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

The Meaning of Life 565stands strangely apart from any causal connection between the thingreferred to and the person referring. Knowledge, too, throws up the paradoxthat knowers are acquainted with things that have never impingedupon them. Our thoroughgoing perplexity about the enigmas of consciousness,self, will, and knowledge may come from a mismatchbetween the very nature of these problems and the computational apparatusthat natural selection has fitted us with.If these conjectures are correct, our psyche would present us with theultimate tease. The most undeniable thing there is, our own awareness,would be forever beyond our conceptual grasp. But if our minds are partof nature, that is to be expected, even welcomed. The natural worldevokes our awe by the specialized designs of its creatures and their parts.We don't poke fun at the eagle for its clumsiness on the ground or fretthat the eye is not very good at hearing, because we know that a designcan excel at one challenge only by compromising at others. Our bafflementat the mysteries of the ages may have been the price we paid for acombinatorial mind that opened up a world of words and sentences, oftheories and equations, of poems and melodies, of jokes and stories, thevery things that make a mind worth having.