So intelligence, which formerly seemed miraculous-something that mere matter could not possibly accomplish or explain-can now be understood as a kind of computation process. Cognitive science has shown that feats that were formerly thought to be doable by mental stuff alone can be duplicated by machines, that motives and goals can be understood in terms of feedback and cybernetic mechanisms, and that thinking can be understood as a kind of computation. ![]() ![]() Neuroscience is showing that all aspects of mental life-every emotion, every thought pattern, every memory-can be tied to the physiological activity or structure of the brain. In a 2002 interview with Reason Magazine, Pinker posited: Among many other things, Pinker believes that all of human behavior-such as morality and free will-is traceable to the firing of neurons and synapses in the brain. I went to hear Steven Pinker, renowned evolutionary psychologist and cognitive scientist whose work on language and cognition seeks to debunk the myths about the mind. ![]() But the book was a gift from a close friend whose mind I admired, and my third attempt resurrected the novel for me when I, in the heat of the late summer of 2007, finished reading it in the context of what has frequently been labeled both as America’s most literate and most un-churched city.Īctually, it was at a summer lecture in Town Hall when many of the pieces in Bulgakov’s masterpiece finally congealed and became graspable within my own particular context. When I returned for a second reading, my pietistic judgments of the violence and debauchery obscured the experience. The first time I read The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov, I was too swept away with its hot-blooded madness to grasp what the deuce Bulgakov intended with his novel.
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