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Submitted by Roger and Launchpad on Sun, 10/12/2008 - 6:50pm.
Steven Pinker and his pursuit of reverse engineering remain humble in his book entitled "How the Mind Works" (1997).
Steven writes: "...it omits a third alternative: that some categories are products of a complex mind designed to mesh with what is in nature." on page 57 in the last sentence of the first paragraph.
Those words by Pinker on page 57 put me at ease as a reader to both understand that his order of events appears to be: stimuli-hardware-interpretation and, that Pinker is not a fundamentalist attempting to answer the wrong questions instead of asking the right questions.
"Replace X better than Y with how X works". Hardware from stimuli. To go from human-interpretation to hardware to stimuli is "reverse engineering" which, is also known as an illposed (unanswerable) physics/engineering question.
Interesting itinerary. The retina displays images of stimuli to the brain for interpretation (in that order) while, Deaf kids devolop the same language patterns of hearing kids. The Chinese say that a baby is already one years (plural) young upon birth.
With warrant Steven implies that the brain is already programmed to form according to the stimuli.
If the Deaf get language without hearing, do the blind get sight without seeing?
More accurately, that begs the question: did the brain originally form knowing what the stimuli would be?
I am looking forwards toward the next chapters in Steven's book to see how he characterizes the line of fit for the equation: stimuli-hardware-interpretation.
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