# Study Guide  ## Metadata - Author: [[SuperSummary]] - Full Title: Study Guide - Category: #books ## Highlights - Part 1 of How to Read a Book (“The Dimensions of Reading”) stresses the need for active reading and introduces the first two levels of reading: elementary reading and inspectional reading. Part 2 (“The Third Level of Reading: Analytical Reading”) covers different aspects of analytical reading, such as pigeonholing, x-raying, coming to terms with authors, criticizing books fairly, and using various reading aids. Part 3 (“Approaches to Different Kinds of Reading Matter”) covers how to read specific types of books—such as imaginative literature in the form of novels, plays, and poems, and nonfiction books in the fields of history, science, mathematics, and philosophy. Part 4 (“The Ultimate Goals of Reading”) explains the fourth level of reading—syntopical reading—which comprises exploring multiple books on a particular topic. ([Location 47](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0B4HPVK92&location=47)) - Tags: [[orange]] - Adler and Van Doren remind readers that there is no agreeing or disagreeing with fiction; they either like it or don’t (208). The authors argue that “our critical judgement in the case of expository books concerns their truth, whereas in criticizing belles-lettres, as the word itself suggests, we consider chiefly their beauty” (208). ([Location 292](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0B4HPVK92&location=292)) - Tags: [[orange]] # Study Guide  ## Metadata - Author: [[SuperSummary]] - Full Title: Study Guide - Category: #books ## Highlights - This structure mirrors one of the themes of the book, which focuses on the iterative way we learn, starting from what we know and building increased knowledge. ([Location 45](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B087D6FM9B&location=45)) - Pinker summarizes the criteria for intelligence as acting using rules based on some relation to reality or logical inference, pursuing a goal or desire, and using the rational rules to pursue the goal in different ways depending on the obstacles in place. ([Location 154](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B087D6FM9B&location=154)) - It can then store the uncle information, thereby adding to information readily available without any processing. The computational theory of mind takes this approach to intelligence: that it is a form of computation. However, human intelligence can handle partial information and probabilistic information such that it can register the probability of a variety of outcomes instead of only handling information that will necessarily produce the same outcome with the same input. ([Location 171](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B087D6FM9B&location=171)) - The reason we are more intelligent than other creatures is because we have more hidden layers allowing exclusive-or-type propositions, and we have more finely tuned connection weights from interacting with humans around us (social learning). ([Location 212](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B087D6FM9B&location=212)) - Pinker discusses the various views of consciousness, including as a synonym for intelligence, as self-knowledge, as access to information, and as sentience. For self-knowledge, people typically define consciousness as, “building an internal model of the world that contains the self” ([Location 246](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B087D6FM9B&location=246))