Concerning the nature of consciousness:
“I think children are dualists from the start. Even babies start off with this sort of body-soul split. To put it somewhat differently, they start off with two distinct modes of construal, or systems of core-knowledge, one corresponding to bodies, the other to souls. Because these systems are distinct, commons sense dualism emerges as a natural by-product.
For much of our recent intellectual history, in philosophy and psychology, this claim about babies would be thought to be utterly ludicrous. Total madness. It was said that babies and young children know nothing about bodies, and know nothing about souls. They are blank slates. Rousseau called the baby a perfect idiot. And Jean Piaget, the Swiss psychologist who got developmental psychology going in the last century, was adamant that babies have no notion of what an object is, and no notion of what a person is.
But over the last two decades there is decisive evidence showing that this minimalist perspective is wrong. In fact, babies, before they hit their first birthday, have a rich and intricate understanding of bodies and of souls**.”**
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“This issue is far from settled. But I want to give two examples that suggest to me that young children do have a dualistic understanding of the world**.**
The first involves their understanding of the brain. Young children start off now knowing what the brain does. That makes sense; it was a scientific discovery that the brain was involved in thinking, But once they do learn about the brain they develop an odd and interesting misunderstanding. I can illustrate this with a story about my son, Max, when he was six years old.
We were having an argument because he had to go to bed. I told him, You have to go to bed, it’s very late, and he said, You can make me go to bed, but you can’t make me go to sleep. It’s my brain! This got me interested. I said, Okay, fine, stay up, let’s talk. I got out a piece of paper, and started asking him questions about what he thinks the brain does. I gave him lists of things - does the brain do this, does the brain do that?
His answers showed an interesting split. He agreed the brain is involved in perception - in seeing and hearing, in tasting and smelling. He’d been taught that. And he agreed that the brain is particularly important with regard to conscious problem-solving: Solving a math problem, making sense of a story, planning what to do. But he said the brain didn’t do certain things: it didn’t do dreaming, it didn’t do loving his brother, it didn’t do pretending to be a kangaroo. Max said, that’s what I do, though my brain might help me out.
I later found out when I looked at this literature that there are several experiments supporting this conception as typical for a child his age. Once children learn that the brain is involved in thinking, they don’t take it as showing that the brain as the source of mental life; they don’t become materialists. Rather they interpret “thinking” in a narrow sense, and conclude that the brain is a cognitive prosthesis, something added to the soul to enhance its computing power. In other words, there’s Max, the person, and then there’s his brain, which he uses to solve problems just as he might use a calculator or a computer.”
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“A second sign of early dualism concerns when children think about the afterlife. The best study on this was done by Jesse Bering and David Bjorklund. They told young children a story about a mouse and an alligator, where the mouse is running around and the alligator comes up to him and chomps down, and the mouse is no more. The mouse is dead. Then they asked the children questions. Some of these are questions about the biology of the mouse. Now that the mouse is not alive, does its brain still work? Now that the mouse is not alive, will it grow up to be a big mouse? For these the children tended to say No. They understand that once the mouse is dead, his brain is not going to work; he isn’t going to need any food.
What is more interesting is that they also asked children about the mental life of the mouse. Now that the mouse is not alive, does he still love his mother? Does he still like cheese? Does he know he’s dead? For these questions the children tended to answer Yes. So they tacitly believe that even though the mouse is not alive any more, its mental life persists. This is the foundation for the more articulated view of the afterlife you usually find in older children and adults.”
If I were a materialist, I would find it extremely difficult to understand why a completely impersonal, cold, and senseless universe would produce a species with a natural tendency toward dualism—especially if, in reality, souls don’t exist and humans are merely beasts. I would find it even harder to explain why young children think this way, while animals more intelligent than children at that age (such as gorillas and dolphins) show nothing close to that level of abstract thinking, let alone any notion of dualism.