Activity Quote by Steven Pinker

“All our behaviours are a result of neurophysiological activity in the brain. There is no reason to believe there is any magic going on.” quote by Steven Pinker — Download Open image

“All our behaviours are a result of neurophysiological activity in the brain. There is no reason to believe there is any magic going on.”

Steven Pinker

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Activity Behaviour Believe Brain Habits Magic No reason Reason Results

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Consistent style prevents presentation from getting in the way of content.

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The supposedly immaterial soul, we now know, can be bisected with a knife, altered by chemicals, started or stopped by electricity, and extinguished by…

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I've never argued that humans are massively hot-wired. What I was trying to point out was that you can't understand how we learn unless…

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As many political writers have pointed out, commitment to political equality is not an empirical claim that people are clones.

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Since violence is largely a male pastime, cultures that empower women tend to move away from the glorification of violence and are less likely…

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When it comes to explaining human thought and behavior, the possibility that heredity plays any role at all still has the power to shock. To acknowledge human nature, many think, is to endorse racism, sexism, war, greed, genocide, nihilism, reactionary politics, and neglect of children and the disadvantaged. Any claim that the mind has an innate organization strikes people not…

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Morality is not just any old topic in psychology but close to our conception of the meaning of life. Moral goodness is what gives…

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“The biblical story of the binding of Isaac shows that human sacrifice was far from unthinkable in the 1st millennium BCE. The Israelites boasted that their god was morally superior to those of the neighboring tribes because he demanded only that sheep and cattle be slaughtered on his behalf, not children. But the temptation must have been around, because the…

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Part of the bargain of being alive is that one takes a chance at dying a premature or painful death, be it from violence,…

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In fact, without a specification of a creature's goals, the very idea of intelligence is meaningless. A toadstool could be given a genius award for accomplishing with pinpoint precision and unerring reliability, the feat of sitting exactly where it is sitting. Nothing would prevent us from agreeing with the cognitive scientist Zenon Pylyshyn that rocks are smarter than cats because…

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“The obvious cure for the tragic shortcomings of human intuition in a high-tech world is education. And this offers priorities for educational policy: to provide students with the cognitive tools that are most important for grasping the modern world and that are most unlike the cognitive tools they are born with. The perilous fallacies we have seen in this chapter,…

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Where I grew up, learning was a collective activity. But when I got to school and tried to share learning with other students that…

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It must be assumed and established as a principle, that the right of private property must be regarded as sacred. Wherefore, the law ought to favor this right and, so far as it can, see that the largest possible number among the masses of the population prefer to own property… But if the productive activity of the multitude can be…

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And also I think the rise of other, you could say, destinations for international jihadis mean that Pakistan isn't necessarily the place where people…

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To evoke in oneself a feeling one has once experienced, and having evoked it in oneself, then by means of movements, lines, colors, sounds,…

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Fighting's fun, man. It's a great activity, it's a great sport.

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There were books everywhere in my house. Books were very present. I just loved books. I never understood reading as anything but a pleasurable…

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For war to man, like childbirth to women, is simplifying in its emotions and activities. All the real problems of life can be put aside while the one thing is done and little thought is needed to do it. ... His hatreds can be expressed without censure, he can let his emotions run free, he can behave as dramatically, as…

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