continua anddynamical processes, they couch their theories in words, equations, andcomputer simulations, combinatorial media that mesh with the workingsof the mind. We are lucky that parts of the world behave as lawful interactionsamong simpler elements.But there is something peculiarly holistic and everywhere-at-omce andnowhere-at-all and all-at-the-same-time about the problems of philosophy.Sentience is not a combination of brain events or computationalstates: how a red-sensitive neuron gives rise to the subjective feel of rednessis not a whit less mysterious than how the whole brain gives rise tothe entire stream of consciousness. The "I" is not a combination of bodyparts or brain states or bits of information, but a unity of selfness overtime, a single locus that is nowhere in particular. Free will is not a causalchain of events and states, by definition. Although the combinatorialaspect of meaning has been worked out (how words or ideas combineinto the meanings of sentences or propositions), the core of meaning—the simple act of referring to something—remains a puzzle, because it