Descartes & Babies

Today is my due date. I cannot manage to be distracted by novels, moving pictures, or my own academic pursuits, so I have been reading about infant psychology. It turns out that babies are geniuses. Seriously. Some well-known evidence: newborns recognize their parents' voices from having heard them in the womb; they are comforted by the music they were exposed to in utero (Burrito enjoyed live performances by Neko Case somewhat early on and TV on the Radio quite recently--s/he grooved really hard to the latter); and can discriminate between their mother's and other mother's milk. What truly amazed me to learn, however, was that newborn babies have more than the power of recognition or memory; they can do more than preserve sense impressions... In fact, if Descartes is right, they already exhibit reason.

Descartes offers the famous wax example to demonstrate that reason organizes sense impressions. (Hopefully, I remember how this goes.) Consider how wax changes texture and appearance based on temperature, applied pressure, etc., such that it can exhibit various shapes and be hard, soft, or liquid, hot, cold, or warm. The wax can appear to the senses in radically different modalities, but nevertheless the human mind attributes an underlying unity to the substance. We recognize the various appearances of the malleable ball as permutations of the same thing. Descartes thinks that imagination/ sensory experience alone is insufficient to recognize the continuity belonging to the substance. Thus reason is required to endow a series of sense impressions with unity, allowing us to affirm that this mutable thing is a single object.

Well, René, newborn babies likewise attribute unity to objects. An experiment was performed where newborns were blindfolded and given one of two binkies to suck on. One was a typical nuk and the other had some protrusions. Once the blindfold was removed, the infants immediately identified visually which pacifier they were sucking on. Having only touched an object, they were able to identify it with an entirely different sense afterward, never having seen it before. On the Cartesian model, they must have retained some kind of mental schema, abstracted from the particular sensual qualities of the object that they were then able to map onto their visual experience. Of course, Gassendi may have been right, too, when he protested that reason seems entirely unnecessary for attributing unity to objects. Dogs have no trouble seeing that their human companion who sits, stands, sleeps, wears hats, and changes overcoats is one and the same "object." Perhaps corporeal imagination is far more self-organizing and active than Descartes could imagine? Perhaps the body doesn't need some universal translator overseeing its experiences? Of course, I tend toward Gassendi and think there is far from a vast chasm between human and canine mental life. Basically, dogs, like babies, are geniuses. Still, that binky thing is pretty cool. The psychologist Daniel Stern concludes that newborns have a far more active sense of self, even beginning in utero, than we have hitherto thought.