So, surprise, surprise, when philosophers and psychologists are thinking about consciousness, they think about the kind of consciousness that philosophers and psychologists have a lot of the time. USB1 is a miRNA deadenylase that regulates hematopoietic development By Ho-Chang Jeong Yeah, so I was thinking a lot about this, and I actually had converged on two childrens books. So open awareness meditation is when youre not just focused on one thing, when you try to be open to everything thats going on around you. And again, theres tradeoffs because, of course, we get to be good at doing things, and then we want to do the things that were good at. Does this help explain why revolutionary political ideas are so much more appealing to sort of teens and 20 somethings and then why so much revolutionary political action comes from those age groups, comes from students? Alison Gopnik (born June 16, 1955) is an American professor of psychology and affiliate professor of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. And if you think about play, the definition of play is that its the thing that you do when youre not working. But if you look at the social world, theres really this burst of plasticity and flexibility in adolescence. As always, my email is ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com, if youve got something to teach me. And its much harder for A.I. But here is Alison Gopnik. So the meta message of this conversation of what I took from your book is that learning a lot about a childs brain actually throws a totally different light on the adult brain. The adults' imagination will limit by theirshow more content And it turns out that even if you just do the math, its really impossible to get a system that optimizes both of those things at the same time, that is exploring and exploiting simultaneously because theyre really deeply in tension with one another. Whats lost in that? people love acronyms, it turns out. And then the ones that arent are pruned, as neuroscientists say. But another thing that goes with it is the activity of play. And I think its a really interesting question about how do you search through a space of possibilities, for example, where youre searching and looking around widely enough so that you can get to something thats genuinely new, but you arent just doing something thats completely random and noisy. But one of the great finds for me in the parenting book world has been Alison Gopniks work. So for instance, if you look at rats and you look at the rats who get to do play fighting versus rats who dont, its not that the rats who play can do things that the rats cant play can, like every specific fighting technique the rats will have. Theres Been a Revolution in How China Is Governed, How Right-Wing Media Ate the Republican Party, A Revelatory Tour of Martin Luther King Jr.s Forgotten Teachings, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/16/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-alison-gopnik.html, Illustration by The New York Times; Photograph by Kathleen King. And of course, youve got the best play thing there could be, which is if youve got a two-year-old or a three-year-old or a four-year-old, they kind of force you to be in that state, whether you start out wanting to be or not. (if applicable) for The Wall Street Journal. And if you think about something like traveling to a new place, thats a good example for adults, where just being someplace that you havent been before. And each one of them is going to come out to be really different from anything you would expect beforehand, which is something that I think anybody who has had more than one child is very conscious of. But if you do the same walk with a two-year-old, you realize, wait a minute. The robots are much more resilient. Could you talk a bit about that, what this sort of period of plasticity is doing at scale? And then youve got this other creature thats really designed to exploit, as computer scientists say, to go out, find resources, make plans, make things happen, including finding resources for that wild, crazy explorer that you have in your nursery. Chapter Three The Trouble with Geniuses, part 1 by Malcolm Gladwell. But its sort of like they keep them in their Rolodex. One of the things I really like about this is that it pushes towards a real respect for the childs brain. And the idea is maybe we could look at some of the things that the two-year-olds do when theyre learning and see if that makes a difference to what the A.I.s are doing when theyre learning. What are the trade-offs to have that flexibility? I can just get right there. Cambridge, Mass. And the way that computer scientists have figured out to try to solve this problem very characteristically is give the system a chance to explore first, give it a chance to figure out all the information, and then once its got the information, it can go out and it can exploit later on. Why Barnes & Noble Is Copying Local Bookstores It Once Threatened, What Floridas Dying Oranges Tell Us About How Commodity Markets Work, Watch: Heavy Snowfall Shuts Down Parts of California, U.K., EU Agree to New Northern Ireland Trade Deal. One of the things that were doing right now is using some of these kind of video game environments to put A.I. Well, I think heres the wrong message to take, first of all, which I think is often the message that gets taken from this kind of information, especially in our time and our place and among people in our culture. I mean, theyre constantly doing something, and then they look back at their parents to see if their parent is smiling or frowning. Alison Gopnik is a renowned developmental psychologist whose research has revealed much about the amazing learning and reasoning capacities of young children, and she may be the leading . Her books havent just changed how I look at my son. Im curious how much weight you put on the idea that that might just be the wrong comparison. Its a terrible literature. Well, or what at least some people want to do. And then the other one is whats sometimes called the default mode. And then the central head brain is doing things like saying, OK, now its time to squirt. If I want to make my mind a little bit more childlike, aside from trying to appreciate the William Blake-like nature of children, are there things of the childs life that I should be trying to bring into mind? Thank you for listening. Alison Gopnik is a professor of psychology and philosophy at UC Berkeley. Read previous columns here. I mean, obviously, Im a writer, but I like writing software. And you start ruminating about other things. researchers are borrowing from human children, the effects of different types of meditation on the brain and more. It kind of disappears from your consciousness. Now, were obviously not like that. system. Thats really what you want when youre conscious. Gopnik's findings are challenging traditional beliefs about the minds of babies and young children, for example, the notion that very young children do not understand the perspective of others an idea philosophers and psychologists have defended for years. We talk about why Gopnik thinks children should be considered an entirely different form of Homo sapiens, the crucial difference between spotlight consciousness and lantern consciousness, why going for a walk with a 2-year-old is like going for a walk with William Blake, what A.I. And the other nearby parts get shut down, again, inhibited. Thats actually working against the very function of this early period of exploration and learning. By Alison Gopnik November 20, 2016 Illustration by Todd St. John I was in the garden. So the children, perhaps because they spend so much time in that state, also can be fussy and cranky and desperately wanting their next meal or desperately wanting comfort. She received her BA from McGill University, and her PhD. And I just saw how constant it is, just all day, doing something, touching back, doing something, touching back, like 100 times in an hour. Even if youre not very good at it, someone once said that if somethings worth doing, its worth doing badly. So look at a person whos next to you and figure out what it is that theyre doing. And often, quite suddenly, if youre an adult, everything in the world seems to be significant and important and important and significant in a way that makes you insignificant by comparison. This isnt just habit hardening into dogma. 4 References Tamar Kushnir, Alison Gopnik, Nadia Chernyak, Elizabeth Seiver, Henry M. Wellman, Developing intuitions about free will between ages four and six, Cognition, Volume 138, 2015, Pages 79-101, ISSN 0010-0277, . As a subscriber, you have 10 gift articles to give each month. We better make sure that all this learning is going to be shaped in the way that we want it to be shaped. One way you could think about it is, our ecological niche is the unknown unknowns. Heres a sobering thought: The older we get, the harder it is for us to learn, to question, to reimagine. Unlike my son and I dont want to brag here unlike my son, I can make it from his bedroom to the kitchen without any stops along the way. Its been incredibly fun at the Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Research Group. So theres this lovely concept that I like of the numinous. You may change your billing preferences at any time in the Customer Center or call And he was absolutely right. Alison Gopnik is a professor of psychology and affiliate professor of philosophy at the University of California at Berkeley. Now its more like youre actually doing things on the world to try to explore the space of possibilities. Theyve really changed how I look at myself, how I look at all of us. Try again later. In The Gardener and the Carpenter, the pioneering developmental psychologist and philosopher Alison Gopnik argues that the familiar twenty-first-century picture of parents and children is profoundly wrongit's not just based on bad science, it's bad for kids and parents, too. [MUSIC PLAYING]. She studies the cognitive science of learning and development. We unlock the potential of millions of people worldwide. And I was really pleased because my intuitions about the best books were completely confirmed by this great reunion with the grandchildren. And why not, right? Youre kind of gone. Theyre not just doing the obvious thing, but theyre not just behaving completely randomly. And I think that kind of open-ended meditation and the kind of consciousness that it goes with is actually a lot like things that, for example, the romantic poets, like Wordsworth, talked about. Alison Gopnik is a Professor in the Department of Psychology. We keep discovering that the things that we thought were the right things to do are not the right things to do. our Subscriber Agreement and by copyright law. So if you think about what its like to be a caregiver, it involves passing on your values. And I dont do that as much as I would like to or as much as I did 20 years ago, which makes me think a little about how the society has changed. Ive had to spend a lot more time thinking about pickle trucks now. By Alison Gopnik. So this isnt just a conversation about kids or for parents. So we have more different people who are involved and engaged in taking care of children. And we dont really completely know what the answer is. And yet, theres all this strangeness, this weirdness, the surreal things just about those everyday experiences. So, again, just sort of something you can formally show is that if I know a lot, then I should really rely on that knowledge. And then once youve done that kind of exploration of the space of possibilities, then as an adult now in that environment, you can decide which of those things you want to have happen. I think its a good place to come to a close. And I think for adults, a lot of the function, which has always been kind of mysterious like, why would reading about something that hasnt happened help you to understand things that have happened, or why would it be good in general I think for adults a lot of that kind of activity is the equivalent of play. And the neuroscience suggests that, too. But nope, now you lost that game, so figure out something else to do. So its another way of having this explore state of being in the world. So thats one change thats changed from this lots of local connections, lots of plasticity, to something thats got longer and more efficient connections, but is less changeable. Planets and stars, eclipses and conjunctions would seem to have no direct effect on our lives, unlike the mundane and sublunary antics of our fellow humans. Two Days Mattered Most. She takes childhood seriously as a phase in human development. If you're unfamiliar with Gopnik's work, you can find a quick summary of it in her Ted Talk " What Do Babies Think ?" Theyre not always in that kind of broad state. So theres a really nice picture about what happens in professorial consciousness. How the $500 Billion Attention Industry Really Works, How Liberals Yes, Liberals Are Hobbling Government. One of them is the one thats sort of heres the goal-directed pathway, what they sometimes call the task dependent activity. Causal learning mechanisms in very young children: two-, three-, and four-year-olds infer causal relations from patterns of variation and covariation. So youre actually taking in information from everything thats going on around you. And as you might expect, what you end up with is A.I. One of the arguments you make throughout the book is that children play a population level role, right? It feels like its just a category. And I think having this kind of empathic relationship to the children who are exploring so much is another. is whats come to be called the alignment problem, is how can you get the A.I. The Ezra Klein Show is produced by Rog Karma and Jeff Geld; fact-checking by Michelle Harris; original music by Isaac Jones; mixing by Jeff Geld. And can you talk about that? Read previous columns .css-1h1us5y-StyledLink{color:var(--interactive-text-color);-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;}.css-1h1us5y-StyledLink:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}here. When I went to Vox Media, partially I did that because of their great CMS or publishing software Chorus. So even if you take something as simple as that you would like to have your systems actually youd like to have the computer in your car actually be able to identify this is a pedestrian or a car, it turns out that even those simple things involve abilities that we see in very young children that are actually quite hard to program into a computer. This, three blocks, its just amazing. So what kind of function could that serve? You get this different combination of genetics and environment and temperament. So if you look at the social parts of the brain, you see this kind of rebirth of plasticity and flexibility in adolescence. What should having more respect for the childs mind change not for how we care for children, but how we care for ourselves or what kinds of things we open ourselves into? And then it turns out that that house is full of spirits and ghosts and traditions and things that youve learned from the past. Yeah, so I think a really deep idea that comes out of computer science originally in fact, came out of the original design of the computer is this idea of the explore or exploit trade-off is what they call it. Contrast that view with a new one that's quickly gaining ground. But I think they spend much more of their time in that state. Their salaries are higher. And we can compare what it is that the kids and the A.I.s do in that same environment. Slumping tech and property activity arent yet pushing the broader economy into recession. will have one goal, and that will never change. Each of the children comes out differently. And let me give you a third book, which is much more obscure. Alison Gopnik July 2012 Children who are better at pretending could reason better about counterfactualsthey were better at thinking about different possibilities. And you watch the Marvel Comics universe movies. The philosophical baby: What children's minds tell us about truth, love & the meaning of life. Our Sense of Fairness Is Beyond Politics (21 Jan 2021) So they can play chess, but if you turn to a child and said, OK, were just going to change the rules now so that instead of the knight moving this way, it moves another way, theyd be able to figure out how to adopt what theyre doing. In the series Learning, Development, and Conceptual Change. Thats really what were adapted to, are the unknown unknowns. Well, if you think about human beings, were being faced with unexpected environments all the time. Tether Holdings and a related crypto broker used cat and mouse tricks to obscure identities, documents show. Alison Gopnik Creativity is something we're not even in the ballpark of explaining. And we do it partially through children. And thats not the right thing. And you say, OK, so now I want to design you to do this particular thing well. Is it just going to be the case that there are certain collaborations of our physical forms and molecular structures and so on that give our intelligence different categories? Articles by Ismini A. But then theyre taking that information and integrating it with all the other information they have, say, from their own exploration and putting that together to try to design a new way of being, to try and do something thats different from all the things that anyone has done before. Everything around you becomes illuminated. And it seems as if parents are playing a really deep role in that ability. Because I have this goal, which is I want to be a much better meditator. She is Jewish. The Understanding Latency webinar series is happening on March 6th-8th. And were pretty well designed to think its good to care for children in the first place. One kind of consciousness this is an old metaphor is to think about attention as being like a spotlight. ALISON GOPNIK: Well, from an evolutionary biology point of view, one of the things that's really striking is this relationship between what biologists call life history, how our developmental. If youve got this kind of strategy of, heres the goal, try to accomplish the goal as best as you possibly can, then its really kind of worrying about what the goal is, what the values are that youre giving these A.I. Speakers include a And of course, once we develop a culture, that just gets to be more true because each generation is going to change its environment in various ways that affect its culture. Or another example is just trying to learn a skill that you havent learned before. And the same thing is true with Mary Poppins. So imagine if your arms were like your two-year-old, right? And awe is kind of an example of this. Their, This "Cited by" count includes citations to the following articles in Scholar. A Very Human Answer to One of AIs Deepest Dilemmas, Children, Creativity, and the Real Key to Intelligence, Causal learning, counterfactual reasoning and pretend play: a cross-cultural comparison of Peruvian, mixed- and low-socioeconomic status U.S. children | Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, Love Lets Us Learn: Psychological Science Makes the Case for Policies That Help Children, The New Riddle of the Sphinx: Life History and Psychological Science, Emotional by Leonard Mlodinow review - the new thinking about feelings, What Children Lose When Their Brains Develop Too Fast, Why nation states struggle with social care.