I just read The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature, by Steven Pinker. When I finished it I was disappointed. I had heard so
much about Pinker (this is the first book of his I’ve read), and I felt like
I had learned very little about human nature. But as I reflected on it over the
next few days, my opinion radically changed. I kept bumping into things that were
illuminated by the insights in this book.
For example, I read an article about how robots are being
programmed to follow some of the basic modes of human thought so they interface
with humans better, and these basic modes are exactly what Pinker outlined.
The basic message of the book is that there are deep structures in our brains, evolved over countless
millennia, which allow us to make sense of our sensory experience. These are very
similar to the “categories of understanding” described by Immanuel Kant 225
years ago. Pinker lists space, time, substance, object, causation, force,
possession, and goal as the basic concepts that form the scaffolding that
constructs our mental model of the world.
These models are very useful for helping us to navigate the
physical world, but science has discovered that our evolved models don’t accurately
match reality. Pinker writes, “They add up to a distinctively human model of
reality, which differs in major ways from the objective understanding of
reality eked out by our best science and logic.” In other words, the basic
concepts box us in; they restrict how we can think about reality. This is why
quantum physics is so hard to comprehend, and also why it is so difficult to
put spiritual experiences into words.
Causation is one of the basic concepts, and it forms a big
part of our worldview. We attribute causation whenever we see an action by an
autonomous actor. Scientists have done studies where shapes move on a computer
screen. If, for example, a yellow triangle moves towards a red circle and stops
just when it touches the circle, and then the circle starts moving, subjects
overwhelmingly say, “the triangle caused
the circle to move.” There’s been research with shapes on computer screens in
which the movements are so involved that the subjects start telling stories
about the shapes as if they are living creatures, even imbuing them with
emotions.
