Babies are Scientists

Babies start out believing that there are profound similarities between their own mind and the minds of others. That belief gives them a jump start in solving the Other Minds problem. But during the first three years they also observe the differences in what people do and say. Those differences stem from the fact that all minds aren't actually entirely alike. Babies and young children watch and listen with careful focused interest as their mother refuses to let them touch the lamp cord or as their older brother tells them they are completely wrong. This new evidence makes babies revise the beliefs they started out with.

Similarly, babies start out knowing that space is threedimensional and that objects move in predictable ways. They even reach out to objects and shrink away from them. By the time they are eighteen months old, as they watch and manipulate the things around them, as they play peekaboo and sort things into piles, they see those objects act in new ways and they look for ways to explain what they see. They learn that three-dimensional moving objects continue to exist no matter how they appear or disappear, and they learn that all those objects belong in categories. By three or four they have transformed those first categories into biological species and "natural kinds," as they begin to understand that kittens become cats and that tigers have guts inside and rocks don't.

Finally, babies start out making all the possible distinctions between the sounds of languages. Like citizens of the world. mierican newborns can distinguish African Kikuyu sounds as well as English sounds. By twelve months, as they repeatedly hear the sounds of their own language, babies create new representations that reflect the sound categories of their particular language. One-year-old American babies can't discriminate Kikuyu categories anymore, but they can discriminate the English categories better, and they have even become "English-sounding" babblers.

In each case the things babies already think influence where they will go next. They determine which events will engage them, which problems they will tackle, which experiments they will do, even which words they will listen to. Then babies change what they think in the light of what they learn.

Babies have another ability that man-made computers lack. They can do things. They can actively intervene in the world as well as passively learn about it. A one-year-old can reach for a new rubber duck, put it in his mouth, bang it against the side of the tub, splash it in the water, and watch his father's reactions to all of this. A key aspect of our developmental picture is that babies are actively engaged in looking for patterns in what is going on around them, in testing hypotheses, and in seeking explanations. They aren't just amorphous blobs that are stamped by evolution or shaped by their environment or molded by adults.

In Chapter Three we described how children need to figure out what's going on around them—they have a kind of explanatory drive. This drive pushes them to act in ways that will get them the information they need; it leads them to explore and experiment. The apparently pointless activities we call play often seem to be the result of this drive. Babies who are who are figuring out how we see objects play hide-and-seek; babies who are figuring out the sounds of language babble. It's all very serious fun.

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The baby computers start out with a specific program for translating the input they get into accurate representations of the world and then into predictions and actions. But the interesting thing about these computers is that they don't stop there. Instead, they reprogram themselves. They actively intervene in the world to gather more input and check their predictions against that new input. The things they find out lead them to construct new and quite different representations and new and quite different rules for getting from inputs to representations. If we wanted to make a new computer as powerful as the biological computers, this is what it would have to be like.

Their drive to play is a drive to explore, they are equipped with the cognitive and physical tools to explore their world and feed their curiosity about it.