Platt, Alison Gopnik is a hero of mine. She teaches at UC Berkeley. Her class on Developmental Psych is available for free on iTunes. Ironically I am in my third pass through her lectures right now. I look forward to her new book as I got a lot out of her earlier book "The Scientist in the Crib".
I think you are getting a somewhat distorted picture of what she is actually saying. Yes, babies are more aware, more conscious of the world than adults. But they also do not have the conceptual framework to support it. They are aware of more because they have yet to learn what is worth ignoring. Piaget saw the task of childhood to construct a suitable conceptual framework to meet the tasks of adulthood. Awareness without conceptualization is empty. It is a little misleading to say that babies take in a wider spectrum of sensation than adult. It depends a bit on the age of the baby. Vision especially is not well developed at birth for example. I believe the senses are at their peak at about age 10. After that nerve cells in the ear start dying off reducing our sensitivity to higher pitches. The lens of the eye becomes gradually more cloudy as we age distorting the quality of the colors we see. Baby are born into the world with incomplete nervous systems. The brain continues to wire itself for several years after birth. It adds neurons and neuronal connections up until about age six. But it overproduces these connections and the ones that are not used quickly begin to thin out. Another factor in the development of the nervous system is mylinization or the adding of a sheath of insulating fat cells around the fibers of nerve cells. This insulation allows the cells to work up to 100 times faster. This process is still going on up until puberty when the areas in the frontal cortex get mylinated. "Children are much better than adults to pick up on all the extraneous stuff going on." But this is something of an inversion of the Good. One might more accurately say the adults are much better at ignoring extraneous stuff. Their broader range of experience teaches them what can safely be ignored. "Baby brain comes with another advantage: utter absorption in the moment." As a fan of Wilber you should recognize this as the pre-trans fallacy. It is a bit like claiming we should seek to have strokes so we can mimic Jill bolte-Taylor. "In some situations it might be better for adults to regress to a newborn state of mind." Perhaps but certainly not in most situations. "When we need to create something completely new, thinking like a baby is our best option." It is best when it is optional, which for babies it is not. But the importance of that option was noticed by both Buddha and Jesus. You said, "Someday science may also catch up to the MOQ view that the world is a moral structure and evolves because it is good to do so. But, don't hold your breath." Someday you may come to see that what works is what survives and it needs no other justification for continuing. The task of childhood is to create static conceptual patterns that filter and make sense of the dynamic flux of experience. We construct those structures and call them good or bad after the fact, depending on the consequences that result from them. Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
