The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature - Steven Pinker
Language: EnglishKeywords:
Anthropology
Brain
Consciousness
Human Evolution
instinct
Psychology
Thought
Shared by:kriskodisko
Written by
Read by Victor Bevine
Format: M4B
Bitrate: 64 Kbps
In The Blank Slate, Steven Pinker explores the idea of human nature and its moral, emotional, and political colorings. He shows how many intellectuals have denied the existence of human nature by embracing three linked dogmas: the Blank Slate (the mind has no innate traits), the Noble Savage (people are born good and corrupted by society), and the Ghost in the Machine (each of us has a soul that makes choices free from biology). Each dogma carries a moral burden, so their defenders have engaged in desperate tactics to discredit the scientists who are now challenging them.
Pinker injects calm and rationality into these debates by showing that equality, progress, responsibility, and purpose have nothing to fear from discoveries about a rich human nature. He disarms even the most menacing threats with clear thinking, common sense, and pertinent facts from science and history.
Despite its popularity among intellectuals during much of the twentieth century, he argues, the doctrine of the Blank Slate may have done more harm than good. It denies our common humanity and our individual preferences, replaces hardheaded analyses of social problems with feel-good slogans, and distorts our understanding of government, violence, parenting, and the arts.
Pinker shows that an acknowledgement of human nature that is grounded in science and common sense, far from being dangerous, can complement insights about the human condition made by millennia of artists and philosophers. All this is done in the style that earned his previous books many prizes and worldwide acclaim: wit, lucidity, and insight into matters great and small.
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| Creation Date: | Sun, 05 Jun 2022 07:49:00 +0200 |
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This post has 11 comments with rating of 3.3/5
June 24th, 2021
Thanks very much for the upload.
June 24th, 2021
Like just about everyone else, Pinker gets Skinner and his behaviourism exactly wrong, repeating Chomsky’s moral-outrage diatribe that became rumour-mill fact. Skinner was explicitly anti blank-slate learning. Why no one ever bothers to read his work is a mystery.
June 24th, 2021
As for Skinner himself, what he actually got wrong was never grasping the concept of computation, that there can be meaningfully different classes of decision-machines. A behaviourist approach to brain subcomponents would be just as correct as a wholistic approach (the boundary line between a computer’s internal components and its inputs can be drawn anywhere), while being of more practical use in studying behaviour, since it’s not feasible to collate an entire life experience and evaluate it as a single program.
Skinner never got around to this realisation, though, probably because he was too frustrated by and suspicious of all the Chomsky-ites building strawmen and discounting him to believe anything else they had to say.
June 24th, 2021
As for Pinker, he ought to have read into the theory of computation before writing this book, and he would have learnt that it says nothing about data structures and algorithms and other implementation details but is rather about classes of pattern recognition, i.e. stimulus paired to response, i.e. exactly the same approach of analysis to which Skinner adhered, only formalised to show the different categories of behaviour and to clearly demarcate behaviours that are impossible (hypercomputation).
> For example, storing the value of a variable in the brain, as in “x=3:’is a critical computational step in navigating and foraging, which are highly developed talents of animals in the wild. But this kind of learning cannot be reduced to the formation of associations, and so it has been ignored in neuroscience.
Computation has nothing to do with reduction. An algorithm functionally/behaviourally equivalent to the store and recall of values certainly *can* be implemented via the formation of associations, though, and so it is in the human brain. Computationalist functionalism, the cogsci application of computation to studying the brain, is the not-direct-but-spiritual successor of Skinner’s behaviourism.
June 24th, 2021
It’s pretty hard to say what specifically Skinner got wrong, but, given that his predictions mostly don’t hold up to the real world, he definitely wasn’t right. In his defense, no one else has been either.
June 25th, 2021
The humans are self destructive, insatiable, reward seeking apes who choose & control nothing.
Now, I finish my remaining years still listening to them honour & congratulate themselves on how clever they think they are even after they have pulled the trigger of their doom - catastrophic runaway climate change which will result in yet another hothouse mass extinction here on planet meat grinder assuming we avoid nuke war as we are already fighting (cold) over the dregs of the resources while still growing the population.
Don’t blame yourselves (assuming you can get past the denial). The humans are just evolutionary & thermodynamic puppets….with egos. The universe created all life to help burn itself out. What’s so great about humans? We work faster than plants by digging up & burning ten million years of stored sunlight in less than 300 years…..What did it cost?….Everything.
June 25th, 2021
Thank you!
Civilization still advances.
June 29th, 2021
I really enjoyed this
July 9th, 2021
Thanks, @howlafist. Insightful and good context.
July 15th, 2021
As usual, Pinker is fighting windmills, since nobody holds any of the dogmas he’s valiantly charging toward. Another grifter trying to profit off of scarecrows.
August 21st, 2021
It seems some windmills squeel when poked.
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