Alison Gopnik: belief

Transcript context

…What does it mean to say babies are more conscious than we are? I should say, first of all, my view about consciousness is that it’s very unlikely to be a single thing. There’s a famous analogy that I think is right about consciousness and life. Life is an example of something that we thought, back in the 19th century, was going to turn out to be a simple thing, and there were whole research programs about what is it that makes a living thing living? It turned out that was just the wrong question, that actually there’re many, many different kinds of processes that are all involved in different things that we think of as life. I think that’s likely to be what will happen with consciousness. But it is interesting — and maybe not surprising — that the thing that professors first thought of as consciousness is that experience you have when you’re sitting at your desk, and you’re introspecting, and you’re trying to solve a problem, and so on and so forth. But I think that’s really different from awareness, from sentience, from your experience of the world around you. In fact, in some ways — I think professors all recognize this — it’s intention with those things. While you’re sitting at your desk trying to solve this problem, you are notoriously not paying attention to all the other things going on around you. I think if you look at the science, what you see with babies is that they are conscious of all the things that are going on around them. That the way that even their brains work is to take in lots and lots of information. Their brains are very much what neuroscientists would call plastic. They’re surrounded by novelty. They’re not just focusing on one thing at a time, the way we do when we’re grown-ups. I think if you think about the context as grown-ups that we are in that state, like if we travel to a new place or we’re trying to do something new . . . It’s not like we’re unconscious when we go to Paris for the first time. On the contrary, it feels like we’re full of experience. We’re vividly experiencing the world around us. I think that’s what it’s like with babies. People who have very weak episodic memories — as you know, that’s a thing — are those people less conscious?…

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