The Starting Point

Although we come into the world with no knowledge of our surroundings or of who or what we are, we have a collection of instinctive behaviours and responses to stimuli applied to our senses, or reflexes to get us started.

These include the sucking reflex and the instinct to put out one’s hands to break a fall and reduce the likelihood of injury.

Although we have no direct experience before we are born of the environment in which we will have to function, our brains are to some extent structured so that we are able to learn how to do so. A kind of BIOS and some specialised hardware but very little else.

In his book “Descartes’ baby”, Paul Bloom [Bloom 2005] quotes some properties of the external world which appear to be built in to our brains at birth and which are listed by Spelke [Spelke 1994].

• Cohesion: If a hand pulls at an object, babies expect the entire object to move with the hand. If it comes off in pieces then they are surprised showing an expectation that objects are cohesive.
• Continuity: Imagine a stage with two vertical barriers separated in space. A small object, like a box, goes behind the barrier on the left, continues between the barriers, goes behind the barrier on the right and comes out on the other side. Adults see this as a single object and so do babies. Now suppose that the box goes behind the barrier on the left, there is a pause, and then the box emerges from the screen on the right, never appearing in the gap. Adults assume there are two boxes here, not one. Babies make the same assumption; they expect continuity.
• Solidity: If an object is put immediately behind a screen, and then the screen tilts backward, babies expect it to stop moving – it should hit the object. When it goes through the space that should be occupied by the hidden object (a trapdoor is used) babies look longer. They expect objects to be solid.
• Contact: One object heads toward another, but the second object moves away an instant before the first object hits it. For babies, just as with adults, this action-at-a-distance is surprising; it violates our expectation of contact – that objects can only influence each other by touching.

In addition to that, [Bloom 2005] identifies several innate traits which also facilitate learning and modelling the environment.

• Essentialism: The tendency to categorise objects, animate or otherwise, into groups which have common properties. To recognise that objects may be in the same group due to what is inside rather than just outward appearance. [page 47]
• Promiscuous Teleology: A tendency to attribute purpose to every object including those which have formed by accident. [page 62] They will generally ascribe design to anything both artificial and natural.
• Creationism: The tendency to expect that if something exists then it must have been intentionally made. “to a 4 year old everything looks as if it has been created for something.” [page 62]
• Dualism: Babies treat people differently from objects. In fact they can be “trigger happy” in attributing mind to patterns which are associated with people.

From about age 2, the baby starts to learn, by imitation and by habit forming to see what works and what does not. This is generally automatic and without intention. Later on the child will actively investigate the environment and come to conclusions about it, firstly by means of induction and, later on, also by deduction. The child, and later the adult, will ask questions such as “Why does this happen?”, “How does this work?”, “How did this come about?”, “What is the purpose, or function, of this?” and will try to find out by experiment or by consulting authorities such as parents, teachers or books.