Chapter 14 followed the evolution of ordinary consciousness from animals to humans. Without making any claims about ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny, it is interesting to look at research on how consciousness develops as human babies grow up. I rely primarily on University of California, Berkeley psychologist Alison Gopnik’s
The Philosophical Baby1 because it incorporates in a comprehensive way recent as well as earlier work in developmental psychology, and because it focuses on babies’ minds and awareness as they grow to later childhood.
According to Gopnik, babies up to about one year old have these characteristics:
1. Language acquisition is minimal.
2. Attention is diffuse rather than concentrated.
3. They are beginning to develop causal models of the world (“Even young babies who can’t talk yet have some ability to anticipate and imagine the future”).
4. They have empathy: “Literally, from the time they’re born children are empathic. They identify with other people and recognize that their own feelings are shared by others. In fact, they literally take on the feelings of others.”
As one-year-olds grow into early childhood, language development accelerates and attention becomes more concentrated, focusing on smaller areas within a frame rather than taking in the whole frame. Meanwhile, models of the world and abilities to manipulate and imagine these models become more sophisticated, while empathy may diminish to levels more commonly seen in adults. These developments are often intertwined, so they need to be followed closely. I pay special attention to language acquisition, which increases exponentially from age one to age five, and to cognitive functioning over the same period.
Here is what seems to happen. First, babies quickly develop their ability not only to represent but also to imagine events that might happen in the future as well as events that could have happened in the past, but didn’t. This is a gradual process from birth to age five. “Children’s brains create causal theories of the world, maps of how the world works,” Gopnik writes. “These theories allow children to envisage new possibilities, and to imagine and to pretend that the world is different.”
2 That is, they learn to call up and manipulate mental representations and project them into the (imaginary) past and possible (or impossible) future. They use this knowledge to “construct alternate universes—different ways the world might be.”
Second, although these abilities can be seen emerging even in babies who can’t talk yet, they accelerate with language acquisition. “The development of language almost certainly plays a role…. [It] provides us with a medium for telling ourselves, as well as others, what happened and what to do.” “Learning language gives children a whole powerful new way to imagine…. Babies start talking about unreal possibilities at the same time that they start to use tools in an insightful way. Being able to talk about possibilities helps you to imagine them.”
3 Therefore, language acquisition extends and strengthens a child’s ability to construct and manipulate mental models, and shows up behaviorally in both problem solving and the use of tools.
Third, while language acquisition proceeds quickly, in parallel with the development and use of mental models, to describe and manipulate external events, use of language to talk about inner events and the self does not really become prominent until the child is six years of age or older. That is, children readily use words to talk about events that are going on around them, including those that they are a part of, but it takes longer for them to begin using words to represent the self. “Once they can talk, one- and two-year-olds can report specific events that occurred to them in the past. . . . But children start to weave those memories into a continuous narrative—a narrative in which they are the hero, or at least the protagonist—only when they are older.”
4Using words to represent the self goes along with being able to look at that self from the perspective of another person (the “looking-glass self”), which is more complicated than merely being aware that one is interacting with that person. “Even very young babies have some sense of self,” says Gopnik. “They can recognize themselves in a mirror and distinguish themselves from other people. . . . But they don’t seem to have the experience of the inner observer.”
Observing oneself from the perspective of others seems to require inner speech, and children develop that only later. For example, Gopnik says that preschoolers (ages three to five):
“don’t understand that your thoughts can be internally generated. They don’t understand that thoughts can simply follow the logic of your internal experience instead of being triggered from the outside.”
5
“[They] deny experiencing visual imagery or inner speech, although they understand perfectly what a picture or a sentence is like.”
6
“They also say you can’t talk to yourself in your head. [The researchers] asked them to think about how their teacher’s name sounded. They denied that there was any voice in their head doing the naming, and if you explicitly asked them they were as likely to say that there was a picture in their head as a voice.”
7
Babies and young children have not yet acquired autobiographical memory and executive control. “They don’t experience their lives as a single timeline stretching back into the past and forward into the future. They don’t send themselves backward and forward along this timeline as adults do, recapturing for a moment that past self who was the miserable loser or the happy lover, or anticipating the despairs and joys of the future.” Babies and young children have not yet learned to project their thoughts into either the past or the future, and they do not appear to have formed a self-construct that can represent them in thoughts about the future. For one thing, “while they can formulate plans for the immediate future, this does not include thoughts or feelings about what that future state will feel like.”
If Buddhist practice works to quiet inner conversation in order to weaken attachments to the social self, Gopnik is in effect describing the reverse process: children first learn to use language, then several years later begin using inner speech, and as part of this process they develop what we recognize as the social self.
Fourth, as language use develops more and more powerfully, attention changes. Babies’ attention is diffuse, in fact rather similar to the experience of mindfulness in adults: “Rather than determining what to look at in the world, babies seem to let the world determine what they look at. And rather than deciding where to focus attention and where to inhibit distractions, babies seem to be conscious of much more of the world at once.”
8 Along with this, “younger children concentrate less well but remember more and learn from the full visual field,” whereas “older children concentrate on one thing at a time.”
Diffuse, receptive attention continues through preschool age. Children this age think that whatever is in the immediate visual field is in awareness, but nothing else. In one study, preschool children were shown a video in which a woman is looking at a framed photograph of children and pointing to some of them. When the children watching the video were asked, “Was the woman thinking about the kids in the picture?” they all said yes. But when they were asked if she was thinking about the frame of the picture, they said, “Yes, she was thinking about that too.” They said she wasn’t thinking about things not in the visual field, for example a chair in the next room. “But they do believe she will be thinking about everything she sees.”
9Fifth, empathy: just as children from ages one to six are slow to develop a separated self, they begin as babies with a great capacity for empathy, which tends eventually to decline unless nurtured. In addition to experiencing the pure feeling, or sensing, that lies at the heart of empathy, infants very quickly begin to make distinctions and generalize: “One-year-olds understand the difference between intentional and unintentional actions, and behave in genuinely altruistic ways. Three-year olds have already developed a basic ethic of care and compassion.”
10It was suggested in
chapter 13 that empathy and the first property of awakened consciousness, no separation, usually go together, so an increase in one brings about an increase in the other. Gopnik notes this same tendency in children, pointing out that as children age, empathy and a sense of no separation both
diminish at the same rate: “Moral thinkers from Buddha to David Hume to Martin Buber have suggested that erasing the boundaries between yourself and others . . . can underpin morality. We know that children’s conception of a continuous separate self develops slowly in the first five years.”
11There is, therefore, an intriguing inverse symmetry between the processes through which a baby turns into an older child or adult and the processes through which an adult moves along the path toward awakening. The baby must learn to represent the world around it and to manipulate those representations mentally, and then learn names (words) for the representations and rules of language for manipulating the words. As this is happening, the baby’s attention becomes more focused and event oriented, less diffuse and receptive. Empathy, which is in full bloom in babies, gradually diminishes. Especially from age six on, inner speech grows more prominent, and with it the “continuous separate self” of adults emerges.
If that same baby, now grown to adulthood, decides to undertake a Buddhist path toward awakening, then she begins with the extremely difficult task of quieting inner speech. As one “skillful means” for doing this, she will probably engage in forms of meditation involving mindfulness. This will help rebuild her capacity for diffuse, receptive attention while improving her ability to turn off inner speech. Along with this, she must work to detach from all conditionings, particularly from social reality, the symbolically represented models of the self and the world to which she has become firmly attached. So the hypothesis is that finally, with her mind quiet and attentive and her emotional attachments to social reality weakened, she is prepared to experience a form of awareness that is similar to what she knew as a baby, but with all the information and skills she has learned since then still active and available.
In sum, as babies grow up, they gradually weaken or lose the three abilities that Buddhist practice seeks to strengthen (mindfulness, nonattachment, and empathy). Along with this, Gopnik describes how children develop a “continuous separate self” at the same time that they are learning to use language in more complex ways, particularly as inner speech. Recent neuroscience research finds that until age twelve, children are not nearly as good as older children and adults at either thinking about what they might do in imagined events or anticipating mentally how others will then view them.
12 Doing these things requires being able to project the self into event sequences and imagine the social consequences, to take the role of the other and understand their viewpoint (Theory of Mind). These skills continue to develop, in parallel with improved ability for introspection, well into adolescence.
13And at this point, the baby turned child, then adolescent, then adult is prepared to live in modern society with fully developed ordinary consciousness.