Does a baby already have a preconceptual worldview?

Philosophy of Mind
21

@Joshs @FireOlogist

I do not deny that speaking of systems of constructs can be useful. But here it seems to me that the problem is being displaced without questioning its hardest point, and without avoiding the temptation of nothingness.

To say that each of us lives through a system of constructs that organizes, anticipates, and interprets the world is already to assume a certain regime of validity of discourse. It means deciding that sense is to be understood primarily as construction, anticipation, interpretation, and a hierarchy of schemas.

But this framework is not natural or absolute. It is already a local grip on appearing.

My problem is not to deny that constructs exist, nor to deny that there are schemas of recognition. The problem is to ask by what right “system of constructs” becomes the general form through which we read consciousness, the human, the child, the world, and experience.

Because “consciousness”, “human”, “child”, “world”, “system”, “construct”, and “anticipation” are not objects already arranged in a stable way before us. They are local statutes: real, but partial; public, but negotiated; effective, but not absolute.

So the clash here is not immediately over the regime of being. It is over the regime of validity of a discourse that assumes certain axioms to be universally shareable.

The risk is that what appears is immediately absorbed into a ready-made grammar: construct, subject, interpretation, anticipation. But perhaps appearing first asks to be treated, not immediately brought back to a theory that decides in advance what form sense must have.
As I can see from several replies, I want to insist on this point: the clash here is not over the regime of being, but over the regime of validity of a given discourse, a discourse made coherent by certain axioms deemed legitimate because they are taken to be universal or a regarded as lacking a discourse that must still be treated, rendered speakable, and brought into nameability.

You are assuming that a certain idea of consciousness, of the human, is valid because it appears natural and self-evident; therefore, you think we can pass over it, since it is perceived as universally shared, or at least shareable.

Even learned and constructed categories are unavoidable facts of a certain kind of appearing, just like anticipation or hierarchy. But to base this kind of reality as if it were absolute, even when presented in pluralist form, evades the fact that it is you who appear in this way, within that kind of grip; being does not care about what you foresee: it happens.

Therefore, even a certain dose of relativism, placed here as an idea, risks shattering before being as it appears and demands the price of being treated.

Traduzione in italiano

Non nego che parlare di sistemi di costrutti sia utile. Però qui mi sembra che si stia spostando il problema senza interrogarne il punto piÚ duro senza scivolare nella tentazione del nulla.

Dire che ognuno di noi vive attraverso un sistema di costrutti che organizza, anticipa e interpreta il mondo è già assumere un certo regime di validità del discorso. Significa decidere che il senso è comprensibile soprattutto come costruzione, anticipazione, interpretazione e gerarchia di schemi.

Ma questa cornice non è natutale, assoluta. È già una presa locale sull’apparire.

Il mio problema non è negare che vi siano costrutti, né negare che ci siano schemi di riconoscimento. Il problema è chiedere con quale diritto “sistema di costrutti” diventi la forma generale attraverso cui leggiamo coscienza, umano, bambino, mondo ed esperienza.

Perché anche “coscienza”, “umano”, “bambino”, “mondo”, “sistema”, “costrutto” e “anticipazione” non sono oggetti già disposti in modo stabile davanti a noi. Sono statuti locali: reali, ma parziali; pubblici, ma negoziati; efficaci, ma non assoluti.

Quindi lo scontro qui non è immediatamente sul regime dell’essere. È sul regime di validità di un discorso che assume alcuni assiomi come universalmente condivisibili.

Il rischio è che ciò che appare venga subito assorbito in una grammatica già pronta: costrutto, soggetto, interpretazione, anticipazione. Ma forse l’apparire chiede prima di essere trattato, non immediatamente ricondotto a una teoria che decide in anticipo che forma deve avere il senso.

Come vedo da varie risposte, insisto sul punto: lo scontro, qui, non è sul regime dell’essere, ma sul regime di validità di un determinato discorso, coerente su determinati assiomi reputati legittimi in quanto universali o reputati privi di un discorso che deve essete trattato reso dicibile e nominabiele.

State pretendendo che l’idea di coscienza, di umano, sia valida in quanto naturale, scontata, e che quindi possiamo sorvolarla, dato che viene percepita come universalmente condivisa o condivisibile.

Anche le categorie apprese e costruite sono fatti inderogabili di un certo tipo di apparire, allo stesso modo dell’anticipo o della gerarchia. Basare questo tipo di realtà come se fosse assoluta, anche se pluralista, elude il fatto che sei tu ad apparire così, dentro quel tipo di presa; all’essere non importa niente di ciò che prevedi: esso accade.

Quindi anche una certa dose di relativismo, qui posta come idea, rischia di frantumarsi davanti all’essere che appare e chiede il pegno di essere trattato.

22

Is it really that fine a line?

Babies use statistical learning to make predictions about the world, guid­ing their actions. Like little statisticians, they form hypotheses, assess probabilities based on their knowledge, integrate new evidence from the envi­ronment, and perform tests. Experiments demonstrate that infants are not merely reactive to the world. Even from a very young age, they actively estimate probabilities
based on patterns that they observe and learn, to maximize the outcomes they desire. (Lisa Barrett)

23

Does a fish have a world view? Does a bat have a world view? Subtracting the symbolic doesn’t efface the type of organised sentience @Joshs is referring to and unarguably exists in its own unique form in babies. We know the symbolic doesn’t impress itself on a tabula rasa, but integrates itself into existing cognitive structures, extending and complexifying them (and maybe even selectively stultifying them).

So, the question of the OP boils down to a definitional one, whether or not we are justified in calling that a ‘world view.’

I don’t think that’s a very interesting question. Endless arguments can easily be made for or against, right? What might be more interesting to ponder though is how a human baby’s pre-conceptual affordances might be, in their particular structuring, anticipatory of the conceptual. What qualitatively identifiable elements in this nascent “world view” are uniquely preparatory of its fully formed, and less controversially applied, counterpart?

24

I think the concept of “need” is to broad for what you want from it, and this leaves the statement kind of meaningless. “Need” already presumes a structure. To experience “need” implies that an organized structure is in place, which apprehends a requirement. So if a baby experiences “need”, this implies already, that there is structure there, which in some way apprehends a deficiency.

So your statement is self-defeating. If the baby experiences need, then structure is already implied and it makes no sense to introduce structure on top as external to need, because structure is already logically prior to need, therefore internal to it.

25

I like that “structure is a verb when it comes to babies” and would go one step further and say that its a verb when it comes to any mind. We are minding things. Can we just jump to a combination of the mind’s structure and the view held by the mind, and reframe this whole question as “When does worldviewing begin?” Turn worldview into a verb, to narrow a broader focus on when does “minding” begin, to when the particular activity of when does something hold a worldview.

This now overlaps with @Wayfarer’s thread on the immaterial or material nature of mind itself. A worldview seems like something wholly present inside a mind (that is of course about the world both beyond the mind along with the mind’s presence in that world). I do agree that there are some initial prompts, some perceptual schemes that accompany or integrate with our cognitive schemes. I would hesitate to say there is a meta-schematic above both the perceptual and the cognitive. I would say the cognitive is the meta level. That’s what minds add to the universe - the meta unifier of many objects as one world, and unifier of subjects as knowing objects in this now unified world. A worldview is a particular instance of what a mind does.

So in a way, minds arise concurrently as worldviews arise. So the notion of pre-cognition might be a bit incoherent. Cognition is immediately self-aware - this insertion of self is the meta layer.

The reason this overlaps with @Wayfarer’s post is that the “meta” aspect of the question of worldview (or any mental content) immediately presents as immaterial. At least from what I can tell. You can’t have a worldview without having a self-awareness of the world and separately your union with the world (as knowledge or as a worldview), so your distinction from the world (as seeking and exploring), all at once.

Seems very crucial. And I would add, because of the importance of language itself to organize cognition, other people, parents, engaging through language, are essential to developing cognitive structures. Babies innately seek to flex their cognitive powers, like they innately open their eyes to capture the light; and these cognitive powers only take particularized form through “active engagement, exploration, experimentation, anticipation” and verbal feedback from other minds. We learn how to think by bouncing off of other minds.

The proactive constructive side (which I think can lead to solipsistic worldviews, or dispel any thoughts of an objective world as part of a worldview), is only part of more dialectical process, where the mind and its cognition emerge together with the world it views. So the mind is the meta activity or the world. We minds ARE the metaphysical.

But as far as babies, they are a stage in this process, and I would say, they are the pre-non-cognitive eggs in need of further hatching.

26

Living in the world doesn’t mean having a worldview. The world has many different layers, which are abstract and metaphysical.

We even don’t know how far the world stretches, and what the boundary of the world should be.

In the world of bacteria and viruses, a tiny cell could be the world for them.

For the fishes in the sea and river, the water they are swimming in would be their world for them.

For the babies just born being nurtured, they don’t have any concept yet in their mind. They have the potential mind which must be developed via perceiving and learning about the world.
But even when they are grown-up adults, they will never know what the real world is.

No one sees the world as a whole. Everyone can only see a tiny fraction of fraction of the world in their whole life.

The man made towns, schools, works and the systems and societies and nations are not the whole world. It is just a little artificial structure constructed for their convenience and protection for leading daily life.

Once they get old and die, they will perish into the thin air or 6ft under. No one knows where the deads are once dead, and remembers if they have been in the world.

The world may have to be included with all the space and places where no one has ever been such as the core of the earth, or the end of the universe.

28

I would like to distinguish between worldview understood as an internal representation of an outer reality, and worldview as a system of anticipatory interaction. Viewing is a doing, an intervention, not a mirroring or representing. To view a world is to be performing activities which alter that world, but performing them on the basis of a scheme of expectations. If I move my hand in such and such a way, the object will respond in such and such a way. You can think for worldview as instructions for anticipating the world’s responses to our engagements with it.

Worldview as activity is not in the head, it is the circuit of engagement between head, body and world. Receptivity and anticipation are not just things that minds do, they are capabilities of all living f systems. So you want to turn the experiential abilities of minds into a metaphysical substance , you’ll have to accord the same privileges to all living things.

29

Sounds like you are speaking of this:

Where you said this:

I am agreeing with that. Although I don’t rely so heavily on “expectation” so much. I think minds can discipline themselves, to be closer to the emptying vessel. We can, to some extent, learn to receive impressions by emptying the mind, as opposed to imposing the mind. But this is really just a more detailed discussion of the same process that is in interplay of the mind we impose on the world, as the world imposes itself on our minds.

30

Exactly. A worldview is a perspective which interprets everything relevant to one’s pragmatic engagement with things in terms of an integrated totality. That is one’s bubble, just as a fish or bird has their bubble, which is the world as it is relevant to their activities and goals. These are worlds which are produced by the organism’s unique patterns of activity in relation to its environment. I don’t think we can ever extract ourselves from our constructed bubble such as to say anything about a world as it supposedly is independent of our interaction with it.

31

But if someone told us, that his wee garden shed, wherein he works all day in and day out, is the world because that is all he ever sees in his whole life, and that is where his worldview comes from, then we would have no idea what he is talking about.

The world is where the whole human race and other life forms live, are born from, and will die in.

32

Maybe the idea that the world is where the whole human race and other life forms live is just one of many worldviews.

33

which is unlikely objective, complete or correct. Highly doubtful if just born babies could have one.

1 Like
34

The baby’s worldview assumption is easy to formulate, but it requires a rigorous metaphysical framework to be answered. Why? Because the human species is the interface between the Life category and the Thought category, and therefore, so is the baby. You need to know exactly how to define and then interface Life and Thought to be able to guess what’s actually happening in a baby’s mind. Lucky for you, I am the only one who has ever figured out how to do that. :smiley:

Definition: Living beings have their definition inside themselves. Thought beings have their definition between human living beings (in the relational space).

Interface: A category will reflect itself in one of its beings, which will thereby bear an infinite, recursive return-to-self, stabilizing itself into a code that bears the next category. For Thought, this biological recursive infinity is meta-mimicry (the mimicry of mimicry), as specific of the human ape to ape. This infinite, recursive aping behavior is what structurally defines us as a species, as living beings.

A recursive infinity suffers nothing other than itself to run as the implementation of the infinite, exactly like every surface is perfectly adjusted in a rotating motor.

OK, let’s apply this model to our baby:

First, Thought does not appear at birth, but around 3 months after conception. Imagine the father pressing his head against the mother’s belly and saying, “I can feel it!”. In the fetus’s meta-mimicking mind, the pressure of the head will mimic the voice, and the voice will mimic the pressure of the head, creating the concept of “pressure-voice”. Catch the mimicking idea now?

OK, we can now precisely answer your worldview assumption: at birth, a baby already possesses a 6-month-old conceptual meta-mimicking model of what happens in the mother’s womb . This conceptual thinking model is not a worldview of what is happening after birth; rather, the infinite meta-mimicking recursive engine will simply continue to run and meta-mimic whatever happens next.

This process has been beautifully described by the works of the immense psychologist Jean Piaget.

35

I agree. For example, what Heidegger means by world is not the same as what others might mean. And world and worldview are not the same thing for Heidegger.

1 Like
36

What do you mean by world and how do you distinguish world from worldview?

Perhaps the more primordial question is when does a baby arrive at a vague and average understanding of being rather than an understanding of world. Isn’t the former essential to forcing the world to announce itself? And if one can not force the world to appear, then how would one form a view of it?

37

Worlds don’t appear like an image, it is produced through our active engagement with it, through what we can do with it.

1 Like
38

I agree “appear” may not be the ideal choice of word but it is adequate to the degree that it is considered somewhat synonymous with emerge, materialize, show-up, and arise.

As Heidegger might say, symptoms of an illness could “appear” without the appearance being visible.

In addition, if we move on from world to worldview, then appear seems less ambiguous than some alternatives. After all, we do not actually “view” a worldview.

I am going to stick with the term.

39

Our active engagement with the world does not produce the world. Instead, our active engagement with the world is with an always already existing world. At least in our average everydayness.

But of course the key concept I am getting at is at what point does a baby have a vague and average understanding of being and at what point can that vague and average understanding of being lead to the world appearing, showing itself, announcing itself, coming to light, etc. And I suggest that all of that needs to happen prior to forming a world-view of the world that has already appeared, showed itself, announced itself, came to light, etc.

40

No, not an empty world. If it appeared empty, the baby would not learn from, and grow within, it. The baby sees the order. She doesn’t recognize order, but her brain develops in response to it.

From Livewired, by David Eagleman:

41

So, but naturally in contradiction one says it all comes from experience while the other perpetuates that it is predetermined like archtypes but what about if we think of it another way like I have not experienced something but my thoughts and ideas still link to it? What will that be reffered to as then? I am genuinely pertubed.