The Philosophical Baby, page 1
ALSO BY ALISON GOPNIK
The Scientist in the Crib:
What Early Learning Tells Us About the Mind
(coauthor with Andrew N. Meltzoff and Patricia K. Kuhl)
Words, Thoughts, and Theories
(coauthor with Andrew N. Meltzoff)
The Philosophical Baby
The Philosophical Baby
WHAT CHILDREN’S MINDS TELL US ABOUT
TRUTH, LOVE, AND THE MEANING OF LIFE
Alison Gopnik
FARRAR, STRAUS AND GIROUX
New York
FARRAR, STRAUS AND GIROUX
18 West 18th Street, New York 10011
Copyright © 2009 by Alison Gopnik
All rights reserved
Distributed in Canada by Douglas & McIntyre Ltd.
Printed in the United States of America
First edition, 2009
Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint stanza 4 from “Dragonflies Mating,” from Sun Under Wood: New Poems by Robert Hass, Ecco Press, p. 9. Copyright © 1996 by Robert Hass. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Gopnik, Alison.
The philosophical baby : what children’s minds tell us about truth, love, and the meaning of life / Alison Gopnik.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-0-374-23196-5 (hardcover : alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 0-374-23196-6 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. Cognition in children. 2. Human information processing in children. 3. Perception in children. I. Title.
BF723.C5G675 2009
155.4'13—dc22
2008049226
Designed by Gretchen Achilles
www.fsgbooks.com
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
TO BLAKE, MY PHILOSOPHICAL BABY BROTHER,
WITH PROFOUND GRATITUDE FOR THE TRUTH AND LOVE
HE HAS ALWAYS GIVEN ME
Contents
Introduction
HOW CHILDREN CHANGE THE WORLD
HOW CHILDHOOD CHANGES THE WORLD
A ROAD MAP
1. Possible Worlds: Why Do Children Pretend?
THE POWER OF COUNTERFACTUALS
COUNTERFACTUALS IN CHILDREN: PLANNING THE FUTURE
RECONSTRUCTING THE PAST
IMAGINING THE POSSIBLE
IMAGINATION AND CAUSATION
CHILDREN AND CAUSATION
CAUSES AND POSSIBILITIES
MAPS AND BLUEPRINTS
CAUSAL MAPS
DETECTING BLICKETS
2. Imaginary Companions:
How Does Fiction Tell the Truth?
DUNZER AND CHARLIE RAVIOLI
NORMAL WEIRDNESS
MAKING A MAP OF THE MIND
IMAGINARY COMPANIONS AND PSYCHOLOGICAL KNOWLEDGE
AUTISM, CAUSATION, AND IMAGINATION
MAPS AND FICTIONS
WHY MINDS AND THINGS ARE DIFFERENT
SOUL ENGINEERS
THE WORK OF PLAY
3. Escaping Plato’s Cave: How Children, Scientists, and Computers Discover the Truth
OBSERVATION: BABY STATISTICS
EXPERIMENTATION: MAKING THINGS HAPPEN
DEMONSTRATION: WATCHING MOM’S EXPERIMENTS
UNDERSTANDING MINDS
4. What Is It Like to Be a Baby?
Consciousness and Attention
EXTERNAL ATTENTION
INTERNAL ATTENTION
BABY ATTENTION
YOUNG CHILDREN AND ATTENTION
WHAT IS IT LIKE TO BE A BABY?
TRAVEL AND MEDITATION
5. Who Am I? Memory, Self,
and the Babbling Stream
CONSCIOUSNESS AND MEMORY
CHILDREN AND MEMORY
KNOWING HOW YOU KNOW
CONSTRUCTING MYSELF
CHILDREN AND THE FUTURE
THE STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS
LIVING IN THE MOMENT
INTERNAL CONSCIOUSNESS, FREE ASSOCIATION, HYPNAGOGIC THOUGHT, AND INSIGHT MEDITATION
WHY DOES CONSCIOUSNESS CHANGE?
A MAP OF MYSELF: CONSTRUCTING CONSCIOUSNESS
6. Heraclitus’ River and the Romanian
Orphans: How Does Our Early Life Shape
Our Later Life?
LIFE CYCLES
THE PARADOX OF INHERITANCE
HOW BABIES RAISE THEIR PARENTS
7. Learning to Love: Attachment and Identity
THEORIES OF LOVE
BEYOND MOTHERS: SOCIAL MONOGAMY AND ALLOMOTHERING
LIFE’S WEATHER
THE CHILD INSIDE
8. Love and Law: The Origins of Morality
IMITATION AND EMPATHY
ANGER AND VENGEANCE
BEYOND EMPATHY
PSYCHOPATHS
TROLLEYOLOGY
NOT LIKE ME
WIDENING THE CIRCLE
FOLLOWING THE RULES
BABY RULES
DOING IT ON PURPOSE
RULES AS CAUSES
THE PERILS OF RULES
THE WISDOM OF HUCK FINN
9. Babies and the Meaning of Life
AWE
MAGIC
LOVE
CONCLUSION
Notes
Bibliography
Acknowledgments
Index
The Philosophical Baby
Introduction
A one-month-old stares at her mother’s face with fixed, brow-wrinkling concentration, and suddenly produces a beatific smile. Surely she must see her mother and feel love, but what are seeing and feeling like for her? What is it like to be a baby? A two-year-old offers a hungry-looking stranger a half-chewed lollipop. Could a child this young already feel empathy and be altruistic? A three-year-old announces that she will come to dinner only if a place is laid for the Babies, the tiny purple-haired twins who live in her pocket and eat flowers for breakfast. How could she believe so profoundly in something that is just a figment of her own imagination? And how could she dream up such remarkable creatures? A five-year-old discovers, with the help of a goldfish, that death is irreversible. How could a child who can’t yet read or add uncover deep, hard truths about mortality? The one-month-old turns into the two-year-old and then the three-year-old and the five-year-old and eventually, miraculously, turns into a mother with children of her own. How could all these utterly different creatures be the same person? All of us once were children and most of us will become parents—we have all asked these sorts of questions.
Childhood is a profound part of the human condition. But it is also a largely unexamined part of that condition—so taken for granted that most of the time we hardly notice it at all. Childhood is a universal fact, but when we do think about it, it is almost always in individual first-person terms: What should I do, now, about my child? What did my parents do that led me to be the way I am? Most books about children are like this, from memoirs and novels to the ubiquitous parenting advice books. But childhood is not just a particular plot complication of Irish autobiographies or a particular problem to be solved by American self-help programs. It is not even just something that all human beings share. It is, I’ll argue, what makes all human beings human.
When we start to think about childhood more deeply, we realize that this universal, apparently simple fact is riddled with complexities and contradictions. Children are, at once, deeply familiar and profoundly alien. Sometimes we feel that they are just like us—and sometimes they seem to live in a completely different world. Their minds seem drastically limited; they know so much less than we do. And yet long before they can read or write they have extraordinary powers of imagination and creativity, and long before they go to school they have remarkable learning abilities. Their experience of the world sometimes seems narrow and concrete; at other times it looks far more wide-ranging than adult experience. It seems that our experiences as children were crucial in shaping who we are. And yet we all know that the path from child to adult is circuitous and complex, and that the world is full of saints with terrible parents and neurotics with loving ones.
The younger children are, the more mysterious they are. We can more or less remember what it was like to be five or six, and we can talk with school-age children on a reasonably equal basis. But babies and toddlers are utterly foreign territory. Babies can’t walk or talk, and even toddlers, well, toddle, and yet science, and indeed common sense, tells us that in those early years they are learning more than they ever will again. It may be hard to see just how the child is father to the man. Yet it is even more difficult to trace the link between the “I” writing this page and the seven-pound bundle of fifty years ago, all eyes and forehead, or even the later thirty-pound whirlwind of tangled sentences, intense emotions, and wild pretend play. We don’t even have a good name for this age range. This book will focus on children under five and I’ll sometimes use the word “babies” to talk about anybody younger than three. For me “babies” means that particularly adorable combination of chubby cheeks and funny pronunciation, though I recognize that many three-year-olds themselves would reject the description vigorously.
New scientific research and philosophical thinking have both illuminated and deepened the mystery. In the last thirty years, there’s been a revolution in our scientific understanding of babies and young children. We used to think that babies and young children were irrational, egocentric, and amoral. Their thinking and experience were concrete, immediate, and limited. In fact, psychologists and neuroscientists have discovered that babies not only learn more, but imagine more, care more, and experience more than we would ever have thought possible. In some ways, young children are actually smarter, more imaginative, more caring, and even more conscious than adults are.
This scientific revolution has led philosophers to take babies seriously for the first time. Children are both profound and puzzling, and this combination is the classic territory of philosophy. Yet you could read 2,500 years of philosophy and find almost nothing about children. A Martian who tried to figure us out by studying Earthling philosophy could easily conclude that human beings reproduce by asexual cloning. The index of the thousands of pages in the 1967 Encyclopedia of Philosophy had no references to babies, infants, families, parents, mothers, or fathers, and only four to children at all. (There are hundreds of references to angels and the morning star.)
Very recently, however, this has begun to change. Philosophers have started to pay attention to babies and even to learn from them. The current Encyclopedia of Philosophy includes articles that are actually about babies, with titles such as “Infant Cognition” and “The Child’s Theory of Mind.” I talk at the American Philosophical Association as well as the Society for Research in Child Development, and philosophers argue about when babies understand the minds of others, how they learn about the world, and whether they are capable of empathy. A few even sit precariously on little chairs in preschools and do experiments with children. Thinking about babies and young children can help answer fundamental questions about imagination, truth, consciousness, identity, love, and morality in a new way. In this book I’ll argue for a new view of these fundamental philosophical ideas, based on babies, and a new view of babies, based on these philosophical ideas.
HOW CHILDREN CHANGE THE WORLD
There’s one big, general idea behind all the specific experiments and arguments in this book. More than any other creature, human beings are able to change. We change the world around us, other people, and ourselves. Children, and childhood, help explain how we change. And the fact that we change explains why children are the way they are—and even why childhood exists at all.
Ultimately, the new scientific explanations of childhood are rooted in evolutionary theory. But studying children leads to a very different picture of how evolution shapes our lives than the traditional picture of “evolutionary psychology.” Some psychologists and philosophers argue that most of what is significant about human nature is determined by our genes—an innate hardwired system that makes us who we are. We’re endowed with a set of fixed and distinct abilities, designed to suit the needs of our prehistoric ancestors 200,000 years ago in the Pleistocene. Not surprisingly, this view discounts the importance of childhood. The picture is that a “good enough” childhood environment may be necessary to let the innate aspects of human nature unfold. But beyond that, childhood won’t have much influence because most of what is important about human nature in general, and individual character in particular, is in place at birth.
But this view doesn’t capture our lives as we actually live them and as they change and develop over time. We at least feel as if we actively create our lives, changing our world and our selves. This view also can’t explain the radical historical changes in human life. If our nature is determined by our genes, you would think that we would be the same now as we were in the Pleistocene. The puzzling fact about human beings is that our capacity for change, both in our own lives and through history, is the most distinctive and unchanging thing about us. Is there a way of explaining this flexibility and creativity, this ability to alter our individual and collective fate, without resorting to mysticism?
The answer, unexpectedly, comes from very young children—and it leads to a very different kind of evolutionary psychology. The great evolutionary advantage of human beings is their ability to escape from the constraints of evolution. We can learn about our environment, we can imagine different environments, and we can turn those imagined environments into reality. And as an intensely social species, other people are the most important part of our environment. So we are particularly likely to learn about people and to use that knowledge to change the way other people behave, and the way we behave ourselves. The result is that human beings, as a central part of their evolutionary endowment, and as the deepest part of their human nature, are engaged in a constant cycle of change. We change our surroundings and our surroundings change us. We alter other people’s behavior, their behavior alters ours.
We begin with the capacity to learn more effectively and more flexibly about our environment than any other species. This knowledge lets us imagine new environments, even radically new environments, and act to change the existing ones. Then we can learn about the unexpected features of the new environment that we have created, and so change that environment once again and so on. What neuroscientists call plasticity—the ability to change in the light of experience—is the key to human nature at every level from brains to minds to societies.
Learning is a key part of the process, but the human capacity for change goes beyond just learning. Learning is about the way the world changes our mind, but our minds can also change the world. Developing a new theory about the world allows us to imagine other ways the world might be. Understanding other people and ourselves lets us imagine new ways of being human. At the same time, to change our world, our selves, and our society we have to think about what we ought to be like, as well as what we actually are like. This book is about how children develop minds that change the world.
Psychologists, philosophers, neuroscientists, and computer scientists are beginning to carefully and precisely identify some of the underlying mechanisms that give us this distinctively human capacity for change—the aspects of our nature that allow nurture and culture to take place. We even are starting to develop rigorous mathematical accounts of some of those mechanisms. We’ll see that this new research and thinking, much of it done just in the past few years, has given us a new understanding of how the biological computers in our skulls actually produce human freedom and flexibility.
If I look around at the ordinary things in front of me as I write this—the electric lamp, the right-angle-constructed table, the brightly glazed symmetrical ceramic cup, the glowing computer screen—almost nothing resembles anything I would have seen in the Pleistocene. All of these objects were once imaginary—they are things that human beings themselves have created. And I myself, a woman cognitive scientist writing about the philosophy of children, could not have existed in the Pleistocene either. I am also a creation of the human imagination, and so are you.
HOW CHILDHOOD CHANGES THE WORLD
The very fact of childhood—our long protected period of immaturity—plays a crucial role in this human ability to change the world and ourselves. Children aren’t just defective adults, primitive grown-ups gradually attaining our perfection and complexity. Instead, children and adults are different forms of Homo sapiens. They have very different, though equally complex and powerful, minds, brains, and forms of consciousness, designed to serve different evolutionary functions. Human development is more like metamorphosis, like caterpillars becoming butterflies, than like simple growth—though it may seem that children are the vibrant, wandering butterflies who transform into caterpillars inching along the grown-up path.
What is childhood? It’s a distinctive developmental period in which young human beings are uniquely dependent on adults. Childhood literally couldn’t exist without caregivers. Why do we go through a period of childhood at all? Human beings have a much more extended period of immaturity and dependence, a much longer childhood, than other species, and this period of immaturity has become longer as human history has gone on (as we parents of twenty-somethings may recognize with a sigh). Why make babies so helpless for so long, and why make adults invest so much time and energy in caring for them?
