How The Mind Works by Steven Pinker

 Theories of mind have always been shaped around images, metaphors, and analogies. The dominant picture of mind since the Renaissance--it is common to classical empiricism, which embraced consciousness, and modern behaviorism, which eschewed it--is the tabula rasa: the blank ledger upon which the environment leaves its trace as the mind is given whatever structure and content it finally possesses. Originally, the mind is conceived to be neutral, void, unbiased, plastic, undifferentiated--a mere vacuum awaiting the rush of sensory experience. The mind is able to copy experience, to detect its regularities, to order its deliverances into categories; but innately it is just a formless sponge soaking up the environmental contingencies. Behavior, in consequence, is under no innate constraint or predisposition; it simply reflects the experience of the organism, whatever that may be. Everything mental is up for grabs. There is no human nature. Our essence is nothingness.