The Philosophical Baby

✒️ Note-Making

🔗Connect

⬆️Topic:: childhood

💡Clarify

🔈 Summary of main ideas

1. Children are learning machines - Even if they seem incapable, irrational, or acting strangely, most of children's actions are driven by the desire to learn more about the world around them, both the physical and the social world. Their strongest skill is the power of imitation. They don't just copy behavior, they copy intentions, they are able to translate between external behavior and internal states.
2. Learning is what makes us human - We are born with only the most basic of skills. Most of who we are, what we know, how we act, is the result of our learning process about the world, especially when we were little. Our mental flexibility costs time, as we need to learn almost everything from scratch.
3. Children are free thinkers - Children are not yet limited by the status quo or "how the world works", they are much more mentally flexible, able to think about counterfactual, imagine and constantly try new ways of looking/solving their problems.
4. Play is a form of learning - Play is not just for fun, it is also a way to learn. It is usually a form of simulation that helps prepare the child to future real-life scenarios. Through imaginary friends or lying they learn about interaction with others, for example.
5. Sense of self takes time - Their sense of self is one of the last things to be developed, because it require a psychological continuity, which is based on the ability to have an "internal viewer". At early stages, children are more like observers in a movie, passive (they don't choose what to watch).
6. A parental connection is a gateway for empathy and meaning - First of all, as we help our children grow, so do we grow in the process. Similarly, through us they learn empathy, love, healthy attachment, and even how to find meaning in life. They enrich us as we enrich them.

🗒️Relate

⛓ by following this method, what will happen? What is the goal of this book? Understand better the behavior of children, and be able to experience awe seeing their fresh minds learn about the world

🔍Critique

✅ relevant research, metaphors or examples that helps to convey the argument

❌ the logical jumps, holes or simply cases where it is wrong...

🧱 Implementations and limitations of it are... This is not a book you "implement", it is a book that enriches your understanding about children.

🗨️Review

💭 my opinions on the book, the writers style... This book was interesting and boring at the same time. On the one hand, it was sprinkled with philosophical theories and cute anecdotes. On the other hand, it occasionally felt like a series of researches grouped together into a book without too much emphasis on how to connect them or to make them interesting.

🖼️Outline

📒 Notes

Introduction

Childhood is an amazing and important period of our lives. It's when we grow and learn the most, and it's the universal step that everyone around you has gone through.

Childhood is a symbol for humans ability to change, to grow beyond our genes, to change our mind and change the world as well. It's not just that by learning we change who we are. Although that's a strong feature of humankind, that we change ourselves throughout our lifetime and across generations social evolution.

But also, learning is how we change the world. All the amazing things around us are a product of human creativity. Our thoughts literally change the world.

Childhood exists because learning takes time Patience. We can't be born creative same as a horse knows how to run on their first day. Our capacity for thinking has to be cultivated.

That's why childhood and adulthood are two different types of humans, not just a mere "weaker adults". Children are better at Ideation. They are more flexible and faster at generating ideas, and not limited by Status-quo bias, Defaults or Attachment. How the world works is not a limitation. These are the most liberated minds in existence, free to explore in every direction that interests them. It takes time for the prefrontal cortex to develop, usually until the mid twenties. Until then it's a time of exploration and play.

Introduction

• young children are actually smarter, more imaginative, more caring, and even more conscious than adults are. (Location 166)
• The great evolutionary advantage of human beings is their ability to escape from the constraints of evolution. (Location 196)
• 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. (Location 222)
• An 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. (Location 236)
• 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. (Location 239)
• 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. (Location 248)
• To be imaginative, you want to consider as many possibilities as you can, even wild and unprecedented ones (Location 274)
• Play is the signature of childhood. It’s a living, visible manifestation of imagination and learning in action. (Location 282)

Possible Worlds - why Do Children Pretend

Humans have a tendency to think through counterfactuals. We don't only try to see the world as is, we imagine "what if" scenarios. The past, all the possible futures, all alive within our perspective right now. The advantage in "what if" thinking is it's ability to actually change the future. Through envisioning a different future we can't bring it to life Believing makes it real. It is also a disadvantage, as we feel responsible for all the possible future that didn't come to life. For example feeling Regret for what we've done, knowing that we could have acted differently.

Not only that children are very capable of thinking about counterfactual, as shown by experiments through their pretend play and reasoning, it is also very clear that they can distinguish between the real and the imaginary. The play with a fake kitchen, but they don't really eat the plastic fruit.

They are also very capable of reasoning and understanding causality. They understand what leads to what, and can change their perception based on information they get from the world. They create causal maps that retain the relationships between objects.

Possible Worlds

• 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. (Location 401)
• Counterfactual thinking lets us make new plans, invent new tools, and create new environments. (Location 405)
• As soon as babies can talk they immediately talk about the possible as well as the real. (Location 475)
• Preschool children spend hours pretending, but they know that they are pretending. (Location 511)
• Understanding the causal structure of the world and generating counterfactuals go hand in hand. In fact, knowledge is actually what gives imagination its power, what makes creativity possible. (Location 728)

Imaginary Companions

Same as they track causal maps, they also create social maps, a deep understanding of the people around them, with their unique personality and preferences.

This skill usually begins with the art of lying, pretending, or the creation of imaginary friends. Like counterfactuals, it's a type of Simulations that help them understand the mind of others. With time, they are able to understand that others think differently, and that we don't all see the same world, rather we see our beliefs of it. By age 2-5, our social understanding greatly develops.

They also gain Self-awareness in the process. As they understand the minds of others better, so does they understand themselves, and here lies the spark of Self-control.

Through their social maps they become who they are, an American child becomes an "American", while they also can develop their own sense of self and uniqueness because they have the cognitive freedom to pursue whichever idea that interests them.

Imaginary Companions

• Because we can plan, hope, and be responsible for the future we can also wonder, daydream, and escape into the fictional. (Location 991)
• There is something almost supernatural about psychological causation—say a few words from across the room or even across the country and you can instantly make someone else sigh with love or boil with anger. (Location 1003)
• young children, unlike adults, don’t seem to prefer the close counterfactuals of planning to the distant counterfactuals of fiction. They don’t choose to explore only the possibilities that might be useful—they explore all the possibilities. (Location 1096)

Escaping Plato's Cave

Babies are amazing researchers. They are able to learn from their mistakes and of others, to see the logic behind people's actions. That's why they love to play and explore, because it helps them understand something about the world they live in. To make it "make sense".

There are great imitators, but they don't get copy the "how to" of others' actions, especially adults, they are also interested in the why behind the action. They try to think through the mind of the other, to understand it's Intention. They learn best from those around them, which is how culture is passed from one generation to another, from parents to children, between siblings.

Escaping Plato’s Cave

• We don’t teach psychology in elementary schools, because we don’t need to. Every distracted or commanding teacher, every successful bully or heroic defier of bullying, every charming flirt or captivating class clown, is a rich psychology tutorial of their own. (Location 1515)

What is it like to Be a Baby

There's still much to solve about consciousness, but we do have indications of how psychological and behavioral phenomenon are linked.

Babies are on some level more conscious than we do. If we define consciousness as being aware of something, and babies are focused on everything around them because it's new. They haven't got used to it yet. When we get used to something, it becomes white noise, something we ignore subconsciously. They are not at that stage yet, everything is exciting.

Their attention is not as easily controlled as it is for grown-ups. They are easily distracted, and having hard time to follow instructions. The world decides what they pay attention to.

Same as we have several different definitions of what it means to be conscious, so we can accept babies as conscious as well. For example, we see "flow" and "meditation" as two different instances of being conscious, so perhaps the way babies experience the world is another kind.

What Is It Like to Be a Baby?

• When we learn we literally change our minds and brains in the light of new information. (Location 1668)
• Babies seem to have an infinitely voracious appetite for the unexpected. (Location 1698)
• rather than determining what to look at in the world, babies seem to let the world determine what they look at. (Location 1728)

Who Am I

We perceive consciousness as a continuous state. What we call autobiographical/episodic memories, similar to psychological continuity, that we distinctively remember important moments in our lives, like a first kiss, graduating, etc.

However, even if we have such memories, they're not necessarily true. They can be distorted over time, and even implanted inception.

For children up to the age of four their memory exists yet it is very passive. They have difficulties remember their past mental state, for example if they are not hungry, they believe they never wanted food, even if they ate five minutes ago. They are also highly susceptible, the questions we ask can unintentionally implant false memories. They also require a cue to remember Cue based memorization. For example asking them "how was your day" will return blank, but asking "did you go to the park today" will result in amazing stories.

Similarly, up to the age of five they have a weak sense of self, even if they recognize themselves in the mirror, they don't connect between past, present and future self as the same person. They don't have an "I", an observer that thinks about their experiences. Even if they think of something, they won't admit of thinking of it, because they are not aware of their "thinking self".

Consciousness is not a single steady stream. It is messy even for us adults. Same as we can be influenced by biases and have implanted memories, we shouldn't be surprised that it's even messier for children.

Heraclitus River and the Romanian Orphans

How much of who we are today will remain the same tomorrow? How much of us is similar to our past self? Are we even the same person? Theseus ship

We can drastically changeover time, to such degree that it's reasonable to ask which one is the real "us". Not only time changes us, but the environment as well. Some traits are hereditary, although even those are highly influenced by our environment. A trait is not your destiny. How the environment is shaped can impact whether this trait is manifesed or not Genetic Switches. Unfortunately, it often goes together. Those with poor genes are raised in sub optimal environments and vice versa.

The connection between parent and child works both ways. Our interactions with them shape them, but also change us.

Learning to Love

Since infancy, babies form theories about love, specifically their relationship with their caregivers. You might get:

1. Secure attachment - when the caregivers are responsive to the child and care about their emotional health Safe Base
2. Anxious - when the child is not certain whether they will get support or not
3. Indifference - when the child ignores their caregivers

A healthy attachment is a matter of relationship, and not just temperament. The child can have a different attachment to each caregiver.

Our past, present and future identities are all interconnected. We care deeply about the past even though we can't change it, because there lies the seeds to who we are, it defines us. Similarly, our hopes and desires for our future can influence us today. I might want kids in the future, and even if I don't want them now, it can still affect my dating habits.

Love and Law

Children are highly moral due to their strong sense of Empathy. The source of that empathy is likely to be their innate desire to imitate the people around them. To try and do what others do requires a mapping between observed behavior and internal state, such as intention, feelings and desires. Second, due to the strong connection between body and mind, to physically imitate others leads to an emotional imitation as well. When a baby copies their parents smile, it makes them happy as well.

That means that my parents happiness is mine, so making them happy would make me happy as well. That's how empathy is converted into morality.

As they get older, their tendency of Golden rule becomes more complex as they understand that what you like might be different from what they like. Similarly they learn to differentiate between a general rule, and the harm that might be or not be depending on context. They recognize rules as something arbitrary, while harm is the real thing you want to prevent.

Morality occurs when empathy is expanded from a close inner circle to many other people. However, we are often limited by a Us vs them mentality, expanding our empathy only to those who share similar traits as us (usually arbitrary ones like skin color). All moral theories generally support universality, but it's easier said than done.

Children have a strong perception of rules and intentions. They understand that it's bad to break a rule in a different sense of "badness" than it is to actually harm someone Social Construct. Like how it doesn't really matter which side of the road to drive, as long as we all drive on the same side.

They're also aware that breaking a rule is worse if you do it intentionally.

Babies and the Meaning of Life

Being a parent is perhaps an answer to the meaning of life, a feeling of immortality because after we die we know that our children live on, we live through them. Through shared moments of awe, of magic, of strong unbreakable love, a bond is created.