ix First, we don't understand how the mind works [JLJ - What? You write
a book called "How the Mind Works", then within a few words of the start you declare that we don't understand how it works]
p.3 I will try to explain what the mind is, where it came from, and how it lets us see, think, feel, interact,
and pursue higher callings like art, religion, and philosophy.
p.4 The faculty with which we ponder the world has no ability to peer inside itself or
our other faculties to see what makes them tick.
p.14 An intelligent system... must be equipped with a smaller list of core truths and a set of rules to
deduce their implications. But the rules of common sense, like the categories of common sense, are frustratingly hard
to set down... A thinker has to compute not just the direct effects of an action but the side effects as well.
But a thinker cannot crank out predictions about all the side effects, either.
p.21 The mind is a system of organs of computation, designed by natural selection
to solve the kinds of problems our ancestors faced in their foraging way of life, in particular, understanding
and outmaneuvering objects, animals, plants, and other people. [JLJ - the mind determines how to 'go on', whether this means
to solve a problem or not, or to make up an answer, or to be lazy, or to watch someone else solve a problem, or to ask someone
for an answer, or to learn a better way to solve the problem. The mind transforms perceptions into knowledge]
p.29-30 Our common sense about other people is a kind of intuitive psychology - we try to infer people's
beliefs and desires from what they do, and try to predict what they will do from our guesses about their beliefs and desires.
p.30 Each of our mental modules solves its unsolvable problem by a leap of faith about how the world
works, by making assumptions that are indispensable but indefensible - the only defense being that the assumptions
worked well enough in the world of our ancestors.
p.33 We need ideas that capture the ways a complex device can tune itself to unpredictable aspects of the
world and take in the kinds of data it needs to function.
p.36 natural selection is the only evolutionary force that acts like an engineer, "designing" organs that
accomplish improbable but adaptive outcomes
p.43 The ultimate goal that the mind was designed to attain is maximizing the number of copies of the genes
that created it.
p.52 I do know that happiness and virtue have nothing to do with what natural selection designed us to accomplish
in the ancestral environment. They are for us to determine.
p.62 Intelligence, then, is the ability to attain goals in the face of obstacles by means of decisions
based on rational (truth-obeying) rules. [JLJ - Intelligence involves understanding the environment in enough detail
to maintain a posture which confronts the elements, infers intention where necessary to maneuver jointly with them and
maintain essential relationships, and compete for goal or other objects] The computer scientists Allen Newell and Herbert
Simon fleshed this idea out further by noting that intelligence consists of specifying a goal, assessing the current situation
to see how it differs from the goal, and applying a set of operations that reduce the difference. [JLJ - yes, but in playing
a game your opponent is aware that you are trying to do this, and will arrange his pieces or players so that there is
no clear way to do it. Now what? You will have to build a position that is adaptive, and out-adapt your opponent as emergent
details come to light. You will have to consider the effects of joint action, as both players collide in their pursuit of
opposing goals. You will have to maneuver by changing a posture and re-reacting to your opponent's posture. And so on.]
p.63 In our daily lives we all predict and explain other people's behavior from what we think they
know and what we think they want. Beliefs and desires are the explanatory tools of our own intuitive psychology,
and intuitive psychology is still the most useful and complete science of behavior there is.
p.79 The intelligence of the system emerges from the activities of the not-so-intelligent mechanical demons
inside it.
p.83 Scientific understanding and technological achievement are only loosely connected.
p.137,138 Simple calculations how that the number of... [unique] chess games... can exceed the number of
particles in the universe... an information processor needs rules or algorithms that operate on a subset
of information at a time and calculate an answer just when it is needed.
p.178 Learning works like this. Each animal, as it lives its life, tries out settings for the learnable
connections at random until it hits upon the magic combination. In real life this might be figuring out how to catch
prey or crack a nut; whatever it is, the animal senses its good fortune and retains those settings, ceasing trial
and error.
p.182 A brain is a precision instrument that allows a creature to use information to solve the problems
presented by its lifestyle.
p.190 Language is a means of exchanging knowledge.
p.300 Wallace's paradox, the apparent evolutionary uselessness of human intelligence, is
a central problem of psychology, biology, and the scientific worldview.
p.301 A computer that issues paychecks cannot also analyze election returns or play tic-tac-toe,
unless someone has reprogrammed it first. [JLJ - someone needs to explain to the intelligent Mr. Pinker what multi-tasking
is and the purpose of operating systems.]
p.301 We will soon see that all people, right from the cradle, engage in a kind of scientific thinking.
We are all intuitive physicists, biologists, engineers, psychologists, and mathematicians.
p.305 we are apt to want our version of the truth, rather than the truth itself, to prevail.
p.360 All of us are creative.
p.361 Geniuses are wonks [JLJ - nerds]. The typical genius pays
dues for at least ten years before contributing anything of lasting value... During the apprenticeship, geniuses
immerse themselves in their genre. They absorb tens of thousands of problems and solutions, so no challenge is completely
new and they can draw on a vast repertoire of motifs and strategies.
p.361 Geniuses... work day and night, and leave us with many works of subgenius... Their
interludes away from a problem are helpful not because it ferments in the unconscious but because they are exhausted and need
the rest (and probably so they can forget blind alleys). They do not repress a problem but engage in "creative worrying,"
and the epiphany is not a masterstroke but a tweaking of an earlier attempt. They revise endlessly, gradually
closing in on their ideal.
p.362 The genius creates good ideas because we all create good ideas; that is what our combinatorial, adapted
minds are for.
p.372 Without goals, the very concept of intelligence is meaningless.
p.373 The emotions are mechanisms that set the brain's highest level goals.
p.393 The numbers show that it is not the rich, privileged, robust, or good-looking who are happy; it is
those who have spouses, friends, religion, and challenging, meaningful work... "The direct pursuit of happiness is
a recipe for an unhappy life." [evolutionary psychologist Donald Campbell]
p.396 Shelling notes the strange ways in which we defeat our self-defeating behavior: putting the
alarm clock across the room so we won't turn it off and fall back to sleep [JLJ - I tried that, but I shut it off
and go back to bed anyway. You have to put it on the floor in front of the bathroom door - you have too much momentum forward
into the day at that point. I have also tried two alarm clocks, one set about ten minutes after the first one. The final idea
was an alarm clock that goes off in the evening to tell me that it is time to go to bed. With enough sleep you get up without
a problem when the morning alarm clock rings.]
p.411 To defend yourself against threats, make it impossible for the threatener to make you an
offer you can't refuse.
p.418 "People who are sensible about love are incapable of it," wrote Douglas Yates.
p.429 If the mind is an organ of computation engineered by natural selection, our social motives should
be strategies that are tailored to the tournaments we play in.
p.462 Germs are small, and they develop diabolical tricks for infiltrating and hijacking the machinery
of cells, for skimming off its raw materials, and for passing themselves off as the body's own tissues to escape
the surveillance of the immune system.
p.535 One of the brain's tricks as it identifies the soundmakers in the world is to pay attention to harmonic
relations.
p.542 General strategies like "Get your Queen out early" are too vague to be of much use [JLJ - BUT there
might be other general strategies, operated together to form a concept of sustainability, that might be of much use]
p.543 Life has even more moves than chess... The intrigues of people in conflict can multiply out in so
many ways that no one could possibly play out the consequences of all the courses of action in the mind's eye.
p.554 "The most common of all follies," wrote H. L. Mencken, "is to believe passionately in the palpably
[JLJ - easily perceived as; obviously] not true. It is the chief occupation of mankind."
