Even a brief encounter with Steven Pinker is a meeting with a remarkable, if occasionally bewildering, genius; the ultimate human-watcher of his generation.
On Saturday, 1,300 people gathered in the National Concert Hall to hear his lecture, "How the Mind Works" - also the title of his 660-page tome, described by the New Yorker as "marking out the territory on which the coming century's debate about human nature will be held".
The professor of brain and cognitive sciences at Massachusetts Institute of Technology has been classified by Newsweek magazine among "100 Americans for the next century".
He is not hot on the human brain with its neurones and hormonal triggers, rather what the brain does. Nor does his "computational theory" suggest we are some form of advanced computer or robot, but his grasp of the complexity of the human mind goes a long way to explaining why man will never be able to generate a robot to empty the dishwasher.
Pinker believes mental activity is a form of computation and the neural computer that gives rise to human nature was derived by natural selection.
Having left the hunter-forager period that has almost totally dominated our evolution - though we still have hangovers from that time - we now operate within "the cognitive niche".
"Man is so lost in rapturous contemplation of what he thinks he is as to overlook what he indubitably ought to be," he recalls from Ambrose Bierce's Devil's Dictionary. "His chief occupation is extermination of other animals and his own species, which, however, multiplies with such insistent rapidity as to infest the whole habitable earth and Canada."
We are unprecedented with many unique or extreme traits. Humans achieve their goals by complex chains of behaviour, assembled on the spot and tailored to the situation.
In the course of such life-business we deploy advanced technologies which he describes as core intuitions.
An infant's world, for instance, is not a kaleidoscope of "blooming, buzzing confusion" - such a description might be better applied to parents - because from as young as three months a baby is deploying "intuitive physics", coming to an understanding of how an object behaves, falls to the ground or collides with another.
Equally, our "thinking machines" have a ready ability to embrace intuitive biology. We automatically classify animals or stereotypes.
Our ability to "reverse engineer" is another invaluable facility; it enables us to work out in reverse what something is for or comprehend the relevance of certain types of behaviour. We easily home in on the function of objects: "the only thing all chairs have in common is that they hold up human behinds".
Beliefs and desires fall under the umbrella of intuitive psychology. "We make the assumption that other people have beliefs and desires; we cannot sense a belief or desire in another person's head the way we smell origins."
"Most don't like to think of themselves as having a mind like a system of computers designed by natural selection." The Pinker vision is driven by a more optimistic attitude. Within the powerful brain software, love, friendship and a sense of justice can exist. With different parts of the mind fulfilling different roles, he would like to think the more noble parts might out-smart less noble parts.
The lecture was presented by the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies with the MIT Club of Ireland and supported by the Irish Research Scientists Association and The Irish Times.
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