Imagine that you're executing some automatic task, like dicing onions, flossing or driving home from work. Your brain is on autopilot, juggling countless crucial judgments and adjustments, while your thoughts traverse well-worn neural grooves, replaying that annoying conversation you had with a colleague, or re-reviewing all the items on your to-do list. It's all very banal when you think about it, and the tape loop keeps iterating until some zinger of an experience or a question jolts you out of your stupor. At that moment, you're hit with some transcendent truth, like, oh, so this is what love is, or that's the reason why I'm here.
Those epiphanies are rare. We try to kick-start them with religion, novels and yoga, through visits to art galleries or to remote destinations. But transcendence is readily available to babies and very small children, according to cognitive psychologist Alison Gopnik, because novelty is a regular feature of their daily experience. Ergo, their brains are built for invention and revelation.
The Philosophical Baby: What Children's Minds Tell Us About Truth, Love, and the Meaning of Life, by Alison Gopnik, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 288 pages, $31
As she writes in The Philosophical Baby, they're the “R&D department of the human species, the blue sky guys” whose job it is to make big discoveries, while we adults are simply day labourers, the production and marketing folks who manufacture and flaunt widgets, who put food on the table. And if only we paid closer attention to what makes babies and toddlers tick, we'd know more about ourselves. “Many profound questions about human nature can be answered by thinking about children,” she writes, such as how do we understand the way the world works, what will happen in the future and what do other people believe?
If a two-year-old can't answer those questions, he or she at least thinks about them a lot of the time. Anyone who has spent time with the preschool set knows how much experimentation and idea-testing – not to mention practice, practice, practice – goes into every waking moment. What would happen if I dropped this spoon off my tray? Put the bowl on my head? Climbed on the coffee table. And did it again and again and again, changing the conditions slightly each time? Would my mother's face change if I cried? Ate a cigarette butt? Banged her computer with a block? What would happen if I pretended an inanimate object had appetites like my own, or imagined the world to be different than it is?
Using scientific evidence from her own lab at Berkeley, among others, Gopnik argues, in brisk, clean prose, that a young child's thought processes are not really clumsy, irrational versions of adult thinking. Instead, they're evidence of a unique baby consciousness, one governed by learning through statistical computations of cause and effect, by theories about other people's beliefs, and by hypotheses about possible worlds. She calls these three organizing principles of baby consciousness causal maps, care-giving and counterfactuals.
Despite the “philosophy” in the book's title, what Gopnik means by counterfactuals is not the philosophical-legal sense of statements that contradict the known facts (if the gun hadn't been loaded, I wouldn't have shot him), but what-if ideas that let children try ideas on for size. By altering reality, changing the conditions only slightly, young children get to learn about the psychological as well as the physical world. Such as, what if there were an unpredictable little man in my crib named Dunzer? (Dunzer is baby Alison's imaginary companion, who was friendly at first, but then became scary – so scary, in fact, that even one-year-old brother Adam was spooked).
Gopnik's ability to marshal the empirical facts adds clarity to what can seem downright inscrutable
