The Philosophical Baby: What Children's Minds Tell Us About Truth, Love, and the Meaning of Life

by Alison Gopnik

we all know that the path from child to adult is circuitous and complex, and that the world is full of saints with terrible parents and neurotics with loving ones.

We used to think that babies and young children were irrational, egocentric, and amoral. Their thinking and experience were concrete, immediate, and limited. In fact, psychologists and neuroscientists have discovered that babies not only learn more, but imagine more, care more, and experience more than we would ever have thought possible. In some ways, young children are actually smarter, more imaginative, more caring, and even more conscious than adults are.

human beings, as a central part of their evolutionary endowment, and as the deepest part of their human nature, are engaged in a constant cycle of change. We change our surroundings and our surroundings change us. We alter other people’s behavior, their behavior alters ours.

to change our world, our selves, and our society we have to think about what we ought to be like, as well as what we actually are like. This book is about how children develop minds that change the world.

children and adults are different forms of Homo sapiens. They have very different, though equally complex and powerful, minds, brains, and forms of consciousness, designed to serve different evolutionary functions. Human development is more like metamorphosis, like caterpillars becoming butterflies, than like simple growth—though it may seem that children are the vibrant, wandering butterflies who transform into caterpillars inching along the grown-up path.

There’s a kind of evolutionary division of labor between children and adults. Children are the R&D department of the human species—the blue-sky guys, the brainstormers. Adults are production and marketing. They make the discoveries, we implement them. They think up a million new ideas, mostly useless, and we take the three or four good ones and make them real.

Play is the signature of childhood. It’s a living, visible manifestation of imagination and learning in action. It’s also the most visible sign of the paradoxically useful uselessness of immaturity. By definition, play—the baby nesting blocks and pushing the buttons of a busy box, the toddler pretending to be everything from a mermaid to a ninja—has no obvious point or goal or function. It does nothing to advance the basic evolutionary goals of mating and predation, fleeing and fighting. And yet these useless actions—and the adult equivalents we squeeze into our workday—are distinctively, characteristically human and deeply valuable. Plays are play, and so are novels, paintings, and songs.

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.