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

by Alison Gopnik

Babies’ brains are actually more highly connected than adult brains; more neural pathways are available to babies than adults. As we grow older and experience more, our brains “prune out” the weaker, less used pathways and strengthen the ones that are used more often.

Our ability to learn about causes may underlie both these valuable and distinctively human abilities. We should, of course, be wary of saying that there are things that only humans can do. Many animals are better at using tools and understanding the actions of other animals than we once thought. And we should avoid the hubris of thinking that these capacities are somehow “higher” or “more evolved” than others. We have been around for only about one-hundredth as long as the dinosaurs, and our capacities for tool use and complex social networks may yet lead to our extinction.

And, of course, the younger you are, the more novelty and unexpectedness you will experience, both in the external and internal worlds. Both the objects around you and your own internal feelings will start out being unexpected.

When we travel we notice the small things that we take for granted in our own country: the way that everyday Japanese life is ferociously aesthetic, or the knowing way that people look at each other in a French café, even the subtle intonations of an unknown language. This may lead us, in turn, to reshape our causal maps of our own culture and country—our own desires and actions—and this new knowledge lets us imagine new ways that we could live ourselves, with Japanese baths or Italian passion or French wit. The cliché says that travel broadens the mind, but this may be literally true. When we travel we return to the wide-ranging curiosity of childhood, and we discover new things about ourselves as well as others.

Or consider certain types of meditation. Meditative practices involve manipulating attention in novel ways. In some of these traditions, the idea is to focus and sustain vivid attention on a single object—a mandala or a koan or a crucifix. But in other types of meditation the idea is to distribute attention as much as possible. Certain types of “open awareness” meditative practices are about not focusing on a single object. They are recipes for defeating inattentional blindness, and escaping attentional inhibition. In these practices you begin by heightening your overall level of attentiveness and arousal. You sit in an upright and unsupported posture—you don’t lie down or sit in chairs, because you don’t want to just get drowsy. Meditators also imbibe notoriously large quantities of caffeine. Indeed, tea was originally cultivated by monks in China who had discovered how helpful a little neurotransmitter modification was for maintaining attention. It is still a mainstay in every Zen monastery, and evidently many modern Japanese monks are devoted to thick, awful, instant Nescafé.

Lantern consciousness leads to a very different kind of happiness. There is a similar feeling that we have lost our sense of self, but we lose our selves by becoming part of the world. Lantern consciousness is invoked by writers like Virginia Woolf and Emily Dickinson and artists like Henri Cartier-Bresson. It is William Blake’s world in a grain of sand, William Wordsworth’s splendour in the grass.

Babies, like Buddhas, are travelers in a little room. They are immersed in the almost unbearably bright and exciting novelty of walls, shadows, voices.

William James, the greatest writer of all psychologists, has a typically striking image that might help invoke the experience. He himself applied it not to babies but to the brilliant but scatterbrained among adults. In some people, he says, the field of consciousness is like a narrowly focused beam with darkness all round it. For others, and I would argue for babies, “we may suppose the margin to be brighter, and to be filled with something like meteoric showers of images, which strike into it at random, displacing the focal ideas.”

And infants and children are clearly not in this state all the time. In fact, it may be just because they are in this state more than we are that babies spend much of the rest of their time either asleep or miserably fussy. Think about how frazzled you can get on a trip. The traveler, like the baby, may also show a tendency to wake up crying at three o’clock in the morning.

Instead of thinking about one Big Explanation for Consciousness we should be looking for little explanations for all the many different kinds of consciousnesses—endogenous focus and exogenous openness, self-conscious planning and unself-conscious absorption, spotlight and lantern. Changes in consciousness as we grow older, or wiser, or develop new ways of learning about the world can be especially revealing. Rather than focusing in on just one aspect of consciousness that will prove to be the explanatory key, we should perhaps be more open to the whole manifold, variegated universe of experience.

From a scientific point of view, of course, this can’t be right. The inner executive, like the inner biographer who witnesses my memories, is what philosophers call a “homunculus”—a little man inside your head. But we can’t explain what a person experiences or decides by assuming there is another littler person inside their head experiencing and deciding.

When we say “mother” in poems, we usually mean some woman in her late twenties or early thirties, trying to raise a child. We use this particular noun to secure the pathos of the child’s point of view, and to hold her responsible.

Robert haas

There is a terrible pathos about this basic asymmetry between caregivers and children. From an objective perspective caregivers are just individual people with complicated lives doing the best they can. But from the baby’s perspective caregivers loom large; this handful of frail human beings may define a baby’s conception of love and care.

At most times and places parenting is something everybody takes for granted, but many modern parents seem to think it’s another specialized profession to study for. There’s nothing like the prospect of an exam to make you anxious and miserable.)

Parents often feel a kind of existential anxiety as they watch their children grow up—as we say, it goes by so fast. We watch that infinitely flexible, contingent, malleable future swiftly harden into the irretrievable, unchangeable past. Japanese poets have a phrase, mono no aware, for the bittersweetness inherent in ephemeral beauty—a falling blossom or a leaf in the wind. Children are a great source of mono no aware.

Imagine a novel in which a woman took in a stranger who was unable to walk or talk or even eat by himself. She fell completely in love with him at first sight, fed and clothed and washed him, gradually helped him to become competent and independent, spent more than half her income on him, nursed him through sickness, and thought about him more than about anything else. And after twenty years of this she helped him find a young wife and move far away. You couldn’t bear the sappiness of it. But that, quite simply, is just about every mother’s story. And it’s also the story of every human community—every constellation of mothers and fathers and socially monagomous mates, every group of siblings and babysitters and alloparents. It’s not so much that we care for children because we love them as that we love them because we care for them.

“But what about immortality?” ten-year-old Alison asks. I suspect that she, like Woody Allen, would have said that she didn’t want to achieve immortality through her children, she wanted to achieve it through not dying. Failing that, though, children aren’t bad. One of the worst things about writing about the importance of children is that practically everything you say turns out to sound like a greeting card. Still, clichés often get to be clichés because they’re true, and the cliché that children are our future is no more than simple, literal truth.