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July 14, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
51:00
The Philosophical Baby | Dr. Alison Gopnik and Stefan Molyneux
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Well, thank you so much for taking the time.
I'm speaking with Dr.
Alison Gopnik, a renowned, dare I say, world-famous developmental psychologist who has written a book, The Philosophical Baby, and has participated in The Scientist in the Crib, another absolutely fascinating, fascinating book about the development of consciousness all the way from initial percepts through to ethical reasoning, which occurs at a surprisingly early age, at least more surprising than I would have thought.
And so, Dr.
Gopnik, I guess... One thing I found, well, one of the many things I found very interesting in your book was self-knowledge as a discipline goes all the way back through the pre-Socratics and psychology as a discipline has been around for, you could argue, a century and a half or so.
And yet it seems that it's only been very recently that the study of babies and infants has really been taken on as a project.
But most sciences start with the beginning of things.
I mean, physics and biology start with the origins of the universe and the origins of the species.
But it seems to have taken an enormous amount of time for psychology to focus on the start of consciousness, the beginning of life.
And I was wondering if you could share some thoughts as to why you think that might have been the case.
Well, I think there's a number of reasons, but I think a sort of straightforward reason is that if you look, just look cursorily at babies and young children, which is what most philosophers and psychologists were doing, it doesn't look as if there's very much that's going on there.
So if you just take a quick look at babies, after all, they don't talk, and even preschoolers, although they'll talk to you, say things that sound like they're beautiful stream of consciousness poetry, but not indicating that there's very much going on in there.
Now I think that people who actually spent time with babies and young children, mainly the caregivers who took care of them, always thought that there was more going on.
But of course most of the philosophers and psychologists were not those people who were looking after babies.
So it was only really in the last 30 years or so when we discovered techniques for asking babies what they think in their language instead of our language that we really started to understand just how much was going on.
And I think there's another aspect to it, which is that, of course, most of the people who were doing that work for all those years were men, and most of them actually were childless men.
And I think even independently of the fact that you can't see too much with babies cursorily, I think there was a sort of sense that babies and children were just not the sort of thing that people took very seriously.
They were women's stuff.
There was a period when, for example, one of my colleagues who wanted to I studied developmental psychology.
I had to go to a home economics program.
Right. Well, it's been my real privilege too.
My daughter is almost a year old and I've spent most of the year with her full time.
So that's been a real privilege and it's been quite eye-opening for me as a thinker and quite humbling to realize just how much is going on before you and I can remember and certainly before most of the people that you're talking about would have really been able to appreciate it.
I think it's fascinating to the degree and the implications just radiate outwards for me from the work that you and other developmental psychologists talk about in terms of the extension of personhood.
This is a historical pattern that is hard to miss.
The progress of the species morally is around the extension of personhood, you know, first to at least male slaves and then to women and then to children and now further to infants.
Do you think that that is part of what you're doing?
Because it seems hard to avoid the conclusion that babies are people rather than, as you say, crying carrots.
It's a wonderful phrase that you use in the book.
Well, I think that's certainly part of it.
So, as we started to pay more attention to babies and, as I say, And again, to be fair to the psychologists and philosophers, until we actually had some scientific tools for really figuring out what was going on in babies' minds, even if we felt sort of intuitively that we would treat them as persons, even as caregivers, we couldn't really demonstrate that scientifically.
And the new scientific tools that we've gotten have actually shown empirically.
Just how much is going on.
Although it is sort of horrifying to realize, for instance, that at one point they did operations on their young babies without anesthesia because they thought that those babies were too young to actually feel pain.
So I do think that there's a moral, I think there's a moral dimension to this, to our extension of personhood.
But I think the core of it has to do with just scientifically discovering how much How much is actually going on?
I think there's also a kind of natural tendency when we're thinking about both children and non-human animals to still, even in the age of Darwin, to act as if there's a kind of great chain of being where, you know, Adult human philosophers, male philosophers are at the very depths.
Somehow, oddly enough, the guys who are writing the books are sort of at the very pinnacle and then all these other critters are just sort of somehow missing the things that lead to this pinnacle of consciousness.
But, of course, if you're thinking about it from an evolutionary point of view, That doesn't make much sense.
Why would we make children be defective adults?
So when you start thinking about it from that perspective, you start thinking, well, childhood and children must have their own function.
And when we do the science, it turns out that really a better way of thinking about it, rather than thinking about babies and children as being sort of deficient adults, is to think that they're really in some ways very different creatures doing different kinds of things.
And there are some things that they're actually better at than we are.
Yeah, you've mentioned in the book that in many ways babies appear to be more conscious than we are, which I found very intriguing.
I wonder if you could expand upon that a little.
Right. So, you know, again, the conventional wisdom, which I think is partly just this kind of great chain of being impulse, is to say, well, consciousness must be something that develops, and we must have more of it than non-human animals do, and grown-ups must have more of it than babies do.
And, of course, part of the problem is that it depends a lot on what it is that you think consciousness is.
And one of the problems in consciousness studies is, again, that we know for sure that we, i.e., the person who's writing the book, is conscious.
And there's lots of things that go together for the person who's writing the book.
As adults, we have consciousness in the sense of our vivid awareness of the world around us.
We also have the kind of self-consciousness that involves our reflective Our ability to see ourselves as agents or subjects.
And we have a kind of sense of consciousness being extended in time.
So we think that our self existed in the past and will exist in the future.
So for us adults, all those things are kind of glommed together in our sense of what our conscious experience is like.
And sending children, I think, is very useful philosophically because it makes you realize that those things might come apart.
For example, if you look at the kind of adult consciousness that's just our vivid awareness of the world around us, it turns out that we actually know something about the physiological basis for that kind of consciousness.
So, in adults, we get that kind of vivid consciousness of the world around us when we attend to something.
So, if I'm paying attention to something, that part of the world becomes extremely vivid, and in fact, other parts of the world around that Get shut down.
So there's this phenomenon that you might have know about or talked about called inattentional blindness, which is that if we're not paying attention to something as adults, we literally stop seeing it.
There's a fantastic set of experiments that Dan Simons has done.
You can see them on the web.
Dan Simons at Illinois has done where For instance, you can give grown-ups a video of a bunch of people throwing a ball in a room and tell them, all right, I want you to count the number of times that the ball gets thrown, which is kind of a hard thing to do, so you have to focus on the ball.
And in the middle of this video, a guy in a gorilla suit walks through the video and stands right there smack in the middle of the video and beats his chest and walks off.
And most people, when they see that, will not see the gorilla.
They're so focused on trying to do the attentive counting that they literally just don't see the other things that are going on around them.
And we know something about the brain basis of this.
So when you pay attention to something, that part of your brain becomes more flexible and plastic and better at processing information.
There's even chemical changes where Acetylcholine gets, as it were, squirted onto that part of your brain.
Acetylcholine is, sad to say, the chemical that's in cigarettes that make cigarettes make you more focused and aware.
And then other chemicals are squirted around that actually inhibit neural activity in other parts of the brain.
So we actually have a pretty nice physiological story about how that kind of vivid attention-based consciousness works in adults.
And we know that in adults it's very much under our conscious control, so I can just decide, alright, here's what I'm going to pay attention to.
I pay attention to that, that becomes vivid, that part of my brain starts working better, and I shut down other things.
Alright, sorry, that's a long story, but that's kind of a nice fit between what we know from function and neuroscience and the phenomenology of consciousness.
Now let's think about babies for a minute.
Well, babies have the same kind of attention setup that we do, but there's some important differences in the way their attention works.
So rather than being focused on just one thing, babies' attention seems to be much more widespread.
So babies will pay attention to anything out in the external world that's informative or startling or novel.
And rather than being under conscious, top-down kind of control, Babies' attention seems to be much more under the control of the external world.
So it's what psychologists call exogenous rather than endogenous.
It's being controlled by all the things that you're seeing out there in the world.
And we know that even chemically, babies have extremely high levels of these cholinergic transmitters, but the inhibitory transmitters haven't come online yet.
So if you put all that together, the picture you get is A picture not of babies being unconscious, but babies being in some ways conscious of more that's going on around them than adults are.
When we talk about babies or preschoolers being bad at paying attention, what we really mean is that they're bad at not paying attention.
So they're bad at editing out, distracting things that are going on in the world and just paying attention to the things that are important.
So when you've got all that together, it seems as if one way of thinking about it is that whereas the adult consciousness is like a kind of spotlight, this is a metaphor that lots of people have used, that we consciously shine on the parts of the world that we want to know about, baby consciousness is like a kind of lantern that's going out and illuminating the entire world at once.
So from that perspective at least, babies turn out to actually be More conscious than we are.
And the funny thing is I had thought about this and worked out some of these arguments and done some of the research about infant attention and I was giving a talk and an anesthesiologist in the room said, Well, maybe that explains why they need more anesthesia.
And it turns out that you actually need more anesthesia relative to body weight to knock out an 18-month-old than anybody else.
So if you think that the simplest definition of consciousness is it's that stuff that disappears when you take an anesthetic, that's another reason for thinking that babies might actually be more conscious than adults.
And so I think I understand the moral of the story is that if only we could get babies to take up smoking, they would be a lot more like adults.
I think that's the gist of what you're saying.
Well, actually, it's interesting because caffeine is actually an antagonist to those inhibitory transmitters.
So in other words, probably closer is when you have caffeine, your attention gets opened up.
Acetylcholine kind of helps to focus in your attention.
Caffeine actually gets rid of the inhibition, so caffeine sort of makes your brain a little more like a baby's brain.
So I say, if you want to think about what it's like to be a baby, if you think also about what it's like, say, when you're traveling to a new place and suddenly you're in the position a baby is.
Everything is new. You're learning about everything it wants.
Everything that's coming in is novel and unexpected.
And I think what happens in those circumstances is actually not that your consciousness contracts or disappears, Your self-consciousness and your ability to go out and function may take a beating, but the vividness of the world around you really becomes intense.
So you get back home and those three days in Paris are much more intense and consciousness-filled, as it were, than those Months of zombie, you know, faculty meetings back home.
So I think that kind of gets you into that, as an adult, can get you into that kind of lantern state.
So one of the things I say is you want to know, and there are other things like hunting, for example, I am told, not having ever hunted, has some of the same effects, and being in love has some of the same effects, when suddenly everything becomes vivid and fresh.
So I think that if you want to know what it's like to be a baby, it's like Right, and of course it's funny to think that that state of mind, which would be so desirous, we would think of as being a broken adult, when of course we may think of ourselves as broken babies for not having that experience more often.
I think another thing that I found really fascinating in your books, both of the books, the one that you wrote or the other that you co-wrote, is the degree to which science as a discipline, as a pursuit, as an art form that in a sense is objective and empirical, is fueled by the skills that babies have.
And it seems to me quite a lovely thing to think that the capacities of babies have handed a great gift to to science and in return in a sense science is handing a great gift of personhood back to babies and I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about the counterfactual processing and the probability processing that seems to be very close to science and I would also say entrepreneurship in the business world but that may be arguable if you could talk a little bit more about that I would be quite fascinated to hear more right so one of the big One of the biggest philosophical problems always has been how is it that we could possibly know as much as we do about the world around us?
So all that actually reaches us from the world are a few vibrations of air, our eardrums and photons hitting the back of our retina, and yet all of us can learn about an abstract, organized world, including a world that includes, you know, not just people and thoughts and Words, but a world that includes quarks and leptons and distant planets and so on.
How is that possible?
And science, of course, has always been one of the best examples of how we can take evidence and find out about the world around us.
But from a company's point of view, science is rather puzzling because we've only been doing it for 500 years or so.
So why would we have this Cognitive capacity to go out and find out about leptons.
We've only been using it for 500 years.
And what's happened is over the past 30 years, people have been trying to solve the parallel problem for children.
How is it that children can learn so much as they do?
And it turns out that there's actually a lot of similarities between what the children are doing and what the scientists are doing.
This started out back in the 80s and 90s.
Arguing for what I've called the theory theory, the idea that children are developing intuitive theories of the world, much like scientific theories, abstract causal representations of the world around them.
And that's become almost commonplace in developmental psychology, that children are developing theories of biology and physics and psychology.
But of course the real question is, what would be the kind of learning mechanisms that would enable you to develop so much?
So to begin with, when we went to the philosophers of science and asked them, all right, well, we think babies are learning like scientists.
How do scientists learn?
They said, gee, we do. Maybe they learn like babies.
But in the past 10 years or so, there's been really exciting work, actually originally coming out of the philosophy of science, trying to characterize mathematically how is it that anyone initially thinking about science and scientists Could learn about the world and then that was translated into working computer science trying to design artificial machine learning systems that could learn about the world in the same sort of way that scientists do.
And what we've been doing over the past 10 years is showing that in fact these kinds of fairly sophisticated mathematical kinds of induction and inference are there even in very young children and babies.
So let me be a little more specific about some of the kinds of things that we found.
It turns out that even very young babies, for instance, can analyze statistics.
Now, if you've ever, you know, either taken or especially taught an introductory statistics course, you know that even grown-ups have a very hard time doing that consciously.
But unconsciously, implicitly, even very young babies, even one-year-olds seem to be doing this.
And not only are they processing statistics, but they're actually using statistical patterns to draw conclusions about what's going on in the world around them.
So let me give you just one example.
So how could we ever tell this?
Well, here's one example of a recent experiment that my colleague Fei Xu did.
What she did was show babies boxes of mixed up ping-pong balls.
So say an 80% white and 20% red ping pong box full of ping pong balls.
And then she would show the baby an experimenter taking a sample from that box.
And either the experimenter took a representative sample, like what you'd expect from a random sample, say four white and one red, or else they took an unrepresentative sample, like four red and one white.
And what she discovered was that the babies looked longer when the experimenter picked out the four red and one white.
They paid more attention to that than if they looked at the four white and one red.
So the babies seemed to be sensitive to the fact that this sample was an unexpected sample from this population, kind of like a scientist going out and saying, hey, wait a minute, there's only less than 0.05 probability that this happened at random.
On top of that, in an experiment that they've just finished, she did the same experiment, but now the baby saw the experimenter.
So after this sampling had happened, the experimenter gave the baby a red ball and a white ball and put out her hand and said, can you give me one?
Now, in the random case, the baby doesn't have any information about what the person wants.
But when she had picked out the non-random sample, say four red and one white from a mostly white box, the children would give her a red ball.
So in other words, the children seem to have seen this unusual event and then said, hmm, let me see if I can think of an explanation for this.
Well, maybe she likes red balls.
Which is interesting because it's statistics and value as well.
Exactly. So they're not just...
Kind of dumbly putting together statistical patterns.
They're using those statistical patterns to infer something about something very deep, which is people want things and even people might want something different from what I want.
And the more rare it is, the more people might want it if they're asking for it.
Exactly, exactly. So the children are not just detecting statistics, although it's one thing they're doing, but they're also What we really think they're doing, again like scientists, is trying to make causal sense out of those statistical patterns.
Use those statistical patterns to make a causal hypothesis that makes sense.
And we've shown this with somewhat older children, with three and four year olds.
We have a machine called the Blickit detector.
It's a machine that lights up and plays music when you put things on it.
And the children see various kinds of contingency patterns between the detectors and the machine.
And then they have to figure out the causal structure of the machine, how the machine works.
And again, even two and a half year olds are extremely good at taking those patterns and using them to figure out causal structure, which is exactly, precisely the thing that scientists do.
Moreover, one of the big advantages of picking out causal structure in particular, as opposed to Sage's statistical structure, is that when you have a causal understanding of the world, That supports what false risk call counterfactuals.
That is not just reasoning about what did happen, but what could have happened.
And I increasingly think that that's really the most important human capacity.
Not just the ability to make predictions, which is important, but the ability to say, here's a way the world could be different from the way that it actually is.
And for us, importantly, to go out and actually make the world different.
So I think there's a very important kind of I'm a small point here, which is that often when you look at scientists talking about human nature, they end up with this very sort of reductive determinist picture, the sort of evolutionary psychology picture where we're stuck back in the capacities we had in the police decene and we can't really escape from that.
And I think one of the nice things that comes out of the developmental work is that in fact these capacities for change, these capacities for altering what we do and being different from the way we are, Those seem to be really fundamental in place from the time we're very young indeed.
Right, right.
Yeah, and I mean, one of the things that I've talked about in my show is a uniquely human capacity is the ability to compare perceptual information to an ideal, to a standard called, you know, truth or science or logic or whatever, and that seems to be quite unique.
And it does seem to be showing up in the work that you and others are doing very early on where the perceptual scattering of ping-pong balls can be compared to an ideal standard called Well, this isn't in accordance with what randomized theory would predict.
I mean, of course, that's not what the baby's actually thinking, but there's an instinct which is comparing what is happening perceptually to some sort of ideal standard that is showing up, to me at least, shockingly early in children, in sort of nine months or sometimes even earlier.
Well, you can see that we get normative and moral reasoning.
One of the things that we're doing right now in my lab is trying to apply some of these ideas that started out Just thinking about scientific reasoning or causal reasoning and trying to apply some of those to cases of normative reasoning or moral reasoning.
And again, even children as young as two and a half already seem to be not just saying here's how the world is or how people are, but something about here's what's right and here's what's wrong.
Here's how people should be.
And even if you think about A little experiment with the ping pong balls.
One thing that's interesting about it is that the kids can make the infants.
Another thing that's interesting is they think, well, if that's what she wants, then I guess that's what I should give her.
Right, right, right.
Yeah, and I think the distinction that children and really toddlers, if not babies, have between Social rules or culture and moral rules or ethics, I think, is really, really fascinating that they can determine that nap time, while, you know, can be a rule, but it's not moral, whereas hurting another person or another child is a moral rule that's more universal.
And I wonder if you could just mention the experiments that teased out that rather startling observation.
Right. So, for children as young as two and a half, again, for some...
The conventional wisdom about those children was that they were amoral.
So in addition to planting children by saying that they were irrational and pre-causal and egocentric, the conventional wisdom was that they were not moral either.
And even Piaget, of course, was the great founder of developmental psychology, thought that children's notion of morality didn't really become Like adult versions until, you know, adolescence or even beyond.
But in fact, if you look at even very young children, you can ask them to differentiate between just social conventions and cases of harm.
So you can take a child and you can say, okay, look, here's the daycare and the rule in the daycare is that you, you know, can't drop your clothes in the cubby.
And the rule in the daycare is also that you can't hit other kids.
Now, suppose that everyone in the daycare, the teachers said, well, it's okay to drop your clothes in the cubby, would it be okay?
And suppose they said it's okay to hit other kids, would it be okay?
And even the very young children already seem to think that it would be okay to change the social conventional rule, but it would not be okay to change the rule about harm.
And we think that that's probably due to the fact that the children are very sensitive to, say, emotion and distress from the time they're very young, even sort of physiologically.
So we think that the sort of, at least what for many people is the kind of core of morality, the golden rule, do unto others as you would have others do unto you.
There's a kind of fundamental basis for that in the fact that even the youngest babies already are reading the emotional expressions of other people and mapping Those emotional expressions onto their own emotional expressions.
So it seems that babies really are sort of feeling your pain and when they feel your pain they think that that pain shouldn't be inflicted.
And it is a startling thing as a parent and also as a reader of your works to realize that we can aspire to babyhood.
I mean that there are some ways in which we wish we could be as moral as babies are in terms of the open empathy for instance that your son displayed while Giving you a band-aid when you were upset about a day.
I've also noticed, of course, that babies are staggeringly patient.
I mean, as my daughter is learning to walk, she experiences more setbacks in a day of walking than I do in six months of trying to do anything that I do, and yet is infinitely more patient and shows almost no levels of frustration.
So, aspiring to babyhood, I think, would be the great title for your next book.
That we could dream of being that comfortable with failure, that empathetic, that warm, that open, that conscious of the newness of things, which so often we forget.
I think it's in a way something to aspire to.
And you're right, it's quite slanderous the way that babies have been depicted, I suppose, in most literature prior to this sort of new revolution.
Well, I think one of the things that comes out...
Again, thinking about it even from an evolutionary perspective, is that there's a kind of trade-off between the kinds of things that babies are good at and the kinds of things that adults are good at.
So the kind of skills that we see in babies and young children, these incredible capacities for learning, for imagination, for flexibility, for possibility, for empathy, There's a kind of trade-off between, I think, those things and then the things that we're really good at as adults, which are things like being able to plan and act and be swift and effective and take care of things.
And to be fair to the grown-ups, part of the reason why babies can be so open and flexible and patient and persistent and learn so much is because They don't have to worry about, you know, the paychecks and then where the next meal is coming from.
That's getting taken care of by us.
That's actually what I most aspire to, but sorry, go on.
Yeah, that's right. Well, occasionally we scientists kind of get away with that extended babyhood of having someone else take care of us while we just have fun going down and exploring and learning, or I wish, anyway.
But I think that it's one of the, again, one of the unsung glories of caregiving.
One of the reasons why I think it's actually one of the most profound and satisfying things that people can do is because it's one of the few activities that on the one hand is this profoundly grown-up activity, in some ways the most grown-up, the one that involves the most planning and care and work and An organization and taking care, I mean, the one that involves the most profound kind of care, really.
But on the other hand, it also means that because you're hanging out with babies, you get to actually experience some of this very childlike blissful openness and flexibility and sensitivity to the world.
So, you know, the five blocks that you have to take to get to the 7-Eleven.
Right. You walk those five blocks with a two-year-old and you suddenly realize, oh my goodness, that's These blocks are full of fascinating, wonderful things.
There are dogs and there are pizza fliers and there are geeks that swing and you can really do get a kind of re-enchantment of the world just in the course of doing this very grown-up thing of taking care of children.
Right, right. Just on a slightly different note, I'm not sure when it was recorded, but I watched an interview or I guess a roundtable discussion that you participated in with two other professionals on the Charlie Rose show.
and a lot of it focused around the importance of years zero to three.
And it seemed to me, you know, again, just as an amateur outsider, it seemed to me that there was quite a lot of intensity in the conversation that had a little bit more to do with, well, a little less to do with abstract scientific results and a little bit more to do with personal stuff.
And the degree to which...
The emphasis is put upon sort of years zero to three.
And there's something you mentioned in the book about children who are able to defer eating cookies when told not to actually do better as teenagers in SAT scores and college admissions and so on.
And of course, when we start talking about years zero to three and the effect that that has on long-term brain development, we do sort of get a bit of the chill hand of determinism starting to sort of creep its way up.
And we have this ambivalence.
Like when I read about this stuff, I'm like, Yay!
A lot of what I don't like about myself is explained by genetics and environment.
And then it's like, oh, damn.
And a lot of stuff I do like about myself.
We have this ambivalence around that which is sort of set in stone by environment and genetics.
And at the same time, we do want to take pride in what we do and take some ownership for our lives.
And I was just wondering, I know that you talk about that in the latter part of the book, where your thoughts are on this challenge of influence, which is important to change, versus determinism, which we sort of We innately resist, whether it's right or wrong, we innately resist that.
Right. Well, I think one of the things that we've discovered is that there's this constant interaction between genetics and temperament of children and their behavior and the way that adults, the way that they're interacting with adults and the environment around them.
So even, you know, the very hard-nosed genetics work that's coming out is showing that What you're talking about with genetic variation, for instance, is, say, sensitivity to environmental conditions rather than any particular outcome.
So some kinds of genetic, for instance, seem to make people more vulnerable to things like substance abuse or depression, but those things also depend on what actually happens out in the environment.
So there's this constant dance going back and forth, literally from the time babies are born, between what the babies are like, what the caregivers are like, How the caregivers shape and affect the babies, how the babies affect and shape the caregivers.
So, you know, even within the same family, two different children can literally have different parents because the parents are interacting with those children in different ways.
So I suppose the good news is that the process is so complex that nobody has to get blamed.
And also, I think it's important that we have this picture Now, this process of creating counterfactuals, of making the world rather than just detecting or being shaped by the world, that that's a process that's going on from the time that babies are very young, indeed, really from the time children are infants.
They're creating their world as much as they're being shaped by the world.
Right, right. Yeah, I mean, I'm concerned about having a second child because, you know, I think I'm a good parent now and you never know.
Some child, as you say, you have this Mediterranean child and this Anglo-Saxon child.
It really does depend. And Dr.
Shankar, when we chatted as well, was talking about how his son was more of a challenge for him to parent than his daughter.
And sometimes it does seem to fall along gender divides, but I think it's...
It's so easy for us to think of sort of trickle-down parenting that we are on top and we are managing and so on without recognizing that babies in many ways are a mirror of both our capacities and our limitations and that it is a relationship.
It is not fundamentally a managerial authoritative relationship.
It's not hierarchical, but it's mutual.
And I think that the work of extending personhood to babies really, really helps people to remember that it should be a relationship and not a sort of authoritarian environment.
Well, one of the things that I think I'm going to be writing about, I write about a little bit at the end of this book, and I'm going to write about more, I think, in the next book, is there's a kind of strange thing that's happened historically, which is that, you know, for most of history, most people were caregiving a lot of the time, if not most of the time. So, for instance, if you've got, you know, a big, think about a village with big families.
If you weren't taking care of your own child, you were taking care of Your younger brothers and sisters when you were young and you were taking care of cousins and you were being taken care of by lots of different adults.
So I think caregiving is a very fundamental part of human nature.
In some ways, since that long period of immaturity seems to be one of our most characteristic evolutionary developments, the most fundamental part of human nature.
Now what's happened, which is strange now, is that because we no longer have big families, we have more mobility, There are many people who just don't experience caregiving at all until they have their own child.
And the result is that our model for caregiving becomes a model of other things that we do do a lot, like going to school or going to work.
And I think it's just a terrible model for what caregiving is about.
So, you know, when we work, we set up goals and we say here's what it is that we want to accomplish and here's how we're going to accomplish it.
And that's just not what caregiving is about.
Caregiving is not about.
It's shaping your child in a particular way.
I say sometimes, imagine if you got married and you said, oh, okay, I want to read a bunch of husbanding books to turn my husband into a better person after the end of 10 years.
That would be creepy and awful.
Make sure that my husband goes to Harvard after 10 years.
But we do have this weird parenting industry.
That sort of has the same structure, that somehow the point of having children is to shape them so that they'll come out the way that you want, which aside from being a completely self-defeating exercise, is also a sort of morally dubious exercise.
The great, fascinating, paradoxically, philosophically paradoxical thing about caregiving is that we have the goal of creating a human being who can have goals that are totally different from our goals.
We want our children to Be different from us.
We want our children to have the capacity to, for instance, completely fail and screw up.
It's a very, very, very peculiar kind of enterprise to be engaged in and yet one that's really, really profoundly human.
There was an article recently which you might want to check out.
I think it was on the Time website around the demise of helicopter parenting, this sort of hovering over-involved parent who doesn't like the child to be exposed to risk or failure or disappointment.
I think that's sort of relevant to what it is that you're talking about.
I think, certainly from my experience, I worked in a daycare when I was younger and as a parent.
What the child most wants is not stimulation or management, but she wants me and she wants my wife.
She wants us to interact with her, to be intimate with her, to be curious, to share.
That, I think, is what she most wants, and that is really not a managerial exercise at all.
It's a get down in the mud box and play, so to speak.
Yeah, I think that's right, and I think if we can get But I think it is interesting because it is just this relationship which is so unlike any other relationship that we engage in.
You know, one of the things I say is that I think that I take good care of my partner, but what that comes down to is I, you know, come home and I spend half an hour cooking dinner and then, you know, an hour or two sitting around and talking.
If you did that degree of care for a baby, you would be a hideous abusive monster.
So the very minimum care, I mean literally the minimum, in the sense the amount that is necessary to keep the baby alive, is such an enormous devotion, an enormous expenditure of devotion, an enormous exercise in self-esteem.
The bad parents are Our devoted and selfless in a way that would just be crazy or saintly if you took that much care of anyone else.
So it's a very, I mean, I think as profound and interesting or human activity as religion or science or any of the other things that philosophers have thought about a lot, and yet it's one that's just kind of taken for granted, one that we don't contemplate very much.
I think we don't quite recognize just how Just how strange and fascinating and deep and profound it is.
And when we assimilate it to things like, you know, managing a company, I think we're making a mistake on all sorts of levels.
Yeah, and I think that we are also, it's sort of a A vicious circle.
If we think that the institutions that are developed for adulthood can be applied to childhood, I think we're fundamentally missing a basic and important fact, which is that many of our most abstract social institutions come out of some early childhood experiences.
So when children are raised more authoritarianly, you tend to end up with more authoritarian social institutions.
When they're raised with neglect and violence, for whatever reason, I mean, if you look at Africa, then you end up many times with more neglectful and violent cultures.
Looking at society and our most abstract institutions as sort of dim echoes of early childhood experiences, I think is more accurate than to say, well, we should take these adult institutions which come out of childhood so often and apply them to childhood, I think, is to reverse the cause and effect so often.
No, I think that's right.
All right. One last question, and I don't want to keep you, I know you have a million things to do, but there has been some conversation that I've heard in developmental psychology circles that, you know, the mistake to think that the brain develops in sort of one central way is not particularly accurate,
but instead it develops, the systems develop, and sometimes interdependent and sometimes independent of each other to some degree, which Can be tested by people who've had brain damage or have lost particular aspects of the mind that they still retain other capacities?
Some of the conversation seems to be that there are two main modules one for the material world of physics and one for the social world and What are your thoughts on that?
Do you think it comes down to two?
Do you think it's more of an ecosystem or a constellation?
Where is that debate at the moment?
Well, I think There's two different, so this is in the context of claims about, you know, long-standing philosophical discussions about what's innate and what's learned, what's nature and what's nurtured.
And I think there are two different ideas out there about what it would mean for, say, certain kinds of knowledge to be innate.
So one set of ideas, going back to Chomsky, is that we have these kind of modules that are just constant and unchanging in development, that they're They really constitute a kind of set of quite strong constraints on the ways that we can conceptualize the world or the ways that we can understand the world.
And that's the view that Chomsky has, that's the view someone like Steven Pinker has, that's the view in development that someone like Elizabeth Spelke or I think Paul Bloom have.
And Jerry Fodor, the philosopher, articulated this in terms of modularity, thinking that there's these very specific, unchanging constraints on our conceptions.
And the thought is that there might be a grammar module, there might be an intuitive psychology module, an intuitive physics module, and so forth.
Now, if you have that view, at some point, the information from those systems is going to have to feed into some other system that can actually change and alter those, because we know that, after all, as adults, we have all sorts of knowledge that seems very unlikely was the result of these innate modules.
But maybe that only happens when we're very sophisticated adults and we have a wealth culture and so forth.
So that's one view. Another view, which is actually the view that I think that I would advocate and that I think is becoming the prevailing view, is that we're...
Sorry, let me backtrack a minute.
So the alternative might be that we're just these blank slates and that we don't have anything to begin with and everything that we know we learn as a result of our specific experiences.
That's sort of been the opposition traditionally.
Another view, which is the view that's coming out of the sort of Bayesian probabilistic models work that I and others have been involved in, is that we start out with very specific hypotheses about what the world is like.
So we do start out, in that sense, knowing a lot about the world.
But we shouldn't think about those hypotheses as being strong constraints on where we're going to end up.
We should just think of them as being a sort of first starting state, first stab at understanding the world.
And that from the time we're infants, we're already revising and altering and modifying those first hypotheses based on the new evidence that we have.
So one way that you could think about it from a philosophy science perspective is we have what Bayesians call very strong priors for certain hypotheses.
So we start out thinking it's very likely that people or objects behave in particular ways.
And I think it probably is true that some of those first guesses have to do with Intuitive psychology and some of them have to do with intuitive physics.
But I think that from the time we're very young, we already can revise and alter and change those ideas based on our experience of the world and our experience of others.
And we can also, as I say, imagine these counterfactuals, think about other ways the world could be.
And I think there's a kind of cultural ratcheting where what's very characteristically human is, say we imagine different ways that we could run our psychological lives.
For example, we could have Equality between men and women, something that we're probably not evolved to have.
And then, of course, that becomes the fact that the next generation of children is learning about, or we painfully introduce on new interactive computer graphics into the world, and then the next generation of children just has that as their baseline experience and thinks that the world includes interactive computer graphics.
So I think there's this kind of constant cycle of change where we start out with some kinds of assumptions about what the world is like, but we modify and change and alter those in the light of The experiences that we have, the environment we find ourselves in, and then, on the basis of that, we go out and modify our environment for the next generation.
So, I think the sort of Chomsky picture, Pinker picture, which is, well, there's just this, you know, we're stuck back in this hunter-gatherer, police-to-scene environment, and we have knowledge that's been adapted for that, and it's just very painful for us to alter that.
I don't think that really fits what the data is showing us.
But I think it's also true that the kind of associationist or connectionist or behaviorist view that there's nothing there, that we're a black slate and we're just putting together, associating particular bits of experience, that doesn't apply very well either.
So I like this kind of Bayesian picture which says we start out with hypotheses about the world, but we don't end there.
We can always have this capacity for revision and change and alteration in the light of the new things that we find out about the world around us.
Right, and it would also seem to fit into the theory that seems to be accepted now, which is that we start off with all kinds of language, like every possible phoneme and morpheme and every kind of language we have, And then around the age of six months, we begin to discard that which is not relevant to the particular language that we're exposed to, as well as babies absorb everything and then develop that selective attention based upon both physical and cultural cues.
I think that would work well with the stuff that's been established with language to say that we kind of absorb everything and then we prune stuff away.
And that, I think, works quite well with what you're talking about here.
Well, I think, you know, if you look at the language case, that's a nice case where we know quite a bit about it in detail.
And what happens is two things happen.
One thing that happens is that we prune away some of the possibilities.
So we stop hearing distinctions like distinctions between tones that people in China use as part of their language.
But that's not all that happens.
The other thing that happens is that we sharpen and reorganize the sound systems of our particular language.
So it isn't just that we have a limited range of possibilities and we just kind of click on the particular possibilities that we work in our language.
We're also in some sense actively creating the details of our particular language at the same time.
And I think that's a better picture in general about what's going on than either the kind of classical nativist modularity picture or the kind of classical empiricist dissociationist picture.
Well, I appreciate that correction.
So instead of it being a flat line which we discard, we also heighten particular aspects of attention for that which is closer to the language that we're learning as just children.
That's a good correction.
Well, again, I don't want to take all day, but I really do appreciate the time that you've taken.
I do know that my listeners are completely fascinated by the stuff that I've been bringing to them in terms of brain development because I'm very much a materialist and into science and so on, so I don't accept any kind of ghost in the machine.
And if we are, of course, fundamentally our neurons and the chemical connectors between them, then that which occurs is actually who we are, that which occurs in the brain.
is the mind and so when it comes to questions of identity and and ethics in society and conflict resolution and empathy and emotionality it really all comes down to the wetware that we have between our ears and I have found it really really fascinating to explore this and I really do appreciate I mean,
not just the time that you spend talking to me, but I also wanted to really express my appreciation for both the content of the books that you've written and also, and I haven't seen this written about too much, but I'd just like to mention that I also find your writing style to be very elegant and charming and witty and empathetic.
And that, of course, is rare in science writing.
As you mentioned, some of it can be a Sahara-like dry and pretty arid.
So I really do appreciate the time that you spent crafting a very delightful writing style.
And I think that it's a beautiful way to get this message out to people.
So I wanted to just express my appreciation for that.
Well, that's a great compliment.
That's a lot of...
I've worked very hard to try.
It's funny because after you've been an academic for a while, it seems sort of contradictory that it's easier.
It's really hard to write simply.
Oh, it is. It's easier to write in a more complicated way.
So that's very, very much what I'm trying to do because I think ultimately we do have a lot of the...
Try apparatus. But ultimately, after all, the reason why we're doing this is because we want to find out very basic things about human nature and how humans work.
And the sort of fundamental basis for my developmental work is really rooted in a kind of emotional feeling for children, which I think lots of people share.
But often isn't articulated with the same kind of seriousness that other kinds of human activities and emotions are.
So I take that as a very high compliment and I'm very grateful to you for it.
And it was a wonderful interview.
Thank you so much and all the very best for your next projects.
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