The Philosophical Baby

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For most of us, having a baby is the most profound, intense, and fascinating experience of our lives. Now scientists and philosophers are starting to appreciate babies, too. The last decade has witnessed a revolution in our understanding of infants and young children. Scientists used to believe that babies were irrational, and that their thinking and experience were limited. Recently, they have discovered that babies learn more, create more, care more, and experience more than we could ever have imagined. And there is good reason to believe that babies are actually smarter, more thoughtful, and even more conscious than adults. This new science holds answers to some of the deepest and oldest questions about what it means to be human. A new baby’s captivated gaze at her mother’s face lays the foundations for love and morality. A toddler’s unstoppable explorations of his playpen hold the key to scientific discovery. A three-year-old’s wild make-believe explains how we can imagine the future, write novels, and invent new technologies. Alison Gopnik - a leading psychologist and philosopher, as well as a mother - explains the groundbreaking new psychological, neuroscientific, and philosophical developments in our understanding of very young children, transforming our understanding of how babies see the world, and in turn promoting a deeper appreciation for the role of parents.

MAIN IDEAS, TAKEAWAYS & SIMILARITIES

• Imagination allows children to consider alternative possibilities and create counterfactual worlds, which is essential for pretend play and envisioning better futures.

• Love and care from adults enable children to learn and imagine freely. Children also develop theories of love based on their interactions with caregivers.

• Rules, combined with empathy and understanding of harm, allow children to navigate a complex social world and coordinate to achieve moral goods. But rules can also perpetuate injustice if detached from their origins.

• By 18 months, children engage in altruistic helping behavior, even at cost to themselves. They make moral judgments, viewing harm as intrinsically wrong regardless of rules.

• However, in-group favoritism and dehumanization of out-groups also emerges early. Widening moral concern beyond one’s immediate circle is an ongoing challenge.

• Babies show empathy from birth, identifying with and taking on the emotions of others. They link facial expressions to internal feelings. This early empathy provides a foundation for moral concern.

• Introduction

  • Childhood is a profound and largely unexamined part of the human condition. Children are deeply familiar yet also profoundly alien to adults.[1]
  • In the last 30 years, scientific research has revolutionized our understanding of babies and young children. They learn more, imagine more, care more, and experience more than previously thought. In some ways, young children are smarter, more imaginative, caring, and conscious than adults.[1]
  • This scientific revolution has led philosophers to start taking babies seriously and learning from them to answer fundamental questions about imagination, truth, consciousness, identity, love, and morality in new ways.[1]
  • The central idea is that more than any other creature, humans are able to change - we change the world, other people, and ourselves. Children and childhood help explain how we change.[1]
  • The evolutionary advantage of humans is the ability to escape the constraints of evolution through learning, imagining different environments, and turning those imagined environments into reality.[1]
  • Childhood, our long period of immaturity and dependence, is tied to the human capacity for change. It provides protected time for learning and imagination before the responsibilities of adulthood.[1]
  • There is an evolutionary division of labor - children are devoted to learning and imagining new possibilities, while adults implement the best of those ideas. This is reflected in differences between children’s and adults’ brains, minds, activities, and consciousness.[1]
  • Love, especially parental love, is an engine of human change that enables our extended immaturity, learning from earlier generations, and the emergence of culture, history, morality, science and literature.[1]

  In summary, the chapter argues that studying the profound differences between the minds of babies and adults can shed new light on deep philosophical questions about the human condition and our remarkable capacity for change and imagination.

• Chapter 1: Possible Worlds: Why Do Children Pretend?

  • Humans don’t just live in the real world, but also in a universe of possible worlds - dreams, plans, fictions, and hypotheses. These are called counterfactuals.
  • Even young children can consider possibilities, distinguish them from reality, and use them to change the world. They can imagine different future and past possibilities.
  • Counterfactual thinking allows humans to make plans, invent tools, and create new environments. It gives an evolutionary advantage.
  • Children as young as 18 months old can solve problems insightfully by imagining possibilities, rather than just trial-and-error. This ability is uniquely human.
  • By age 2-3, children constantly engage in pretend play, creating imaginary worlds. But they clearly distinguish pretense from reality.
  • Children’s ability to imagine possibilities is closely tied to their understanding of causality. Causal knowledge allows them to envision and bring about new possibilities.
  • Even young children have intuitive theories of physics, biology, and psychology that allow them to explain and predict phenomena. Their brains construct “causal maps”.
  • Experiments show that when children gain new causal knowledge, they can use it to imagine new possibilities and change how they think and act.
  • Knowledge and imagination are not opposed - knowledge of how the world works actually enables creativity and counterfactual reasoning. This blend of knowledge and imagination is a hallmark of human intelligence, even in young children’s play and fantasies.

• Chapter 2: Imaginary Comparisons: How Does Fiction Tell The Truth?

  • Children often create vivid imaginary companions between ages 2-6. This is surprisingly common and not a sign of loneliness or psychological issues.[1]
  • Having imaginary companions is linked to children developing a “theory of mind” - an understanding of how their own and others’ minds work in terms of beliefs, desires, and emotions.[1]
  • Children with imaginary companions tend to have a more advanced theory of mind and be more socially skilled than those without, even though they are not smarter overall.[1]
  • Older children create imaginary societies and worlds (“paracosms”) rather than individual imaginary companions. This may reflect their growing interest in understanding complex social networks.[1]
  • Children with autism have difficulty developing a theory of mind and rarely engage in pretend play or create imaginary companions.[1]
  • Adult fiction writers often experience their characters as autonomous agents, similar to children’s imaginary companions. Having an imaginary companion as a child is common among fiction writers.[1]
  • Fictional worlds allow us to explore the vast possibilities of human experience and provide “maps” to navigate our own internal experiences and life choices.[1]
  • Children’s wild, uninhibited pretend play serves the important evolutionary function of allowing them to freely explore possibilities without needing to restrict imagination to what is immediately practical or useful.[1]

  In summary, the chapter argues that children’s creation of imaginary companions and fictional worlds is a natural and important part of their cognitive development, especially the development of social understanding. It lays the groundwork for adult imaginative capacities like fiction writing.

• Chapter 3: Escaping Plato’s Cave: How Children, Scientists, and Computers Discover the Truth

  • Babies and young children are prodigious learners, using powerful learning techniques similar to those used by scientists to discover the truth about the world[1].
  • Children learn about the causal structure of the world through observation, experimentation, and demonstration from others[1].
  • Babies as young as 8 months old are sensitive to statistical patterns, which they use to figure out things like word boundaries in language[1].
  • By 9 months, babies can reason about probabilities, being surprised when mostly red balls are pulled from a mostly white box of balls[1].
  • Toddlers and preschoolers do experiments through play, varying their actions on objects to see the effects and learn causes[1].
  • Children also learn by watching the experiments and demonstrations of others, especially adults. They understand others’ actions are goal-directed[1].
  • In addition to physical causes, children learn about psychological causes - emotions, desires, beliefs. They use statistical patterns and experiments to infer personality traits and mental states[1].
  • Language plays a key role in learning about other minds. Deaf children of hearing parents who don’t sign fluently have delays in understanding false beliefs[1].
  • The human ability to learn causal maps of the physical and social world through observation and experimentation may underlie our intelligence and what makes us uniquely human[1].

• Chapter 4: What Is It Like to Be a Baby?: Consciousness and Attention

  • Consciousness is a difficult philosophical problem. We don’t know exactly how the brain produces subjective experiences.
  • Studying babies’ and children’s consciousness can provide insights into the nature of consciousness.
  • For adults, attention can be captured by external events (exogenous attention) or directed voluntarily (endogenous attention). Attending to something makes us vividly conscious of it.
  • Babies’ attention is more exogenous than endogenous compared to adults. They are captivated by new, unexpected events and less able to voluntarily direct their attention[1].
  • Babies are less able to inhibit distractions and their attention is more widely distributed compared to the narrow focus of adult attention[1].
  • Babies’ brains have abundant excitatory neurotransmitters but inhibitory ones develop later, suggesting they may be more conscious than adults by some measures[1].
  • Young children don’t seem to understand that attention involves a narrow focus. They think people are conscious of everything they see at once[1].
  • The author argues babies may have a “lantern” consciousness - vividly experiencing everything at once, while adults have a more focused “spotlight” consciousness[1].
  • Certain adult experiences like travel to exotic places or types of meditation can produce a more baby-like “lantern consciousness” - a vivid awareness of everything without a narrow focus[1].
  • Studying the varieties of consciousness at different ages suggests there may be many different kinds of consciousness, rather than a single explanation. Changes in consciousness as we develop are especially revealing[1].

  In summary, the chapter explores how babies’ consciousness differs from that of adults in significant ways that can shed light on the nature of subjective experience. Babies may have a more expansive, less focused mode of consciousness compared to adults.

• Chapter 5: Who Am I? Memory, self, and the Babbling Stream

  • Consciousness includes both awareness of the external world and distinctive internal experiences like memories, plans, and inner speech. Autobiographical memory is closely linked to our internal consciousness and sense of personal identity.[1]
  • Babies and young children have episodic memories of specific events, but don’t weave them into a continuous autobiographical narrative until around age 5.[1] Before this, their memories seem to belong as much to others (like parents) as to themselves.
  • Before age 4-5, children have difficulty remembering the source of their knowledge[1] and their own past mental states[1], leading to greater suggestibility. They live more “in the moment” without projecting a constant sense of self into the past and future.
  • The stream of consciousness and constant inner speech that adults experience seems largely absent in young children.[1] Their consciousness is more fragmented, shifting between thoughts without a strong sense of a unified self over time.
  • The development of autobiographical memory and executive control around ages 4-6 shapes children’s consciousness to be more adult-like, with language likely playing a key role in constructing a narrative sense of self.[1]
  • Examining the differences between young children’s consciousness and adults’ weighs against the idea that consciousness is a unified, infallible phenomenon, and instead suggests consciousness is an indirect construction shaped by knowledge and thought.[1]

  In summary, the chapter argues young children’s consciousness differs dramatically from adults’ in lacking a strong unified sense of self over time, which develops as autobiographical memory and executive function mature, constructing the narrative “I” we subjectively experience. This suggests consciousness is not a single, direct phenomenon but an indirect product of developing knowledge and thought.

• Chapter 6: Heraclitus River and the Romanian Orphans: How does our early life shape our later life?

  • The chapter explores how our early life experiences shape our later life and personal identity, drawing on philosophical stories and scientific evidence.
  • Young children around 4-5 years old already have a sense of autobiographical self that links their past, present and future. They actively create this sense of “I” as the protagonist of their life story.
  • The Romanian orphans who suffered severe early deprivation but were later adopted into nurturing homes provide a striking example of both resilience and risk. Many recovered completely, while some continued to have problems, especially those who spent longer in the orphanages.
  • In general, negative childhood experiences increase risks for problems later in life, but do not determine outcomes. Most people are resilient and can overcome early adversity.
  • Genes and environment interact in complex ways to shape development. Traits like alcoholism and IQ show substantial heritability, but heritability itself can vary depending on the environment.
  • For example, IQ is much more heritable in rich vs poor children, likely because environmental variations have a bigger impact for the poor. Historical rises in IQ may reflect the new environment of mass schooling.
  • Our human capacity to shape our own environments makes the effects of genes more complex and changeable. The same genes may have very different consequences in the new environments we create.
  • Early childhood is an integral part of our identity as adults. It shapes who we become not just through direct causal effects, but as part of the autobiographical story that defines us.

• Chapter 7: Learning to Love: Attachment and Identity

  • Babies learn about love and attachment in their early experiences with caregivers. These early theories influence how they interpret new events and shape their ideas about love into adulthood.
  • Around one year old, babies develop specific attachments to familiar caregivers who respond to their needs. They become distressed when separated from these loved ones and are comforted upon reunion.
  • Attachment styles in babies are categorized as secure, avoidant, anxious, or disorganized, reflecting different expectations about caregivers’ responsiveness[1].
  • These attachment patterns are influenced by the contingencies babies observe between their actions/emotions and caregivers’ responses. Consistent comfort leads to secure attachment, while lack of responsiveness or caregiver distress results in insecure attachment[1].
  • Babies develop “internal working models” or causal maps of care based on their experiences. These models shape their predictions and behaviors related to love and relationships[1].
  • Attachment styles show some continuity from infancy to adulthood, influencing how adults think, feel, and behave in romantic relationships[1].
  • Adults’ childhood experiences and memories of love also affect their parenting styles and attachment relationships with their own children[1].
  • Having a coherent understanding of one’s early experiences, even if difficult, allows for reflection and change in attachment patterns across generations[1].
  • While early theories of love are influential, new experiences throughout life can alter attachment styles and ideas about love.

  In summary, this chapter highlights how babies’ early experiences with caregivers shape their developing theories of love, which continue to influence their approach to relationships throughout life, while still allowing for growth and change.

• Chapter 8: Love and Law: The Origins of Morality

  • Contrary to past views, even young children have moral foundations and capacities for moral reasoning and behavior. This challenges the idea that morality only develops in adolescence or adulthood.
  • Babies show empathy from birth, identifying with and taking on the emotions of others. They link facial expressions to internal feelings. This early empathy provides a foundation for moral concern.
  • By 18 months, children engage in altruistic helping behavior, even at cost to themselves. They make moral judgments, viewing harm as intrinsically wrong regardless of rules.
  • Children also understand and follow social rules early on. They differentiate between moral rules about harm and conventional rules. Following rules allows complex cooperation.
  • However, in-group favoritism and dehumanization of out-groups also emerges early. Widening moral concern beyond one’s immediate circle is an ongoing challenge.
  • Children consider intentions, not just outcomes, in their moral judgments by age 3. Understanding others’ mental states informs their praise and blame.
  • Rules, combined with empathy and understanding of harm, allow children to navigate a complex social world and coordinate to achieve moral goods. But rules can also perpetuate injustice if detached from their origins.
  • In summary, morality in early childhood involves both innate empathic reactions and capacities for social learning, reasoning about rules and intentions, and extending concern to others. Both emotional intuition and rational deliberation shape moral development.

• Chapter 9: Babies and the Meaning of Life

  • Babies and young children have a remarkable capacity for learning, imagination, and love, which are intertwined and fundamental to the human experience.
  • Children are born with innate knowledge but can learn more than any other animal, allowing them to change and adapt to their environment. They learn through observation, experimentation, and play.
  • Imagination allows children to consider alternative possibilities and create counterfactual worlds, which is essential for pretend play and envisioning better futures.
  • Love and care from adults enable children to learn and imagine freely. Children also develop theories of love based on their interactions with caregivers.
  • The selfless love that caregivers feel for children, despite their neediness and inability to reciprocate, is a powerful model for the love that underpins religious and moral intuitions.
  • Children’s sense of awe and wonder at the richness and complexity of the world is similar to the scientific emotion of amazement at the universe.
  • Children’s imagination and sense of magic reflect the human capacity to envision alternate worlds and ways of living, which can lead to real transformations in individuals and communities.
  • While the emotions and intuitions associated with spirituality have evolutionary origins, they can still capture something genuine and profound about the human experience and the world.

Introduction (Page 9)

The index of the thousands of pages in the 1967 Encyclopedia of Philosophy1 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.) (Page 12)

animal that depends on the accumulated knowledge of past generations has to have some time to acquire that knowledge. An animal that depends on imagination has to have some time to exercise it. Childhood is that time. Children are protected from the usual exigencies of adult life; (Page 16)

All they need to do is learn. When we’re children we’re devoted to learning about our world and imagining all the other ways that world could be. When we become adults we put all that we’ve learned and imagined to use. (Page 16)

All the processes of change, imagination, and learning ultimately depend on love. Human caregivers love their babies in a particularly intense and significant way. That love is one of the engines of human change. Parental love isn’t just a primitive and primordial instinct, continuous with the nurturing behavior of other animals (though certainly there are such continuities). Instead, our extended life as parents also plays a deep role in the emergence of the most sophisticated and characteristically human capacities. Our protracted immaturity is possible only because we can rely on the love of the people who take care of us. We can learn from the discoveries of earlier generations because those same loving caregivers invest in teaching us. It isn’t just that without mothering humans would lack nurturance, warmth, and emotional security. They would also lack culture, history, morality, science, and literature. (Page 21)

Possible Worlds WHY DO CHILDREN PRETEND? (Page 26)

THE POWER OF COUNTERFACTUALS (Page 28)

The evolutionary answer is that counterfactuals let us change the future. Because we can consider alternative ways the world might be, we can actually act on the world and intervene to turn it into one or the other of these possibilities. Whenever we act, even in a small way, we are changing the course of history, nudging the world down one path rather than another. (Page 29)

We can also see evidence for counterfactual thinking in children’s play. Babies start pretending when they are as young as eighteen months old or even younger12. Pretending involves a kind of present counterfactual thinking—imagining the way things might be different. Even babies who can’t talk yet, and are barely walking, can still pretend. (Page 34)

Being able to say “no” and “uh-oh” immediately puts you in the world of the counterfactual and the possible—the road not taken, the possibility that isn’t real. And we discovered that, in fact, babies start talking about unreal possibilities at the same time that they start to use tools in an insightful way13. Being able to talk about possibilities helps you to imagine them. (Page 36)

By the time they are two or three children quite characteristically spend much of their waking hours in a world of imaginary creatures, possible universes, and assumed identities. (Page 36)

Children’s emotions are more intense and more difficult to control than adult emotions, whether the causes of those emotions are real or not. To a worried parent, it may seem that the child trembling under the covers must believe that there really is a monster in the closet. But the scientific studies show that this is not because children don’t understand the difference between fiction and fact. They are just more moved by both than grown-ups. (Page 38)

IMAGINATION AND CAUSATION (Page 39)

CHILDREN AND CAUSATION (Page 41)

Causation is what gives fantasy its logic. (Page 44)

CAUSES AND POSSIBILITIES (Page 44)

Children develop causal theories of the world from a very early age. If causal knowledge and counterfactual thinking go together, then this might explain how young children have the parallel ability to generate counterfactuals and to explore possible worlds. If children understand the way things work, they should be able to imagine alternative possibilities about them. This might also explain the cases where children don’t think counterfactually. (Page 44)

MAPS AND BLUEPRINTS (Page 46)

Children’s brains construct a kind of unconscious causal map, an accurate picture of the way the world works. These causal maps are like the more familiar maps we, and even computerized systems such as Mapquest, use to represent space. (Page 46)

if we actually demonstrate that talking to the machine causes it to light up, children change their minds. If you ask them to make the machine stop they very politely say, “Machine, please stop,” instead of reaching for the switch. And if you ask the children to predict what will make a new machine go, they are much more willing to entertain the “talk to it” possibility than they were before, though they still think the switch is a better bet. Giving the children new causal knowledge changed the way they thought about possibilities, and changed the kinds of actions they would take. Children could imagine a listening machine that had seemed downright impossible before. (Page 52)

Imaginary Companions HOW DOES FICTION TELL THE TRUTH? (Page 54)

You might expect that these psychological causal maps would also be reflected in children’s pretend play. And, in fact, one of the most striking kinds of pretend play involves the invention of counterfactual people—imaginary companions. The creation of imaginary companions reflects a distinctively human kind of social and emotional intelligence. At first glance, weird phenomena such as imaginary companions seem hard to reconcile with the idea that children are also little scientists actively trying to understand how the world works. (Page 55)

Why do young children create imaginary companions? Earlier, we saw the close link between the ability to think counterfactually and causal knowledge. So we might expect a link between psychological counterfactuals and knowledge about other minds. Imaginary companions are a great example of psychological counterfactuals. (Page 61)

heyday of imaginary companions is between about two and six years old. It turns out that this is also the period when children create an everyday psychology—a causal theory of the mind4. (Page 61)

From two to six, children discover fundamental facts about how their own minds and the minds of others work. They formulate a causal map of the mind. They start to understand the causal connections between desires and beliefs, emotions and actions, just as they start to understand the connections between blickets and blicket detectors, or between food and growth or illness. One of the central tenets of this theory of mind is that people may have different beliefs, perceptions, emotions, and desires and that those differences may lead to different actions. People behave differently because they have different kinds of minds. (Page 62)

Just as children construct a causal map of biology that relates growth and illness, life and death, they also construct a map that connects mental states to one another and to the world outside them. And with that map in hand they can explore all the possible combinations and permutations of human behavior, and imagine all the strange things that people might think, feel, and do. (Page 64)

From the adult perspective, the fictional worlds are a luxury. It’s the future predictions that are the real deal, the stern and earnest stuff of adult life. For young children, however, the imaginary worlds seem just as important and appealing as the real ones. It’s not, as scientists used to think, that children can’t tell the difference between the real world and the imaginary world. (Recall that the children in Harris’s and Taylor’s experiments knew very well that the pretend monster or the imaginary companion wasn’t real.) It’s just that they don’t see any particular reason for preferring to live in the real one. (Page 77)

This division of labor may lead to other differences between adults and children. I mentioned earlier that one of the clearest differences between babies and young children on one hand, and older children and adults on the other, is what psychologists call the development of inhibition—the ability to keep yourself from acting impulsively. Inhibition lets us avoid doing what we feel like immediately, in the service of our larger goals. The commonplace that babies and young children are uninhibited compared with adults is literally true, and we even have some ideas about the brain changes in the prefrontal cortex that lead to those changes in inhibition20. (Page 79)