Categories
psychology quotes

Quotes #94 & #95

Two more from Steven Pinker’s ‘How The Mind Works’:

1.

Each of the major engineering problems solves by the mind is unsolvable without built-in assuptions about the laws that hold in that arena of interaction with the world

2.

Beliefs and desires are the explanatory tools of our own intuitive psychology, and intuitive psychology is the still the most useful and complete science of behaviour their is. The predict the vast majority of human acts – going to the refrigerator, getting on the bus, reaching into one’s wallet – you don’t need to crank through a mathematical model, run a computer simulation of a neural network, or a hire a professional psychologist; you can just ask your grandmother.