pumpkinstrokemarrow

In the beginning, to my mind anyway, what are now the established religions were a force for good. Not nice to bash your aunty kind of thing. This was progress at the time. But by the time my parents came along the established religions were a force for the repression of the toiling masses and so I was brought up as a card carrying atheist. Not even baptised. And now we have Messrs Dawkins and Hitchens, who while banging on about how awful god is, appear to have forgotten, if they ever knew, why god was invented in the first place.

But all their banging on has not blunted the desire to know about beginnings and endings. So in Genesis we have two stories about how it all began. Most big religions have something to offer on that front. And then there are other people who have dumped god but who still want to know how the universe began. Others who want to know how planets began. Others again who want to know how life began and others how humans began. With these last including at least two sub-species. Those who attack the problem from an evolutionary point of view and those that attack it from the baby point of view. How babies start off rather unlike humans and quite rapidly become humans. An evolution in microcosm. Bickerton, noticed on 24 December, being an example of the first line of attack.

Just recently I have been reading a contribution from the second line of attack, to wit a book called 'The Philosophical Baby' by Alison Gobnik. A gentle, popular canter through the process of babies turning into people. A popular canter that manages to avoid the jokey style which mars the Bickerton effort.

Impressed by her approach to footnotes of which there are none. But she does claim to provide references to every bit of evidence she cites, via end-notes onto a bibliography. Plus an index for when you lose your place. Uncheckable by me as I do not have access to the sort of university library which carries this sort of stuff and I am not going to pay one of those Internet information services to get it for me. I will have to take her on trust. I think she is deserving.

Moving onto the substance, striking how her babies are into learning and being nice to each other, and to us. Miles away from the anger and angst of the Freudian babies, who appear to have been cast into the sin-bin. For now anyway. I do not think it will be too long before they pop up again, perhaps in newish clothes.

It seems that it is not that hard to do experiments about how babies think and it seems from them that babies think quite a lot, in interesting ways rather more than we do. (A plus, of course, that you can do experiments without whacking out zillions on large hadron colliders. I wonder, in passing, looking at the doom and gloom in today's 'Independent', whether these last will survive the crunch). But to continue, as adults we are very much locked down into whatever furrows our environment has seen fit to put us. Which is good for focus and getting to work on time after a night on the lash, but not so good for what the training people from when I was at work called lateral thinking.

One of the things they are good at is stories. With one of the interesting things being that while their stories might be populated by various outrageous beings, once those beings have been declared, they have to behave in otherwise sensible ways. They have to behave according to the rules. Rather as the outrageous beings in the better sort of science fiction. This is a good way to explore what the rules are and what the rules might be. At the same time, the babies appear to identify with these outrageous beings much more strongly than we would. So if such a being is hurt they feel the pain in much the same way as they would feel an organic pain, if that is the right term. Despite the fact that they are well able to distinguish fact from fiction. A word Gobnik uses a lot is counterfactual, something she believes that animals are very bad at.

Which is very similar to a point which Bickerton makes about the rather rudimentary language of some animals. They can talk about the here and now but they are useless about talking about what might happen tomorrow. A point which is blunted by the fact that monkeys can and do lie.

Much to be thought about.