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. When I returned for a second reading, my pietistic judgments of the violence and debauchery obscured the experience. 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.
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. In a interview with Reason Magazine , Pinker posited:.
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. 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.
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. As Pinker spoke, the highly educated, mostly white, and apparently well-off crowd of Seattleites laughed at his every intonation.
At home, I reviewed the notes I had scribbled down during the lecture in order to shake the disappointed feeling that I had returned with my bucket only half-full—my intellect tingled, but my conscience sat with twiddled thumbs, bored out of its wits, an unanticipated result after hearing from this linguistic hero! That is, there seemed to have been nothing I could take home and apply in a lasting, meaningful, or colorful manner. The lecture was filled to the brim with pithy linguistic theories and riddles that were just smart enough to make a listener feel intelligent and superior.
