Quote

The supposedly immaterial soul, we now know, can be bisected with a knife, altered by chemicals, started or stopped by electricity, and extinguished by a sharp blow or by insufficient oxygen.

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
Stopped
Insufficient
Blow
Altered
Started
Oxygen
Brain
Knife
Soul
Knives
Electricity
Immaterial
Chemicals
Extinguished
Sharp
Supposedly

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A successful learner, . . . must be constrained to draw some conclusions from the input and not others.
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I like ice hockey. No one is ever going to ask me to write about that as a metaphor for life.
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Students do everything on laptops these days, so I definitely think electronic books are a trend that's going to expand.
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With violence, as with so many other concerns, human nature is the problem, but human nature is also the solution.
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People have long assumed that violence is necessary for political change. Rulers never cede power voluntarily, the argument goes, so progressives have no choice but to contemplate the use of force to bring about a better world, mindful of the trade-off between a small amount of violence now and acceptance of an unjust status quo indefinitely.
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It is true that raids and battles killed a tiny percentage of the numbers that die in modern warfare. But in tribal violence, the clashes are more frequent, the percentage of men in the population who fight is greater, and the rates of death per battle are higher.
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For one thing, before the 20th century, there were plenty of genocides. We tend to forget about them, partly because they weren't as well documented and partly because, until recently, people didn't care. We used euphemisms like 'sackings' and 'sieges' instead of calling them 'genocides.'
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Conventions are unstated agreements within a community to abide by a single way of doing things - not because there is any inherent advantage to the choice, but because there is an advantage to everyone making the same choice.
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As every student in Philosophy 101 learns, nothing can force me to believe that anyone except me is conscious. This power to deny that other people have feelings is not just an academic exercise but an all-too-common vice, as we see in the long history of human cruelty.
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There has to be innate circuitry that does the learning, that creates the culture, that acquires the culture, and that responds to socialization.
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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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Consistent style prevents presentation from getting in the way of content.
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Equality is not the empirical claim that all groups of humans are interchangeable it is the moral principle that individuals should not be judged or constrained by the average properties of their group.
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An ideology can provide a satisfying narrative that explains chaotic events and collective misfortunes in a way that flatters the virtue and competence of believers, while being vague or conspiratorial enough to withstand skeptical scrutiny.
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