Are Children More Conscious Than We Are?

Babies can't tell us what their consciousness is like. Fortunately, we have Alison Gopnik, who has spent years researching and writing on how babies think. Gopnik is a psychologist and author of The Philosophical Baby. Gopnik distinguishes between the lantern consciousness of childhood from the spotlight consciousness found in adults. Children, she explains, are “vividly aware of everything without being focused on any one thing in particular” adding that “Consciousness narrows as a function of age. As we know more, we see less.”

One of the great questions that you could ask as a philosopher is what it's like to be a baby? What is childhood experience actually like? And some philosophers over the ages have acted as if, well, babies aren't the sort of people who would have much experience. Having consciousness is something that is reserved for adults. But I think that actually there's good reason to believe that children have in some ways more consciousness than adults, but their experience of the world is very different to the experience of adults. And one way to think of it is that adults' attention is a lot like a spotlight. That's an idea that psychologists have had for a long time. So when we pay attention to something, the thing we attend to becomes very vivid and we're very conscious of it, and everything else gets shut out. We can have inattentional blindness. we stop paying attention to the things we're not paying attention to. For children and babies it's a different story. Children seem to have a much broader focus of attention. When we say that children have trouble paying attention, what we really mean is they have trouble not paying attention. Rather being focused on one thing with everything else in the dark, they're taking information from everything that's going on around them. It's as if their attention is more like a lantern, going out and taking attention from the world, than a spotlight just illuminating one specific relevant fact out in the world.

One of the big ideas that I've been working on recently is the idea that there are intrinsic trade-offs between different ways of being intelligent, different ways of being in the world. I've been doing a lot of work with people in artificial intelligence, I'm part of the Berkeley Artificial Intelligence research group, and they point to attention between what they call exploration and exploitation. So the idea is the kind of things you need to do to act effectively in the world, to get what you want. Those are very different from the kinds of things you need to do if want you want to do is learn what you can about the world. There's proof that those two things are intrinsic attention. You can't be a great learner and explorer and a great actor at the same time. What I've been arguing is that childhood is really evolution's way of resolving that. As adults, that spotlight of attention is very useful if we want to actually get things done. But having this broader, more exploratory attention when we're children actually helps us to learn more about the world around us, and then we can take all those things we've learned and put them to use in adulthood. Now, it has some drawbacks. If you've ever tried to get a two-year-old to put their jacket on if you're trying to get to child care. there are times when you would be very happy if they had more focused attention. But it reflects the fact that what their agenda, as it were, is learning, figuring out about the world, not acting on the world.

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