Pinker sure does suck, I agree. The issue is that the essence of what the likes of Pinker assume about the progress of science isn't all that different from what you're saying either. Even under a communist world, I doubt that science will be able to solve a local issue, in our closed system, like the hard problem of consciousness because of emergent facets of consciousness that are the conditions of its own possibility. I'm not the smartest dude but that seems like a loop we aren't going to get ourselves out of