Reddit Reddit reviews How the Mind Works

We found 11 Reddit comments about How the Mind Works. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.

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How the Mind Works
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11 Reddit comments about How the Mind Works:

u/henrythorough · 42 pointsr/gaming

Excellent example of your mind taking information and organizing it into a more familiar experience. Take this gif for example. Our brains can take visually perceived information and anticipate that, based on previous experience, there should be a sound associated with it. follow up text

u/Tonx86 · 6 pointsr/Physics

Dude, you've gotta read "How the Mind Works"!!! It's a great read.

u/IAmDude · 5 pointsr/explainlikeimfive

This is exactly how I currently understand humor and laughter.

Sources for my opinion:
Psychology Today article, and (credentials for Provine)
Steven Pinker's book, and (credentials for Pinker)

u/originalucifer · 4 pointsr/AskReddit
u/christgoldman · 3 pointsr/DebateAnAtheist

> The idea that the mind is in some way non-physical.

The mind is a product and an element of the physical brain. It may not be concretely tangible (i.e., you can't hold a mind), but that does not mean it is not a part of the physical universe. Physics explains the mind quite well, actually. The neurons in our brain are developed in compliance to the laws of physics and biology, the neurochemicals in our brain are physical substances, and the electric currents in our brains that communicate signals between neurons operate in compliance to the laws of physics.

Evolution also provides insight into the development of consciousness. While, sure, humans are the only terrestrial species with advanced enough consciousness to develop religious and philosophical ideas, we know now that many animals have forms of consciousness and proto-consciousness like what we would expect if humans evolved consciousness from simple origins. The mind is perfectly explainable through naturalistic sciences, and our naturalistic model of human consciousness makes predictions that are falsifiable.

I'd suggest reading Steven Pinker's How The Mind Works. Here's a talk he gave on the book. I'd also suggest his The Stuff of Thought, The Language Instinct, and The Blank Slate.

I'd also suggest Sam Harris' The Moral Landscape. While it's main thrust is to show how science can inform morality, it offers some pretty decent layperson explanation of consciousness, and it is written by an accomplished neuroscientist (whatever your opinion on his religious works may be). His pamphlet-esque Free Will also covers some good ground here.

> All able-bodied humans are born with the ability to learn language.

Not at all true. You can be able-bodied and learning disabled. There was a nonverbal autistic student at my middle school years ago who ran track. Trivial point, but still incorrect.

> I would argue humans also have a Spiritual Acquisition Device.

I would argue that this argument is SAD. (pun; sorry.)

You're positing a massively complex hypothetical neurological infrastructure to link human brains to a divine alternate universe or dimension that has never been shown to exist. Not only has this neural uplink never been observed, but it is entirely unnecessary, as neuroscientists and psychologists have a perfectly functional, testable model of consciousness without it. You're adding a new element to that model that is functionally redundant and untestable. Occam's Razor would trim away your entire posited element out of extraneousness and convolution.

u/zoltar74 · 3 pointsr/philosophy

Steven Pinker discusses this in How the Mind Works. I think your summary jibes very well with his description.

  • laughter is noisy because it's a form of communication
  • laughter can dress actual aggression as "fun"
  • causing laughter is very often a display of wit meant to lift the actor and degrade the object.
u/Hamakua · 2 pointsr/MensRights

>My frustration largely stems from the fact that what envision this subreddit to be, it isn't.

I know where you are now, as far as perspective of how "hateful" everything feels. I have been at this for quite some time (about 10 years, not this subreddit, but as an MRA) and in that time you sort of get a thick skin and "troll X-ray" glasses.

I can tell you the "secret" but it's not so much knowing, it is building up the expertise to spot. Basically I read everything and analyze it by essentially ignoring opinion (very large portion of content) and confront either opinions presented as facts, or facts (and citations) themselves.

this is just a small part of it. I really, really (believe) I know where you are now, and what I probably don't have the ability to relay is that "No, we don't have some central leader, government backing, social support system" or ANYTHING of that nature.

People outside of this reddit imply that "Anywhere that isn't a female space is a male space" That MRA's are redundant.

When your own experience in trying to make a club showed you, no, "The MRM gets less support than even a LGBT club". How does it feel to be ignored even on that level?

White supremacists, God yes, that is probably our largest problem (outside of reddit) this subreddit a while back had to scare away "stormfront", Men's News Daily was shut down mainly because it became a conservative talking points hub.... Yes, "Men's Rights" crosses over some paths traveled by less savory individuals, but the paths themselves are not evil.

I am going to be writing a lot because it's the least I can do, (You did try making a club FUCK YEAH!). Trying and failing is almost better than trying and succeeding. The push-back and failure to do so is data in-itself of something that is horribly wrong.

I don't even know where to begin.

Intro

I'll try and relay to you in the quickest manner possible as much pertinent information that I think will be valuable to you at the stage you currently are at. A lot of it you may already know. I also suspect you may still have a bit of a "white knight" shell, and am not sure how far through the looking glass you have come. Some of the sources I link to might seem misogynist on the surface, but that, I wish to claim (my opinion) is because society as a whole so conflates constantly "feminism" with "female" that to attack one is synonymous with attacking other. I am cutting the intro short.


Who

Christina Hoff Sommers

Angry Harry

ManWomanMyth

Paul Elam

Warren Farrel

Glenn Sacks (older content)

There are others, but those are the cornerstones that have shaped my foundation

What

I have read so many articles, news reports, studies and what-have-you, just listing them will be of no service. I think the most valuable single point pieces I have found are below.

Is there Anything good about Men
An American Psychological Association Invited Address

Consad Report - "An Analysis of Reasons for the Disparity in Wages Between Men and Women
Abstract overture, link to PDF of study on the above page. DOWNLOAD AND READ FULLY. This study was first removed from US government portals then it was moved and hidden a number of times. I know this because I have used it multiple times over the last few years and it likes to go "walk about".

Man, Woman, Myth MRA Documentary series
A must watch, beginning to end, MUST WATCH. He also has a youtube channel but the channel doesn't have all the videos. The above link is the complete collection and really is worth your time. It is UK based but nearly everything has relevance in any western country. (UK, US, Australia run nearly parallel with male issues as it pertains to law)

Male Studies: A Consortium of Scholars
This was the first symposium of the "Male studies" proposition. It is very poor quality and difficult to hear at times, but a very powerful academic perspective of the issues with males in today's society. Christina Hoff Sommers really shines in the piece.

Edge:THE SCIENCE OF GENDER AND SCIENCE
A Harvard debate that focuses not on IF their is a different intelligence distribution between men and women, but why. The data that is covered alone is invaluable. This is not a "men are better than women" issue. It is a piece of the puzzle and explains in part "why" men are over-represented in the technical sciences.

Books

See you in 100 years.
-Not a "direct" MRA resource, but an invaluable account as to why gender roles existed in our recent history that is outside any "corrupt" sense of a patriarchal conspiracy.

The War on Boys
-Beyond the boy focus, it is also a great 2ndary deconstruction as to just how corrupt or faulty institutionalize feminism has become.

The Myth of Male Power

How the Mind Works
-Valuable as it is essentially a collection of studies by all sorts of parties that explain through experimentation as to why humans behave the way they do, including the gender differences. Steven Pinker summarizes but the studies aren't his.

I know it is a lot of data and content,

One thing I want to relay. "Decide for yourself". I was raised a feminist, all the way down to carrying a "Pro choice" sign when I was 7 or 8 in a protest line. I became an MRA when I tried to argue against them. I challenged them for proof, and when they supplied it I sought out counter-evidence to refute the claims, this was 10-11, maybe a bit further ago. And as hard as I tried reality and logic did not mesh with the "cornerstones" of feminism, to the talking points.

I know you aren't coming from the same point, but I wish to state that the MRM, and the history of it is so much more than this subreddit.

u/conceptually_similar · 1 pointr/exchristian

Someone close to me used to strongly believe in God, and also believe that they were going to hell. It's an incredibly hard place to be, mentally, and I'm sorry you're going through that.

On the subject of God's morality and justice: keep in mind that these descriptions of God are all written by humans, and then edited and re-written by other humans over and over many times. It's quite possible to have a conception of God that doesn't rely on the Bible, and that may be a direction you want to go.

As for the personal experience, I've always felt that those are important to an individual (they carry a lot of emotional power), but we have to be careful about how we interpret them.

A lot of spiritual experiences can also be explained as physical/chemical things happening in the brain. These experiences can be profound and open us up to new ideas, and when they occur in the context of religion, they are often interpreted as being from God or from a spirit. Just keep in mind that they can also be interpreted as being a natural result of your brain's own activity. It's something to consider, anyway.

Personally, I like to read books about the brain and popular science books on neurology. How the Mind Works by Steven Pinker was a very good one, for instance. That type of reading helped me a lot when I needed to put my thoughts and experiences in context.

Good luck.

u/Deto · 1 pointr/ECE

How the Mind Works by Steven Pinker

u/Inferno · 1 pointr/funny

Your warping the facts.

>Reduced physical activity,3 particularly from reduced school-based physical education,4 and specific food manufacturing and marketing practices (e.g., vending machines in schools,5 increased portion size,6 increased availability of fast-food,3, 7, 8 use of high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS)9) comprise the Big Two explanations proffered for the obesity epidemic and are frequently cited as targets of potential public health interventions. We do not intend to imply that the Big Two are not salient contributors to the epidemic. Rather, we offer that the evidence of their role as primary players in producing the epidemic (as well as the evidence supporting their potential ability to reverse the trend if manipulated) is both equivocal and largely circumstantial – that is, the hypothesized effects are underdetermined by the data.

They are stating that Reduced physical activity and specific food manufacturing are the two factors. THis is because they know (like any intelligent person) that if you take in a lot of calories and don't burn them, you'll get fat. Learn to read and/or substituting your own facts into the article.

>There's the CDC (who also have an extensive section devoted to obesity, which belies the notion that is a simple concept): http://www.cdc.gov/nccdphp/dnpa/obesity/contributing_factors.htm

>Overall there are a variety of factors that play a role in obesity. This makes it a complex health issue to address.

There are factors as to why there is an epidemic, but the root cause of fat people is high calorie intake with too low levels of exercise to burn off the excess calories. Your cite does not dispute my argument in the least.

>That's what you aren't getting. It has been, in the past, socially desirable to be obese (Egyptions, Romans, even various stages of British royalty demonstrate this). The basis for the desire isn't what is healthy, but rather much like a winter tan (or in developing nations, being pale), it is what is difficult to achieve (or more accurately, harder to achieve for those who aren't wealthy) given the current state of society.

You also need to realize that medicine at this time was little more than prayer. The understanding of healthy was minimal at best, especially since most wouldn't live nearly as long as we do today. Times and social norms change.

Also, human sexuality doesn't evolve towards things that are hard to do, rather what is more healthy. Fat at that time was a sign of being healthy as there was so much famine in the area. Between the two extremes (starving and gluttony) gluttony wins, but it doesn't make it a healthy choice.

>Losing significant amounts of weight is brutal. It requires an unrelenting focus and quite severe discomfort. It effects you physical health, mental health, your job performance, and your social life (and none in a good way). Sure the end goal provides a big payoff, but it's a hell of a ride, and when you get there you still have underlying problems, because it is far easier to regain the weight you lost at the end. The success rate in terms of keeping the weight off, regardless of diet/exercise regime is 2-5%. That means if you are effective 10% of the time, you are a health guru! And it's not that these people are lazy or lack discipline, because they will keep trying again and again, despite the failure!

Extreme weight drops are medically dangerous. This is why starving yourself is bad. It has to be gradual, just like how people pack it on, if you do it over a very small amount of time, you'll run into HUGE medical problems as well. If your smart, eat right (real food as opposed to empty calories) and have a good exercise plan, you will have little to no problems what so ever. TO avoid Kidney stones, be sure to drink LOTS of water, not only will it flush your system of toxins, it'll keep your kidneys flushed and healthy. This may lead to short-term water-retention however if your unaccustomed to drinking so much water.

>Yup totally missing the mark. I'm not suggesting it is a disease. I'm merely suggesting that prejudicial attitudes towards the obese are just that: prejudice, not the product of some well founded rational process.

Then you don't understand how the mind works. We make millions of subconscious calculations of risk and probabilities every day. It's programmed into our minds to do so. This is why you can find someone attractive, your brain does symmetry calculations, as well as "is this person free of disease, do they have child bearing hips, etc". You can't deny the fact that our brains make calculations and decisions on the fly.

Two great books on this subject are Steven Pinker's How the Mind Works and Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene. Both talk about these calculations and how they evolved into these set of automatic rules and calculations, that you seemingly refer to as prejudice.

You either define prejudice very loosely or include it as any reason we choose one thing over another. I choose to eat a sandwich over a pile of feces because I'm prejudice. I choose a beautiful wife over an ugly one because I'm prejudice. I prefer healthy citizens over fat ones because I'm prejudice.

I think I grasp what you mean now, but I still think your fractally wrong on the idea. it's not prejudice you see, but the wonders of the brain picking the better choices for our genes, and by extension, ourselves which is not quite the same thing.