The mind, like the Apollo spacecraft, IS DESIGNED to solve many engineering problems, and thus is packed with high-tech systems, each contrived to overcome its own obstacles

Is this maybe a slip of the tongue on Dawkins' part? Did he not mean to say "designoid"? But then Pinker goes on to use the term designed in the same way. If it swims like a duck, wattles like a duck, quacks like a duck maybe there is just the ghost of chance that it is a duck!

The questioner who referred to the television analogy was onto something, and neither Dawkins noir Pinker addressed the point. The same could be said about the message encoded in the signs that we call "language", or an argument "materialised" in the pixels or in the ink of a text. The message/argument and the materialisation of it are not consubstantial with each other. I have raised this issue again and again on this site and no one has produced a reasonable response to it. Pinker is trying to have his cake and eat it. He is very reluctant to dispense with the "wonder" of the questioning consciousness and so he retains it, but provides no basis upon which it can be retained.