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Sept. 19, 2009 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
26:49
1459 Philosophy and Brain Development

Some thoughts I had about how arrested brain development might influence philosophical beliefs.

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Hi everybody, it's Steph. Hope you're doing well.
Wanted to get down a few thoughts while I'm on my way to pick up my wounded beast of a computer.
From a desk shop, I have had some thoughts.
I've been reading up on baby's brain development, you know, as a sort of interested layperson, complete amateur.
I'm quite fascinated by the sort of last 30 years of The science of brain development and what it has taught us about the capacities of, particularly babies, I mean, I'm astounded, astounded, astounded every single day, the degree to which my daughter processes new information and is able to remember how to do things from one day to the next, when she's supposed to be supposedly just sort of living in the moment and so on, that she still, she has a real continuity.
of learning and skills development and she has moods and she's very creative and very curious and absolutely fascinated by how the world works.
It's a wonderful thing to see because we see, you know, it really is, it's just too sad for words.
We see so often that adults have lost that curiosity and that drive and desire and excitement to simply explore the world.
I swear to Zeus, Isabella cannot be restrained from exploring the house.
She can't be. Like, if I put her on my lap because daddy likes the odd cuddle, she'll, you know, eh, fine, here's a cuddle, now I'm going again.
Like, she will squirm and kick to explore.
I mean, there are times when she wants to be helped, but for the most part, she is just like the Energizer Bunny going around and exploring and picking and tasting and turning over and figuring things out.
We got a sort of fence system and it came with a blue strap.
I gave her the blue strap to play with and she sat there for 20 minutes turning it over, tasting it, trying to figure out what the blue strap was, how it worked, what it was all about.
That drive to understand and to learn and to explore, it's amazing.
I was watching her the other day and I was just thinking, you know, it's quite comfortable.
She was sort of nestled in a bunch of pillows and crawling around.
And I was like, you know, it's pretty comfortable where you are, Isabella.
You ever think of just like, I don't know, lying back and looking out the window?
But she doesn't because she is so driven to explore the world.
And it's a beautiful and fantastic and wonderful, wonderful thing to see.
While at the same time, it's sad to see because it reminds me the curiosity and the courage that is so missing from the world.
She's starting to get the cause and effect.
So we got her this bouncy chair.
It's not a bouncy chair. It's a bouncy seat.
Exo-sorcer is called. She stands and there's these toys around her and so on.
She stands in these two little holes.
And when we first put her in about six weeks ago, we had to sort of watch her the whole time.
But now she's playing with everything and she's figured out that there's one, like it's like a little fire truck.
No, it's a fire engine house.
And she pushes down on it and music plays and daddy does his silly dances, which are also known when he was younger as his cool dances.
But you gain this perspective with age.
So she's learned that with different songs, I will do different dances.
And she's completely, of course, delighted by this.
And when I don't dance for whatever reason, she's shocked.
And then I dance and she's okay.
And so she's getting this sort of cause and effect and learning how things work.
And she's got a really great mental map of the house.
You can put her down in the study.
She will barrel up the hallway into her room because we have her baby monitor on the ground so that we can keep it plugged in.
And she always wants to go, sorry, it's on a little footstool.
So she loves going up to the footstool, climbing up at the footstool and grabbing at, she loves everything with a cord, right?
Like all babies, I think.
I don't know how our species survived the reality of snakes, but that's not for me to answer, as so little is.
But she will barrel down the hallway, and she will go directly straight to her room, straight to that, you know, from the other end of the house.
So she really has a good mental map of the house, and it's really, really impressive.
And she has that. You know, she remembers that from one day to the next.
And it's also fascinating, though again, of course, sad for me, though I don't think it would be for everyone, but it's a sad experience.
I was just looking at her today.
I'm going to take her to the pool sort of twice a week if I can.
Or three times. And we have a little inflatable thing that she sits in.
And it's in the floor in the dining room, which is pretty empty.
And she loves playing with it because it's got cords and she can lift it, right?
I wanted to feel that sense of power, as I mentioned in the Sunday show.
And I was just thinking, you know, and it's a funny thing to think when you're a parent.
And I'm sure every parent thinks it many, many times.
But you look back and you say, well, I was...
I was that size, I was that way, I was that age, I was that, and I can't imagine what my childhood was like.
I can't imagine, I guess, but I can't really imagine what it was like in any practical sense when I was that age, right?
She's, I guess, eight and a half or eight and three-quarter months.
So, it's really fascinating to see just what an exploring and learning goddess she is, how amazing.
She is at remembering things, at developing her mental maps, at figuring things out, at exploring things.
She is unrestrained in her adoration, her stalking her fetish for the world.
And I think that is such a beautiful thing.
Can you keep that all the way through adulthood?
Well, I hope so. I know that I've kept some of it.
I like to think I've kept a lot of it.
But that she is, you know, it reminds me of a line from a U2 song, trying to throw your arms around the world.
She's trying to throw, she's trying to hug the entire planet.
She is so excited by existence and so curious to explore the world that it is a reminder of how we start and a tragedy to a large degree of how many people end up Indifferent to knowledge or hostile to knowledge or to curiosity or to exploration who get cast in Dogma.
You know, Dogma is not just an interesting film but has always reminded me of that metal spray, that cryogenic metal spray that is sprayed upon Han Solo in The Empire Strikes Back, I think?
He's cast in iron and cannot move.
And that's dogma, right?
That's an addiction to conclusions rather than a curiosity and a consistency of methodology.
That is religion, not science.
That is racism, not exploration.
In reading these books about how the baby's brain develops and how the baby's brain works, or at least the latest theories, it's hard to know for sure of any of these things.
But it really is hard to miss, and it's not a fleshed out, it's not proven, this is just some thoughts, right, that might be of interest to you.
It's hard to miss how particular philosophical states seem to correspond to particular stages of mental development.
So, object constancy, depth perception, and so on.
Object constancy is a very, very interesting aspect of the brain development, right?
And it's basically, you know, you put a ball under a blanket when a kid is young enough.
She will say, oh, the ball's gone, and just go play with something else.
But after a certain six or eight months or whatever, she will pick up the Blanket and find the ball.
And she knows it's still there even when it's out of sight.
Although, babies when they're even younger, if you have a little car racing behind a screen and then another car or the same car appears later on, the baby's eyes will still follow it.
They know there's still something behind the screen.
But of course, if it changes into a duck, they don't seem to care.
They just know something's there. Object constancy is something that I think is, you know, when I think of something like Cartesian metaphysics or epistemology, Descartes' Cartesian demon, right, that the world could be manipulated by an external devil who is playing around with your every conceivable perception, that to me would indicate something awry in the mental development around the stage of object constancy.
What is the difference between You know, Platonism versus Aristotelianism, the two major schools of philosophy in Western thought.
Well, one is rational and empirical and outward-focused and assumes that the mind is innately capable of error and that concepts are imperfectly derived from instances in the world, as I have memorably and tiresomely phrased it.
And Platonism is the world is that which exists largely within your own mind and before you were born, and what we experience in the perceptual realm is a dim after-effect or an inferior copy, a degraded copy of what actually has occurred for us within our own minds before birth and in the perfect world of forms.
Well, to me, what does that mean?
Well, that means that I mean, the babies don't notice much about the world early on in their life.
Their eyesight is very poor.
Their depth perception is very poor.
They simply don't notice much about the world out there.
And so, if something went awry with a baby very early on, If the baby found the world to be alarming or frightening or horrible or something like that, then the baby might recoil from exploring the world.
And if the baby recoiled from exploring the world, then the baby would turn to imagination, right?
I mean, the mind is like a river.
You damn it, one, and it just spills over somewhere else, right?
If the baby is not able to explore the world in a pragmatic and practical way and to explore objects and so on, but is restrained either in, you know, the crippling swaddling that De Maas argues and I think with some good proof was consistent and constant throughout most of human history.
If the baby is prevented from exploring the world or is not able to explore the world, Then it would seem to me quite logical and quite likely that the intellectual capacities or the developmental capacities that normally would be poured into an exploration of a rational and empirical world would instead be turned inwards, into self-regard, into imagination, into internal shapes, into dreams, into introspection, although that's an odd word to use with a baby.
I think you know what it is that I mean.
If you're in an isolation tank, Your imagination goes completely vivid and takes over and becomes extraordinarily powerful.
And the degree to which we find ourselves bereft of external stimuli or internal stimuli will increase.
And what does that mean?
Well, it means that wouldn't it sort of make sense that you would view the world as primarily driven by mind and not empiricism if you weren't allowed or if you were punished for or for some reason you couldn't Explore the world around you.
That you would not have the fundamental basis, and I don't know whether I'm talking cognitively or emotionally, and again, this is all just rank speculation, but you wouldn't have that empirical love of the world.
You would have a primacy of consciousness, not a primacy of empiricism.
You think of the stereotype, the sickly boys, the Victorian boys, you know, I had the consumption and I sat in my bed and I made up stories and then these people, I think Robert Louis Stevenson was one, to become these amazingly With great fertile imaginations and so on that people who have these kinds of sickly childhoods where they can't go out and explore the world, well, their inner world becomes stronger.
And to me, the difference between Aristotelianism and Platonism is the difference between religion and Science, right?
In religion, the primacy of thought is the ultimate arbiter of truth, right?
This is the ontological proof of God.
We can think of God, therefore God must be real.
It's the primacy of thought. But in science and in Aristotelianism, it's the primacy of empiricism, of reason and evidence that counts.
And that really, I think, would only occur when someone has had the capacity to explore the world And become tomboyish in that way.
Or to go in another step, and I'm not saying these are all the steps, but in another step, what about the development of empathy, right?
At 12 to 16 to 18 months of age.
But empathy occurs so early on, so early on.
So one of the fascinating things that occurs is when you stick your tongue out at a newborn, a newborn will stick her tongue out back at you, which is a remarkable thing.
Because a newborn has never seen a face and never seen a tongue.
They've been stuck in the dank womb forever, right?
So... How do they know what a tongue is?
And how do they know that it's your tongue and to stick their tongue back out?
I mean, it's mind-blowing what babies and children can do, let alone how quickly they grow, right?
A baby's brain has so many neural connections, it simply blows your mind.
And what happens as an adult is we whittle them down, right?
Like babies are born knowing all forms of language and can distinguish just about every sound in every language.
And then from 6 to 12 months, that whittles down to their specific language.
So, I mean, we're all born geniuses and philosophers, really.
Babies can solve problems that philosophers have spent a long time trying and failing to solve, at least until, I think, our conversation came along in some small areas and some not so small.
If the child is not mirrored, has empathy, right?
Because there's value in the world and there's value in people.
All right, so Isabella loves to explore the world and Isabella enjoys interacting with Christian and myself, right?
When we come down and big smiles and she crawls over to us and wants to climb up and so on.
Is it because she has empathy for us?
Well, no, of course not. She only has empathy for herself.
We are a source of pleasure. To her, and so she wants to spend time with us, right?
She wants to spend time with the pleasure we...
She wants to experience the pleasure we provide, and really want to spend time with us, if that makes any sense.
But that will occur, right?
So there's a little snippet in a book that I'm reading where this woman is writing, and she's one of the writers of the book, this woman who's got a PhD in...
I think it's developmental psychology, I think.
And she says that she had one of these days where she thought she was a bad researcher because one of her papers got rejected by it.
A newspaper. And she thought she was a bad teacher because a student agreed with her.
And she thought she was a bad mother because she came home and hadn't defrosted the chicken for dinner, right?
So she sat on the couch and she burst into tears.
And her two-year-old went and got a box of Kleenexes and started putting Kleenexes on Mommy, randomly, right?
Because she's crying.
So she must be in pain, and so the thing to do is to give her band-aids, because that's what you do when somebody's hurt, right?
And that's a kind of empathy. Is it exactly the same as empathy if we understand it?
Who knows? I certainly don't.
Maybe somebody does. But it's certainly a kind of empathy, and that must come because somebody, his mother, tenderly gave him band-aids when he was unwell.
And if you don't get that, or if you're attacked, like when you're in pain, if you're mocked or humiliated or even further attacked, or if the source of your pain, through violence or yelling or whatever, if the source of your pain is your caregiver, then it would seem to me that an anti-value world would be your result, emotionally and almost developmentally, almost cognitively.
So if that which should be nurtured is attacked in you, pain or vulnerability or whatever, that which should be supported is humiliated, then wouldn't you just sort of inevitably end up in this anti-value universe?
Because the signals that you're giving which would require parental support or which would Invite parental support or instead getting parental or caregiver attack, you would end up with an anti- so that that which should help is hurting, right?
This is anti-value, not no value, as Iraq has no value, but anti-value, as I talk about in the nihilism podcast and video.
Wouldn't that occur?
And, you know, you could go on and on.
Where does post-modernism break down?
Where do people have this idea that Everything is equal.
It's more sophisticated than the anti-value trauma of base nihilism, in my opinion.
But where does it fall on the continuum?
Well, I think it's after the development of language.
And I think it would occur in families where conflict is considered bad.
Conflict is considered bad.
Because that's really what postmodernism is.
Postmodernism is this middle child classical syndrome of trying to keep the peacemaker, the peacemaker, trying to keep peace within the family and warring factions and so on.
All strong opinions are bad.
The middle of the road is good.
Anybody who's an absolutist is crazy.
It's a primitive stage of development.
Anybody who's certain about anything is bound to be aggressive and abusive.
And it's a middle child with warring siblings or warring parents trying to keep the peace.
At least this would be my silly amateur theory.
So where does postmodernism fit?
Well, a hostility towards certainty can only come from warring, irrational, bigoted absolutes within a family and a desire to keep the peace at any cost, to dilute any kind of, you know, let's agree to disagree, let's just dilute it, because the conflicts are unresolvable, and therefore we must simply agree to disagree, and that's, to me, a child stuck between warring, opposing, bigoted personalities and With irrational absolutes who then views all certainty as destructive.
Because what happens is there's this emotional recoiling.
There's this emotional recoiling that occurs in these realms.
And this is something that we see over and over again when we talk philosophy with people.
Because we say, well, we can't reason people out of beliefs that they have not been reasoned into.
But that's a fascinating question.
It's been at the core of what I've been working on for all these years.
Well, if you can't reason someone out of a belief that he has not been reasoned into, the question then is, well, how the hell did he get that belief at all?
Right? It can't be just cultural because within each culture there's a wide variety of facets.
It's a scintillating diamond.
It's a disco ball of refracted and reflected different opinions and perspectives.
There's not culture that produces a nihilist and a relativist and an absolutist and a racist and a non-racist and, you know, a religious and an agnostic and an atheist and a this.
It's not culture that produces all of these.
Certainly, the less brutal the culture is, the more fragments there seem to occur or appear within society.
But how is it possible that all of these different perspectives are formed within society?
It can't be through rational argument because then people would be more amenable to reason.
It has to be that Something, and this is a general theory that I've read in psychologists or psychological texts, which is that trauma, unprocessed trauma, arrests development,
right? So if you had a big trauma, your mom died and no one talked to you about it, and you weren't allowed to grieve when you were 11, then part of you gets stuck at the age of 11, and you can sort of Grow in a way, sort of willfully and somewhat artificially, but there's a core part of you that's going to be stuck until you sort of go back and process that, you know, that which was unprocessed or that which was not allowed to be processed in whatever trauma.
And, you know, even in healthy families, there are traumas.
First, learn about death, right?
I mean, are you allowed to talk about it?
Eight or nine, any goldfish dies, and you get that he's not coming back.
Right? So... To me, again, as a layperson, I generally understand that it's a generally accepted thesis in the psychological community that, you know, think of post-traumatic stress disorder.
You know, people can't move on.
They have repetitions of the trauma until they work through the fear and the anxiety and the pain associated with it.
That if you have a trauma that remains unprocessed, unintegrated into the personality, Then you get emotionally and therefore to some degree at least cognitively stuck at the age where the trauma occurred.
Now, if that is the case, if that is the case, I think it is, but what do you care about what I think, right?
But I think it is. If that is the case, then it goes a long way to me towards explaining why people have these hardened, irrational, traumatized Opinions that they're absolutely certain of,
that they get angry and irritated and sometimes outright hostile when they're confronted with the illogic, when they simply refuse to process the illogic of their position, whether they're nihilists or relativists or theists or whatever,
agnostics. Well, it has to have something to do with emotional trauma, and it has to have something to do With particular stages in cognitive development, right? It has to.
Again, it has to doesn't prove it, but why it has to is because we do see particular patterns of brain development.
Researchers see particular patterns of brain development and particular stages of brain development.
We know that trauma arrests emotional and cognitive development in the moment of trauma, right?
You're stuck like a flying amber.
And that doesn't mean that you can't sort of fake your way past it, but you don't really get past it, right?
You may self-medicate, you may end up, you know, with broad patterns of dysfunction rather than specific areas of dysfunction, you know, like bad relationships rather than something specific.
And there's not an infinite number of philosophical perspectives.
It's not a big blend.
It tends to be very, very specific.
It tends to be very, very specific.
So you may have outgrown the animistic phase of development where children can't really distinguish between living and non-living things, which is, I think, where religion comes from.
You may have fell past that.
But not to real empiricism and therefore you get stuck in agnosticism, right?
So there are particular patterns of brain development that correspond, if interrupted, if frozen in time, if retarded, that do correspond to particular philosophical positions to some degree.
And if it is emotional trauma, Or a lack of development, emotional and cognitive development, that gets people stuck in particular phases in the cognitive development, which translate to these philosophical positions, then we would fully expect that if the illogic of those positions were confronted,
that emotional hostility would that emotional hostility would result.
That's a damn long sentence.
I hope it makes some kind of sense.
I'll try it once more.
I'll drop my satisfaction than yours.
Thanks for your patience.
Because there are pretty specific philosophical positions that you run into again and again, and they correspond quite well to particular patterns of brain development, If it's true that people get stuck in these positions and then they turn philosophical as a way of attempting to justify the emotional trauma that they're stuck in, then we would expect that people who have certainty about their positions,
those positions being irrational, when confronted those positions being irrational, when confronted with the irrationality of those positions, that they would become hostile and tense and weird.
Why? Because there is a trauma at the bottom, right?
Which is what we've talked about a number of times.
And, you know, as a guy who loves philosophy, it's, to me, completely irresponsible to not examine why people don't listen to it, right?
Why people are so hostile to basic reason.
It makes no sense.
It makes no sense because everybody has all these reasons for what they believe.
And to me, it's completely irresponsible if you're into philosophy.
It's completely irresponsible to say, well, I have the answers.
I have some great answers. But, you know, people are just too stupid to listen.
That can't be it. There has to be some other reason.
There's no point developing a cure if no one's going to take it.
So that's why I continue to examine these things and I hope that these ruminations are some help to you.
If you are interested in this, I would be happy to put together something more Thank you.
Thank you so much for listening, for donating, for supporting, for subscribing, for participating, for asking questions, for spreading the word.
I really, really, really do appreciate it.
And may I be so bold as to say, the future appreciates it as well.
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