Canadian - Scientist | September 18, 1954 -
Many artists and scholars have pointed out that ultimately art depends on human nature.
Steven Pinker
NatureArtHuman NatureHumanOut
As individual people, embedded in our daily lives, of course we're interested in what makes one person different from another. We've got to hire one person and not another, marry one person and not another.
DailyPeoplePersonIndividualHire
In the 1970s, many intellectuals had become political radicals. Marxism was correct, liberalism was for wimps, and Marx had pronounced that 'the ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class.'
AgeIdeasPoliticalClassBecome
I suspect music is auditory cheesecake, an exquisite confection crafted to tickle the sensitive spots of... our mental faculties.
MusicCheesecakeMentalSensitive
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.
HomeBrainLanguageSomeoneSpeech
Consciousness turns out to consist of a maelstrom of events distributed across the brain. These events compete for attention, and as one process outshouts the others, the brain rationalizes the outcome after the fact and concocts the impression that a single self was in charge all along.
BrainSelfProcessAttentionOthers
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.
PowerHistoryPeopleMeBelieve
There's a common criticism of evolutionary psychology that it's fatalistic and it dooms us to eternal strife, 'Why even try to work toward peace if we're just bloody killer apes and violence is in our genes?'
WorkPeaceCriticismViolenceWhy
I teach classes 28 weeks of the year, but the rest of the time I do research and write books. While I'm writing a book, which I probably do two out of every three years, it's like having a second job. I squeeze in the hours when I can.
TimeJobResearchWritingBookRest
Capitalism saved the world, and there is even a heretical theory now, moving up from the level of individuals to countries: countries that trade more and have more open economies are less likely to fight wars and less likely to have genocides.
FightMovingWorldCapitalismNow
There is a correlation between economic inequality and personal violence. The explanation for the correlation isn't completely clear; there are a number of possibilities.
PossibilitiesViolenceInequality
One of the perks of being a psychologist is access to tools that allow you to carry out the injunction to know thyself.
ToolsYouKnowOutCarryBeing
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