Dark Matter of the Mind: The Culturally Articulated Unconscious
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.59 (560 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 022652678X |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 394 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2016-04-13 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
Flying in the face of major trends in Evolutionary Psychology and related fields, he offers a provocative and compelling argument in this book that the only thing humans are hardwired for is freedom: freedom from evolutionary instinct and freedom to adapt to a variety of environmental and cultural contexts. The result is fascinating portrait of the “dark matter of the mind,” one that shows that our greatest evolutionary adaptation is adaptability itself. . Is it in our nature to be altruistic, or evil, to make art, use tools, or create language? Is it in our nature to think in any particular way? For Daniel L. He draws on years of field research among the ian people of the Pirahã in order to carefully scrutinize various theories of cognitive instinct, including Noam Chomsky’s foundational concept of universal grammar, Freud’s notions of unconscious forces, Adolf Bastian’s psychic unity of mankind, and works on massive modularity by evolutionary psychologists such as Leda Cosmides, John Tooby, Jerry Fodor, and Steven Pinker. Illuminating unique characteristics of the Pirahã language, he demonstrates just h
He makes a strong argument and brings in a wide-range of interesting anthropological case studies along the way. Recommended.". "Everett begins by offering a fascinating argument: the only source of human learning is the individual—not in the mind, not in the brain, not in societies. Everett argues for and develops his thesis and its consequences in the remainder of the book. Further, most of this learning is transmitted through “culturally articulated dark matter,” which he defines as “any knowledge … that is unspoken in normal circumstances, usua
Amazon Customer said Kant and Fodor as well as critiquing the views of psychoanalysts like Freud and Jung. Everett’s ‘Dark Matter of the Mind: The Culturally Articulated Unconscious’ is an ambitious attempt to revisit the ancient empiricist/rationalist debate on the nature knowledge. However, Everett’s book takes an unusual twist of setting this debate around the nature and influence of our unconscious knowledge. Along the way Everett spars with philosophers from Plato, Kant and Fodor as well as critiquing the views of psychoanalysts l. "A Must-read for Anyone Curious About the Nature of Human Nature" according to Heather T. Remoff. Dark Matter of the Mind is a must-read for anyone curious about the nature of human nature. The fact that author Daniel Everett challenges the existence of a universal human nature or at least of anything conventionally labeled human “instinct” adds to the fun, at least if you are the sort of reader who likes to fully engage with a book. As evidenced by the fact that all the end pages and margins in my personal copy are jammed with my scribbl. A needed academic correction, but only that? I find it hard to assign a star rating to this book. The writing style is highly engaging, and the content is an important revision of academic models, suggesting a new way of thinking which would match what I would consider to be simple common sense knowledge about cultural difference -- things that anyone who has worked with multiple cultures takes into consideration at moments of translation or thick description.However, the main concern of the author