Week 6 - Expert Lecture - Steven Pinker

Steven Pinker is exceptionally gifted at imparting information. The subjects that he is speaking about are relatively complex, but he describes things in an easy to understand manner (at least for the first 45 minutes or so). It made writing about his “expert lecture” both fun and relatively easy.

I liked how Mr. Pinker compared the complexity of human consciousness to that of artificial intelligence. He didn't so much describe similarities between the two as he described the difficulty in acquiring intelligence to begin with. Programing a computer to do even simple tasks is very difficult, yet a four year old can do any of those potential tasks with ease. Walk across the street, pick up a glass, etc. these things are easy for us to emulate, but a computer has a high degree of difficulty realizing these tasks. According to Mr. Pinker, this shows an innate human ability to acquire intelligence. The ease with which we learn and perform tasks is amazing and without some fundamental understanding of how this is possible, trying to artificially emulate intelligence to any great degree will be near impossible. To me, the demonstrates just how truly amazing natural selection really is. The deliberate acquisition of all of our “intelligent” features is somehow easy to understand (their survival value is extraordinary) and yet impossible to imagine.

Mr. Pinker's description of kin relations was also fascinating, as it was something I had really just taken for granted. I care more about my family than the average person. Even though I don't always agree with my family and I may agree completely with some random person, I still care more for my family. The notion that my family shares more of my genetic structure, and thus is cared about by me, is fascinating for both its simplicity and its logical rationality.

I also liked Mr. Pinker's views on morality, that there is some possible underlying logic to it. It would help to explain a global, shared morality that some feel exists. He also explains that moral concepts may exist the same way that math concepts do. It could be argued that we didn't really invent math, we just discovered it. That is explained in the sense that there is a truth to 1+1 equaling 2, we didn't create that to suite us. A moral center in the human brain is also an interesting concept, as it could help to counter the natural cynicism humans poses.

“Philosophy is the study of problems that the human mind is incapable of understanding.” Personally, I found this quite amusing and astonishingly accurate.