arundelo comments on CogSci books - Less Wrong

5 Post author: xamdam 20 April 2010 02:11PM

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Comment author: SilasBarta 20 April 2010 03:04:49PM 1 point [-]

I'll have to echo the recommendation for for Pinker's How the Mind Works. It's 600+ pages, but not a word wasted (until you get to the chapter on art...meh). I was planning to write a review for LW.

The best summary is that it competes with Drescher's Good and Real for the title of "LW in book form", except that it doesn't talk about quantum mechanics (except for a few paragraphs). But it does tie together all of the discussions you see here of the various biases at work, game theory, impact of evolutionary history on the mind, and reductionist accounts of cognitive function (with a particular emphasis on vision and its problem of extracting 3D data from a 2D image by using cues from light gradient, line orientation, etc.).

Having seen the thread, I'll have to check out Fodor's reply book (The Mind Doesn't Work Like That).

Comment author: arundelo 20 April 2010 03:25:52PM *  3 points [-]

After having read a bit about Fodor's new book What Darwin Got Wrong (Wikipedia; Amazon), I think of him as (pardon the snipe -- maybe I'll write in more detail about this sometime) someone whose mind has gotten messed up by doing the word games that pass for philosophy in some circles.