I am reading Steven Pinker’s How the Mind Works. Pinker tackles many of the problems I find to be unanswered by the scientific disciplines: what is thinking, what is intelligence, what is consciousness, and what systems produce them? My best effort was spiritual inquiries for a long time. It was a good start but they are just too skeptical and pre-modern—they do not encourage any non-trivial truth claims. I now prefer something closer to cognitive science, which unifies different models of the mind (neuroscience, information processing, psychology).

Pinker uses much of the same language and theories to explain the mind as Joscha Bach (my favorite thinker right now). Bach is quite a bit more rigorous and formal with his thinking. He is also less accessible.

Pinker understands intelligence as goal directed behavior. Goals are not impersonal; they belong to agents. Agents are self-regulating systems that appear intelligent because they pursue goals that are intelligible. Randomness is not intelligible (by definition) and we do not ascribe it any intelligence (we call this noise).

From an evolutionary lens, all cellular organisms can be understood as intelligent—they pursue the goal of self-replication. They look to preserve their structure in an environment that does not care about them. The organism relies on itself. It is self-organizing.