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Consciousness surely does not depend on language. Babies, many animals, and patients robbed of speech by brain damage are not insensate robots they have reactions like ours that indicate that someone's home.

Steven Pinker

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Steven Pinker
Age: 70
Born: 1954
Born: September 18
Anthropologist
Linguist
Non-Fiction Writer
Philosopher
Psychologist
University Teacher
Montreal
Quebec
Steven Arthur Pinker
Doe
Speech
Robots
Home
Depends
Babies
Many
Baby
Depend
Like
Consciousness
Surely
Animal
Damage
Insensate
Brain
Reactions
Robbed
Language
Patient
Indicate
Someone
Animals
Patients

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Everyone's pedigree merges into everyone else's pedigree. So if you go back far enough, everyone is related.
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You could think of an ecosystem as a bunch of antagonistic arms races, almost: Everything that an animal depends upon for food is the body part of some other animal or plant who would just as soon keep that body part for itself.
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It's likely that taboo words are stored in the right hemisphere of the brain. Massive left hemisphere strokes or the entire surgical removal of the left hemisphere can leave people with no articulate speech other than the ability to swear, spout cliches and song lyrics.
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Something about the topic of consciousness makes people, like the White Queen in Through The Looking Glass, believe six impossible things before breakfast.
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Evolutionary psychologists seem to want to unmask our noblest motives as ultimately self-interested - to show that our love for children, compassion for the unfortunate and sense of justice are just tactics in a Darwinian struggle to perpetuate our genes.
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The rules of friendship are tacit, unconscious they are not rational. In business, though, you have to think rationally.
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Evolutionary psychology is one of four sciences that are bringing human nature back into the picture.
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Language is a window into human nature, but it is also a fistula, an open wound through which we're exposed to an infectious world.
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I think this confusion leads intellectuals and artists themselves to believe that the elite arts and humanities are a kind of higher, exalted form of human endeavor.
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But the newest research is showing that many properties of the brain are genetically organized, and don't depend on information coming in from the senses.
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Much of what is today called social criticism consists of members of the upper classes denouncing the tastes of the lower classes (bawdy entertainment, fast food, plentiful consumer goods) while considering themselves egalitarians.
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Most wars are not fought over shortages of resources such as food and water, but rather over conquest, revenge, and ideology.
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If we are not to abandon values such as peace and equality, or our commitments to science and truth, then we must pry these values away from claims about our psychological makeup that are vulnerable to being proven false.
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In any dispute, each side thinks it's in the right and the other side is demons.
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Statisticians tell us that people underestimate the sheer number of coincidences that are bound to happen in a world governed by chance.
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A successful learner, . . . must be constrained to draw some conclusions from the input and not others.
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Equity feminism is a moral doctrine about equal treatment that makes no commitments regarding open empirical issues in psychology or biology.
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We will never have a perfect world, but it's not romantic or naive to work toward a better one.
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Babies are born with the instinct to speak, the way spiders are born with the instinct to spin webs. You don't need to train babies to speak they just do. But reading is different.
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