How The Mind Works

Pinker starts the book by asking: “Why are there so many robots in fiction, but none in real life?” (3). The answer stems from the fact that even the simplest actions that we take for granted, like a four-year-old complying with a request to put away a toy, walking, or reading, are complex and precisely organized behaviors. This organization happens in our mind, and understanding these behaviors involves having our mind consider itself. Unsurprisingly, that is no small feat. Even though the mind works seamlessly and as if by magic, there is order and structure to the system.

Consider all the seemingly simple things the human body does every day and the amazing complexity that goes into them. For instance, vision involves processing the brightness of individual patches in our visual field, identifying boundaries between objects, somehow creating their three-dimensional relationships from two-dimensional impressions, and then identifying those objects to make sense of the world. The visual system must handle changes in illumination to know that a snowball is a snowball both bright sunlight and when the sun goes down. Our brain carries out these steps so quickly, we don’t even notice they are all happening.

A robot could be programmed to handle some of the simplest steps quickly, such as processing the brightness of patches in the visual field, but how to three dimensions from two is still not understood, and identifying objects is more challenging that it seems.