Mind: We have minds whether we recognize them or not

A friend draws my attention to this video, in which Robert Wright interviews materialist psychologist Steven Pinker on consciousness and does a good job of bringing out Pinker's circular reference to materialism:

You can easily observe in this interview that Pinker can't see that his intellectual struggle with "sentience" [awareness-of-awareness, holistic awareness of self] is the result of an incompleteness in his material presuppositions.

This might apply: During meditation or deep prayer the mind shuts down sections of the brain to achieve the desired undistracted state. This argument relates to the cause-effect argument above. In this case the mind quiets the brain so that the brain is not sending distracting information to the mind ....

Also, while I am here, best wishes to Cindy Lou Bailey, who reported on Facebook: "Thanks for recommending the book, "Spiritual Brain". I got it on CD and have enjoyed it. I am now at Andrews University taking their Leadership Degree with a concentration in Neuroscience."

Hey, need any more help, we are only an e-mail address away.

US cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker defends freedom of expression in Canada

Well, of all people!

Regular blog readers will know that I have rarely been kind to Harvard cognitive scientist Pinker, either at The Mindful Hack or The Post-Darwinist (examples linked), or in The Spiritual Brain.

I find his hard core materialism juvenile - after all these years he still doesn't know that his show left town a while back, as Thomas Wolfe has noted.

All that said, P. M. Jaworski notes at The Shotgun Blog (civil rights lawyer Ezra Levant's online magazine) that Pinker recently said something in defense of intellectual freedom in Canada that makes a lot of sense to me:

I was aware of the Steyn/Maclean's case.

It’s truly shocking that a supposedly democratic government has arrogated to itself the power to censor speech because some judge or bureaucrat thinks it may “expose a person to contempt.” This could outlaw any criticism of a practice that is statistically more common in some groups than others, such as slavery, polygamy, child abuse, ritual torture, gay-bashing, and so on.

It allows haters to decide who gets to say what -- all they have to do is say, “So-and-so’s essay made me show contempt,” and So-and-so gets fined or jailed. And it opens the door to the government banning speech that upsets anyone, anywhere -- as all-important speech is bound to do.

This is an atrocity against the ideal of free speech, and will make Canada a laughing stock among lovers of democracy and enlightenment. (October 24, 2008)

Pinker gets a lot right here - the "human rights" commissions can be used to outlaw criticism of any practice that is "statistically more common in some groups than others."

But he is, alas, mistaken on two points:

1. The criticized practice does not need to be statistically common. Prosecution requires only that the "human rights" commissioner believes that the critic may “expose a person to contempt.” Statistically uncommon practices are more likely to do so.

2. Second, given that many countries have - or are contemplating - similar laws, we are kidding ourselves if we think that Canada - or American university campuses - are making themselves "a laughing stock" by enforcing censorship of opinion.

Many earnest, humourless people who know that they are "victims" or that they represent "victims" will only rest easy when they have permanently shut down all thought that gives them anxiety. As they are not likely to be free of anxiety any time soon, dislodging them will hardly be easy.

Hat tip: Five Feet of Fury

Photo credit: Rebecca Goldstein

David Berlinski on why we should not pay any attention to "evolutionary psychology"

I've been rereading agnostic mathematician David Berlinski's The Devil’s Delusion: Atheism and Its Scientific Pretensions (for a review I am writing), and it was fun to read his sendup of Harvard materialist cognitive scientist Steve Pinker (who thinks that the brain is like a machine):

A successful evolutionary theory of the human mind would, after all, annihilate any claim we might make on behalf of human freedom. The psychical sciences do not trifle with determinism: It is the heart and soul of their method. Were boron salts at liberty to discard their identity, the claims of inorganic chemistry would seem considerably less pertinent than they do.

When Steven Pinker writes that "nature does not dictate what we should accept or how we should live our lives," he is expressing a belief - one obviously true - entirely at odds with his professional commitments.

If ordinary men and women are, like Pinker himself, perfectly free to tell their genes "to go jump in the lake," why pay the slightest attention to evolutionary psychology?

Why pay the slightest attention to Pinker?

Either the theory in which he has placed his confidence is wrong, or we are not free to tell our genes to do much of anything.

If the theory is wrong, which theory is right?

If no theory is right, how can "the idea that human minds are the product of evolution" be "unassailable fact"?

If this idea is not unassailable fact, why must we put aside "the idea that man was created in the image of God"?

These hypotheticals must now be allowed to discharge themselves in a number of categorical statements:

There is no reason to pay attention to Steven Pinker.

We do not have a serious scientific theory explaining the powers and properties of the human mind.

The claim that the human mind is the product of evolution is not unassailable fact. It is barely coherent.

The idea that man was created in the image of God remains what it has always been: And that is the instinctive default position of the human race. (pp. 178-179)

That's why you should never let a mathematician have a go at a materialist theory! Or if you do, don't expect to come back and find any of the structure standing.

Mario and I had a bit of fun with Pinker in The Spiritual Brain too, and he is easy to have fun with.

Here's the review:

Introduction:Berlinski, the devil, and the long spoon
Part One: Taking the measure of the new religion of science
Part Two: Materialism conflicts with evidence more than theism does
Part Three: Evolutionary psychology - the saints' legends of scientism
Part Four: The duty Berlinski never accepted

Do selfish genes explain why you want to hear about your great grandfolks?

An anthropologist offers a critical look at the claims of evolutionary psychology that your selfish genes cause you to care more about your relatives than about other people (because your kin have more of the same genes). Evaluating Harvard cognitive scientist Steve Pinker’s attempt in "Strangled by Roots" to account for the current American craze for genealogy by evolution, poster Rex notes that human groups do not even have fixed ideas of who their kin are:

The overall plot of "Strangled By Roots" will be familiar to any one familiar with evolutionary psychology: a New Field Of Research has been opened up that sheds Scientific Light on a previously untheorized and salaciously quirky bit of human life. The Social Scientists, of course, with their Social Science Models, have got it wrong, but luckily New Experiments have revealed the hidden evolutionary basis of said quirky behavior.

Unfortunately—alas!—however adaptive this behavior once was, it no longer suits the rigors of modern life and is currently the source of many social woes.

This time around its kinship. In the article Pinker claims that "for all its fascination, kinship is a surprisingly neglected topic in the behavioral sciences." While "many social scientists have gone so far as to claim that kinship is a social construction with no relation to biology" others disagree. "Genetics and evolutionary theory," Pinker says, "predict that the biology of kinship should have biased our thoughts and emotions about relatives in several ways"—for instance, that we like to share resources with them (this helps perpetuate their genes, including the genes we share with them).

[ ... ]

Pinker’s argument sounds plausible at first—especially if you don't know anything about the centuries-old literature on kinship or lack in-depth knowledge of the cultural complexity of ours species. In Pinker's case the problem is mostly naivete. ... Pinker's failure to review the literature on the topic can be blamed on many things, but our failure to write it is not one of them.

[ ... ]

But let me get to the main point: there are two main problems with Pinker's argument. First, there is that we have no evidence of what social organization was like deep in our evolutionary past. Of course we can imagine what they might have been like, but speculation is not science—especially for someone sufficiently serious about intellectual rigor that they feel the need to conduct experiments to prove the obvious fact that people who are raised together feel related. So his claim that feelings of kinship were once nontrivially adaptive in the evolutionary past but no longer are is in fact based on speculation. There is nothing wrong with speculation—indeed, it is all we have to go on with in some cases—but this point needs to be flagged.

The second problem is with Pinker's claim that kinship is currently no longer adaptive. The problem here is that Pinker, as philosophers say, 'proves too much'. For, as he himself shows and anthropology has already demonstrated, folk theories of relatedness and accurate biogenetic reckoning are so loosely coupled as to be only tenuously connected. In fact they are so tenuously connected that one wonder why he thinks they are or should be connected at all, except for his assumption (based on speculation) that they must have been in the past. Let's take a closer look.

Well, I won’t spoil any more of it for you; it's a great and instructive read, showing that different groups of people have very different ideas about how you should know who your kin are. And the fact that so many of these ideas are not based on degree of biological relatedness at all should be enough to sink the selfish gene theory.

Incidentally, the current North American craze for genealogy most likely relates not to remote human evolution but to (1) the fact that much more information is available, plus (2) the fact that the population is aging. Older people tend to be more interested in that kind of thing, and (3) After four or five generations, non-aboriginal North Americans are becoming more comfortable with the past their ancestors escaped. They can afford psychologically to find out more about it. They may even feel flattered or morally justified to learn of circumstances that were once a source of shame. Such is the veil that time draws over suffering ....

Now let me make two things clear here: I am not claiming that our evolutionary heritage has nothing to do with the way we view things. Indeed, it is quite easy to show the opposite. Humans, (unlike chimpanzees), are predominately right-handed. The fact that so many languages use "right" to mean good or clever (righteous, dexterous) and "left" to mean bad or awkward (gauche, sinister) is surely related. Similarly, "up" is generally a fortunate direction and "down" an unfortunate one - surely that relates to the fact that an upright stance is normal for humans.

So far, so obvious. But what happens when we seek to go beyond that? The key problems I see with evolutionary psychology, as generally practiced by - for example - Steve Pinker, are,

1. Speculation. As Rex notes, evo psycho explanations for human behaviour are usually speculation based on what we suppose life was like hundreds of thousands of years ago. And the practices for which we DO have documentation vary so widely that it is hard to place much confidence in the speculation.

2. Cherrypicking. Can anyone explain to me why, if selfish genes govern our behavior, so many men have had children with slave women and then treated those children with indifference, while doting on their legitimate offspring - irrespective of fitness? Oh yes, I am sure one speculation or other can be pulled out of a hat to rescue the selfish gene. But it would be more economical to assume that fatherhood is, in large part, a social idea and is not necessarily driven by a genetic imperative governed by natural selection.

3. Suspicious last-minute rescues. One theory has it that men play the field because their selfish genes want them to have as many children as possible in order to get themselves spread around. When I point out the obvious - that men who play the field usually do NOT want a whole pack of kids following them around - the reply is, "Well, that's modern. We’re in charge of evolution now. But back in the old days, ... " In other words, the times for which we do have information don't count, only the times for which we don't.

Of course, I am out of sympathy with the whole evolutionary psychology project because the underlying message is that people are not motivated by their culture but by their genes. I am on the side of the anthropologists (culture) on that one because I think the latter have more and better evidence. In other words, being human does not give us a specific culture (selected by our genes in order to spread themselves, in the evolutionary psychologist's view). It gives us the capacity to form a culture. Cultures may or may not contribute to survival or spreading genes. If they don't, they won't be around long, but we need not suppose that therefore the successful cultures were selected by anyone or anything for that express purpose. That's an attribution error.

In a longish section of The Spiritual Brain, Mario Beauregard and I look at these questions in relation to religion, and argue that the same thing applies there.

Recent book reviews: Steve Pinker's Stuff of Thought

Seth Lerer, in "The Edifice of Pinkerism" suggests that not since the 18th century has there been so much argument about the mind. He is, of course, reviewing Harvard cognitive psychologist Steve Pinker's latest, Stuff of Thought.

Wow. Stuff. I knew Pinker was a materialist, but does he mean stuff like ... stuff? The kind of stuff you give to the SallyAnn (puzzles you've done twice and clothes that never fit). Well, almost, according to Lerer. That is, he believes in "a theory of mind that holds that certain concepts or ways of thinking are hardwired into our brains at birth."

Well, hard wiring is the stuff that the electrician sneaks into a nearby dumpster after fixing the lighting system. So he must mean ... stuff.

But I still don't get it. Everything these guys talk about is simply "an idea in the minds of men." It becomes physical only when they act, and then mainly in the outcome. Before that, what is it, exactly? Not stuff.

Lerer comments:

Then again, there is a fair amount of sheer attention getting in the book, especially the long chapter on "The Seven Words You Can't Say on Television." Mr. Pinker comes off as a comedian manqué, channeling George Carlin to make witty observations on why we can and cannot say things publicly. There's nothing more uncomfortable to a young student than a middle-aged college professor working at being cool, and there are times throughout this book when I just cringed at the Groucho Marxisms or the list of verbs for sexual activity. That this list in particular ends with the Yiddish "shtup" can only be explained by Mr. Pinker's belief that there is something inherently funny in the sonic concatenations of the shtetl.

Mr. Pinker, of course, is more than just a borscht-belt John Locke. He is the cognitive philosopher of our generation, and his work on language and mind has implications for anybody interested in human expression and experience.

Yes, but WHAT implications? Should I just start ignoring Pinker?

Dangerous questions? Huh? Materialists have NO dangerous questions.

Today, I put up some stuff on why the mind obviously isn't merely the brain.

Meanwhile, materialist cognitive scientist Steven Pinker of Harvard has posed a whole bunch of "dangerous questions" in the Chicago Sun-Times.

What strikes me as remarkable is how UNdangerous his questions are. Anyway, I decided to list and answer his questions, as follows:

Do women, on average, have a different profile of aptitudes and emotions than men?

[From Denyse: Yes, of course. Get pregnant, have and raise a baby, and you will understand. But so? (If you cannot carry out this program, not to worry, you have just made my case. Thanks much. Read on.)]

Were the events in the Bible fictitious -- not just the miracles, but those involving kings and empires?

[From Denyse: Well, Steve, do you have any INFORMATION about that? Thousands of archeologists and other scholars would love to hear your news. Otherwise, take a number and wait. Anyone can have a mere opinion about events described in the Bible.]

Has the state of the environment improved in the last 50 years?

[From Denyse: Improved for whom? For me, yes. I live in a much cleaner city, and a nicer neighbourhood, too. For people in coastal China ... probably not. But they eat more regularly, and that may be worth their while.]

Do most victims of sexual abuse suffer no lifelong damage?

[From Denyse: How much damage victims suffer depends in large part on their culture. Is the victim considered "damaged goods"? Does the society offer tacit rewards for long-term unemployment or abnormal relationships? I was sexually assaulted several times when I was young but in every case managed to fight off my assailants with a ferocity that they clearly did not expect. Was I damaged? I don't know. I'd do it again today, only faster and more lethally. Is that evidence of damage or not?]

Did Native Americans engage in genocide and despoil the landscape?

[From Denyse: Yes. The Iroquois wiped out the Canadian Hurons (and the Canadian martyr priests along with them). Plains Indians ran thousands of buffalo off cliffs. But so? Europeans perpetrated the Holocaust. Who dare point a finger?]

Do men have an innate tendency to rape?

[From Denyse: If they do, they better keep it in check. Almost all societies have agreed not to tolerate it. Interesting, in view of the fact that feminists claim that men run everything ... In The Spiritual Brain , neuroscientist Mario Beauregard and I recap evidence from his study showing that men can and do suppress sexual arousal when asked by an investigator to do so. There is no basis for the belief that they cannot do that.]

Did the crime rate go down in the 1990s because two decades earlier poor women aborted children who would have been prone to violence?

[From Denyse: No. The "crime rate" went down because (1) the population aged (old guys don't do second story jobs or stickups) and (2) the government started jailing more perps (guys in jail don't do second story jobs or stickups). Enron still happened, and destroyed the pensions of thousands - far worse than yer average street shakedown - but those are the crimes old guys commit. Most people - for some strange reason - don't think of that stuff as "crime."]

Are suicide terrorists well-educated, mentally healthy and morally driven?

[From Denyse: Only if you think "well-educated, mentally healthy and morally driven" are terms that have no intrinsic meaning. ]

Would the incidence of rape go down if prostitution were legalized?

[From Denyse: No. Rapists get off on forcing themselves on the UNwilling. If all they wanted was a hooker, they could easily find one, unfortunately, irrespective of laws.]

Do African-American men have higher levels of testosterone, on average, than white men?

[From Denyse: So what if they do? See the question on rape above. An elderly mission priest told me years ago about the severe floggings that occasional rapists would receive in the African community he ministered to decades ago. I would think that a guy's t-level is his own business if he hasn't done anything he shouldn't. And in a multicultural society, I can't see the social value of making a policy issue out of ethnic/racial/class comparisons. Basically, here or there, you either observe the law or else.]

Is morality just a product of the evolution of our brains, with no inherent reality?

[From Denyse: No, it isn't. People who believe otherwise (usually expressed as "It's just The Man throwing his weight around") form the usual population of prisons around the globe. The entire spiritual tradition of the human race is against that view, and for good reason.]

Would society be better off if heroin and cocaine were legalized?

[From Denyse: Only if your society has unlimited funds to pay for treatment facilities. Write and tell me which society that is, and I will recommend that our Canadian hard cases move there ASAP.]

Is homosexuality the symptom of an infectious disease?

[From Denyse: Huh?]

Would it be consistent with our moral principles to give parents the option of euthanizing newborns with birth defects that would consign them to a life of pain and disability?

[From Denyse: Would it be consistent with our moral principles to give the surviving kids the option of euthanizing parents who face age-related defects that would consign them to a life of pain and disability? Surely, in the interests of justice, the two bills should be passed together. That way, neither group would have the obvious advantage. (I pray that neither bill will be passed in Canada.)]

Do parents have any effect on the character or intelligence of their children?

[From Denyse: Are home-raised children better than street children? Why do we even wonder about this? If love doesn't matter, what does?]

Have religions killed a greater proportion of people than Nazism?

[From Denyse: No. The mortality from World War II was catastrophic. Human sacrifices at the pagan summer solstices and occasional burnings of heretics by monotheistic religions were nothing by comparison with the eugenic ambitions of the twentieth century, to get rid of whole nations deemed genetically inferior.]

Would damage from terrorism be reduced if the police could torture suspects in special circumstances?

[From Denyse: No. The damage done by undermining traditional legal systems in the Western world that have protected witnesses and suspects for many centuries would quickly exceed the benefit from the information gained from an occasional tormented suspect.]

Would Africa have a better chance of rising out of poverty if it hosted more polluting industries or accepted Europe's nuclear waste?

[From Denyse: How much would cleaning up the mess cost? We need figures here. Without figures, it is not a reasonable question.]

Is the average intelligence of Western nations declining because duller people are having more children than smarter people?

[From Denyse: Is average intelligence declining at all? Is this a trick question? The fact that lots of people enjoy watching Ann Coulter or Michael Moore does not prove that they are getting stupid. They may be getting something they shouldn't be getting, but that is a matter for their spiritual advisers. I think Coulter should wear more obvious clothes on TV and Moore should lose weight and grow up. But so?]

Would unwanted children be better off if there were a market in adoption rights, with babies going to the highest bidder?

[From Denyse: If you want to avoid raising a criminal, would you rather a child be raised by Tony Soprano or by the family of "Daddy was an old time preacher man"? Is this another trick question? It must be .... Pinker must be running out of sensible questions altogether ... isn't he?]

Would lives be saved if we instituted a free market in organs for transplantation?

[From Denyse: The lives of potential donors would NOT be saved, from what I hear from China. They execute lots of young adherents of Eastern and Western religions, and use organs for executed prisoners - and could probably underbid anybody. Here in Canada, we wait for a fatal accident and hope that the victim signed a wallet card. Not very enterprising, are we? But would you rather be in trouble here or there?]

Should people have the right to clone themselves, or enhance the genetic traits of their children?

[From Denyse: Who wants to be responsible for the failures? Isn't nature's bounty enough to manage? Taxpayers underwrite the current sustainable number of failures because we assume that no one simply chose to produce failures as opposed to successes. What if they did?]

Pinker goes on, "Perhaps you can feel your blood pressure rise as you read these questions."

No, in my case. All this stuff is way, way past its stale date.


If you are into dangerous ideas and you are a materialist, you are nowhere. In reality, the only really dangerous idea nowadays is non-materialism .

Pinker is QUITE right to point out that "Writers who have raised ideas like these [listed above] have been vilified, censored, fired, threatened and in some cases physically assaulted." But that is principally because the vile doctrine of political correctness - the business arm of materialist social policy - currently has so much power.

People are only permitted to advocate a materialist doctrine that is obviously popular at any given time. If you want to help stop that, support The FIRE. (Anyone who knows of other similar groups, please write in and I will add them to this post. The FIRE isn't perfect but it does clean up a lot of sludge.)

But ultimately, you can't stop the effects of materialism if you do not think that the mind is real. And you need to know why and how it is real.

Language: Theodore Dalrymple takes on materialist cognitive scientist Steve Pinker

Materialist cognitive scientist Steve Pinker of Harvard, who was recently mixing it up with eminent bioethicist Leon Kass, also attracted the attention of highly literate retired prison psychiatrist Theodore Dalrymple. In "No, Dr. Pinker, it's not just from nature," Dalrymple recalls that many of his patients from the prison culture simply did not fit the stereotype of the "human animal" as "hardwired for language", a stereotype that owes much to Pinker's work. On the contrary, he finds, not only is there no such hard wiring but the lack of it is both apparent and devastating:

With a very limited vocabulary, it is impossible to make, or at least to express, important distinctions and to examine any question with conceptual care. My patients often had no words to describe what they were feeling, except in the crudest possible way, with expostulations, exclamations, and physical displays of emotion. Often, by guesswork and my experience of other patients, I could put things into words for them, words that they grasped at eagerly. Everything was on the tip of their tongue, rarely or never reaching the stage of expression out loud. They struggled even to describe in a consecutive and logical fashion what had happened to them, at least without a great deal of prompting. Complex narrative and most abstractions were closed to them.

In their dealings with authority, they were at a huge disadvantage—a disaster, since so many of them depended upon various public bureaucracies for so many of their needs, from their housing and health care to their income and the education of their children. ...

He adds, a propos Pinker's insistence that there are no "better" or "worse" ways of expressing oneself:

I need hardly point out that Pinker doesn’t really believe anything of what he writes, at least if example is stronger evidence of belief than precept. Though artfully sown here and there with a demotic expression to prove that he is himself of the people, his own book is written, not surprisingly, in the kind of English that would please schoolmarms. I doubt very much whether it would have reached its 25th printing had he chosen to write it in the dialect of rural Louisiana, for example, or of the slums of Newcastle-upon-Tyne. Even had he chosen to do so, he might have found the writing rather difficult. I should like to see him try to translate a sentence from his book that I have taken at random, “The point that the argument misses is that although natural selection involves incremental steps that enhance functioning, the enhancements do not have to be an existing module,” into the language of the Glasgow or Detroit slums.

I'm definitely in Dalrymple's camp here because, like him (though only in a volunteer capacity), I have often found myself writing letters to authorities on behalf of persons in difficulties. What has so often struck me is that some people only clearly grasped the nature of their problems after I had explained them clearly in a letter I was composing, to be sent to someone else.

No doubt Pinker is right in thinking that humans have a natural tendency to construct language of some type. But all language is not equally useful for everything. Put another way, words are tools. If the only tools I know how to use are big and heavy, I can't do fine work. And just as some jobs require fine tools, some missions require carefully chosen words. There is nothing "natural" about any of that. Our language is an artistic inheritance built up over centuries of use and refinement. For various reasons, as Dalrymple notes, some people never got most of the toolkit of their culture (not nature), and it shows.

Often, I helped my friends in difficulty most by teaching them words so that they could think their way through difficulties that they had been trying to feel their way through. Post-modernists would, of course, say that I was "imposing my uptight Anglo-Canadian culture", and to some extent that is true. To help people navigate a system dominated by Anglo-Canadians, I taught them the Anglo-Canadian words of power.

It is the case with all words of power that once you know them, you find that you can think clearly about things that were fuzzy before. You can reject the new thoughts if you want, but you cannot go back to a time before you knew them.

Anyway, enjoy Dalrymple's graceful and interesting essay.

Materialist neuroscience: "The mind is what the brain does! ... ?"

Recently, materialist cognitive scientist Steve Pinker wrote a letter to Commentary magazine, excoriating an article by bioethicist Leon Kass,

This point, the foundation of my field, cognitive science, is one that I have made repeatedly, at length, and with all the expository power I can muster. The mind is not the brain but it is, as I say, “what the brain does” (Mr. Kass’s parsing overlooks the crucial word “does”). By this I mean the brain’s ability to manipulate information in ways that mirror logical, statistical, and other normative principles. As many philosophers have shown, this dissolves the apparent mystery that the brain is a physical object but can traffic in abstract ideas involving meaning and truth.

and making the point that

Mr. Kass is free to use the word “soul” to refer to the software of the brain, but he is mistaken if he thinks that this equation, free of any conception of divine provenance or survival after death, is compatible with the way the vast majority of people use the word. Nor is it clear how invoking a soul illuminates any intellectual problem beyond slapping a label on what we feel we do not understand.

The uselessness of soul-talk is particularly evident in the thriving science of consciousness, the study of “inner states” that Mr. Kass decrees to be impossible. ...

Kass replies,

In the course of my critique of reductionism, I accused Steven Pinker of arrogance and shallowness. I am tempted to say that his letter provides further evidence for the charge, especially as it progresses quickly from science (about which he knows a lot) to philosophy (about which he knows a dangerous little) to the Bible and religion (about which he knows less than the village atheist). But some substantive points should be made.

One of which is,

In my article, I took him to task for the following remarks:

The supposedly immaterial soul can be bisected with a knife, altered by chemicals, turned on or off by electricity, and extinguished by a sharp blow or a lack of oxygen. Centuries ago it was unwise to ground morality on the dogma that the earth sat at the center of the universe. It is just as unwise today to ground it on dogmas about souls endowed by God.

I am happy to learn that Mr. Pinker denies saying that the “mind is the brain”—he says instead that "it is what the brain does," a position deftly skewered in Brian Beckman's letter. But one can hardly be blamed for thinking the man a simple materialist. Someone who boasts, even for rhetorical effect, that “the supposedly immaterial soul can be bisected with a knife” simply does not see that thought and awareness, like all powers and activities of living things, are immaterial in their essence and therefore cannot be so carved.

Biran Beckman's letter? Regarding the notion that the mind is the software of the brain (implying that it is easily accommodated by materialism), reader Brian Beckman of Newcastle, Washington, notes,

Steven Pinker’s idea that “the mind is what the brain does” is about as useful as saying that “software is what your computer does.” Is your word processor nothing more than a pattern of electrons in transistors? How about the letter from a friend that you read on a computer screen? Much more than a ghost in the machine, software activates the machine; but it is, itself, a purely spiritual thing.

... Software is just the latest example of immaterial but very real things like songs, ideas, emotions, and human souls. It is particularly apt, though, for shocking adherents of scientism because it is embodied in that trophy of science, the computer.

It's good to see Commentary getting into this debate. Read the whole thing and enjoy!

Anyway, there's little doubt about what Steve Pinker thinks about the soul. Here's what he wrote for Time Magazine (January 19, 2007):

Consciousness does not reside in an ethereal soul that uses the brain like a PDA; consciousness is the activity of the brain.

[ ... ]

And when the physiological activity of the brain ceases, as far as anyone can tell the person's consciousness goes out of existence. Attempts to contact the souls of the dead (a pursuit of serious scientists a century ago) turned up only cheap magic tricks, and near death experiences are not the eyewitness reports of a soul parting company from the body but symptoms of oxygen starvation in the eyes and brain.

[ ... ]

And when you think about it, the doctrine of a life-to-come is not such an uplifting idea after all because it necessarily devalues life on earth. Just remember the most famous people in recent memory who acted in expectation of a reward in the hereafter: the conspirators who hijacked the airliners on 9/11.

If there were such a thing as oral quotation marks, any time Steve Pinker used the word soul, it would be in oral quotation marks. Of course he is entitled to his opinion, but not to indignation when people take him at his word and doubt his account of reality.

Jerry "Headaches don't have themselves" Fodor on evolutionary psychology

Jerry Fodor, who points out that headaches do not have themselves, also weighs in on the trouble with "psychological Darwinism" (evolutionary psychology), here and why he, as a "new rationalist," does not accept it, in a review of materialist cognitive science books, such as Pinker's and Plotkin's, in the London Review of Books:

Plotkin says 'neo-Darwinian theory [is] the central theorem of all biology, including behavioural biology'; 'if behaviour is adaptive, then it must be the product of evolution.' Likewise Pinker: 'Natural selection is the only explanation we have of how complex life can evolve . . . [so] natural selection is indispensable to understanding the human mind.' One reply to this argument is to say that there is, after all, an alternative to natural selection as the source of adaptive complexity; you could get some by a miracle. But I'm not a Creationist, nor are any of my New Rationalist friends, as far as I know. Nor do we have to be, since there's another way out of the complexity argument. This is a long story, but here's the gist: it's common ground that the evolution of our behaviour was mediated by the evolution of our brains. So, what matters with regard to the question whether the mind is an adaptation is not how complex our behaviour is, but how much change you would have to make in an ape's brain to produce the cognitive structure of a human mind. And about this, exactly nothing is known. That' because nothing is known about how the structure of our minds depends on the structure of our brains. Nobody even knows which brain structures it is that our cognitive capacities depend on. Unlike our minds, our brains are, by any gross measure, very like those of apes. So it looks as though relatively small alterations of brain structure must have produced very large behavioural discontinuities in the transition from the ancestral apes to us. If that's right, then you don't have to assume that cognitive complexity is shaped by the gradual action of Darwinian selection on prehuman behavioural phenotypes.

A friend says, of Fodor, that he is a common-sense doubter of Darwinian materialism, like David Stove. For one thing, he makes quite clear, as Stove did, why one doesn't need to be a creationist of any type in order to dismiss the evo psycho nonsense to its most suitable venue - fluffy magazine articles on why you can't help cheating on your sweetie 'cause it's in your genes.

My other blog is the Post-Darwinist, detailing events of interest in the intelligent design controversy.

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), anoverview of the intelligent design controversy, and of Faith@Science. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of the forthcoming The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).