Chapter Three

By the third day of the conference, the Kiva Ballroom felt like Plato’s cave. We prisoners sat in darkness as spotlighted figures on a stage projected arcane patterns on two enormous screens and jabbered about free will, neural networks, Bayes theorem, machine intelligence, panpsychism, psychedelics and telekinesis. What’s real, I wondered, what’s illusion? Does our desire to escape the cave just drive us deeper into darkness?

It was April 2016, and I was in Tucson, Arizona, at “The Science of Consciousness,” the same meeting I attended back in 1994. Hundreds of scholars pitched theories to a thousand listeners. A disproportionate number of males had shaved heads or ponytails. The woo quotient had, if anything, surged over the past 22 years, perhaps because spirituality mogul Deepak Chopra had become a sponsor.

I tried to be open-minded, but skepticism welled up like stomach acid. Simmering in an outdoor hot tub with a quantum-consciousness enthusiast, I raised the old objection that brains are too warm to sustain effects like coherence and superposition. Bullshit, my tub-mate said, light is a quantum effect that happens at room temperature. To my annoyance, I couldn’t think of a retort, probably because the hot tub was interfering with my quantum coherence.

My hopes rose for a lecture by anthropologist Terrence Deacon, whom another science writer had urged me to check out. Deacon proposed that all organisms, even bacteria, possess “sentience,” the capacity to detect and distinguish themselves from the outer world. Once we figure out sentience, we can take on consciousness, which emerges when organisms become sentient of their sentience.

That seemed reasonable, but as he built upon this premise, Deacon kept introducing more neologisms. Homeodynamics, morphodynamics, teleodynamics, autogenesis and so on. I mused over how one clever coinage, like “strange loop” or “meme,” can illuminate, whereas many obfuscate. Overhearing someone rave about Deacon’s “fantastic” talk, I thought, Our responses to theories of subjectivity are so subjective! And sensitive to theorists’ style.

What does it say about mind-science that language matters so much? One can rank scientific fields by their dependence on rhetoric. Darwin and Einstein could be eloquent, but their theories endure because they fit the facts. We justly call them true. We still read William James and Freud because they are literary masters. To call their works true seems like a category error, akin to saying Pride and Prejudice is true. But does that mean objective analysis of the mind is impossible? Should we see all mind-body theories as works of fiction?

By the time Alison Gopnik lectured, I was desperate for something tangible, empirical, objectively true. Gopnik is a psychologist who specializes in children. While scientists like Deacon try to understand how mind evolved long ego in our ancestors, Gopnik investigates how mind unfolds in kids. Each childhood reprises, in a sense, human evolution.

In her 2009 book The Philosophical Baby: What Children’s Minds Tell Us About Truth, Love, and the Meaning of Life, Gopnik rebukes the great sages of history for overlooking childhood. “You could read 2,500 years of philosophy and find almost nothing about children. A Martian who tried to figure us out by studying Earthling philosophy could easily conclude that human beings reproduce by asexual cloning.”

Studying children, Gopnik argues, can illuminate deep mind-body riddles, like how we know about the world. In a chapter called “Escaping Plato’s Cave,” she points out that knowledge begins with sensory stimuli, such as photons impinging on our retinas and sound waves on our eardrums. From these inputs we construct accurate, predictive maps of the world. How?

Plato proposed that we are born with an intuitive knowledge of mathematical forms existing in a transcendent realm. Worldly things are imperfect manifestations of those ethereal forms. A modern incarnation of this idea holds that evolution encoded knowledge into our genes, knowledge activated by external stimuli. These approaches assume our brains deduce truth. You see something small and furry with a black nose and floppy ears, compare it to your internal models and conclude: puppy!

An alternative, Gopnik points out, would be representing the world probabilistically. Our brains toss out multiple interpretations of a given stimulus and select those that seem most probable. That is probably a puppy, and it’s probably okay to pet it. This is the Bayesian method of knowledge generation, based on a formula for calculating probabilities invented by 18^th-century cleric Thomas Bayes (who used it to prove God’s existence).

Bayesian models have been embraced by other psychologists specializing in learning and by computer scientists trying to build intelligent machines. Gopnik was an early adopter, in part because the models emphasize imagination, which she sees as an underappreciated human talent. Imagination allows us to envision, and become, something other than what we are. Our “capacity for change,” Gopnik states, “both in our own lives and throughout history, is the most distinctive and unchanging thing about us.”

When Gopnik stood before us in the Kiva Ballroom, illuminated by spotlights, I felt sympathetic stage fright, as I often do before others’ talks. But she commandeered the ballroom like Caesar, a diminutive, feminine Caesar with short dark hair, sheathed in silky pants and blouse. Yanking the mike from its stand, Gopnik primed us with a barrage of questions. What is it like to be a child? A baby? Why do humans have such a long childhood? Are babies just dumb, incompetent versions of adults? Are they less conscious than adults, or even unconscious?

Babies are in some respects more conscious than adults, Gopnik said, more open to stimuli, because they have fewer filters, pre-conceptions, goals. She backed up this assertion with a graph charting the synaptic connections between brain cells. The connections surge from birth until we are seven or eight and then drop off sharply as our brains undergo “synaptic pruning.”

Gopnik’s research has also established that kids can be more creative than adults, better at finding “unlikely solutions” to problems. The older we get, the more our knowledge and pseudo-knowledge blind us. We are in “a box defined by our hypotheses.” We search the space of possible solutions for those compatible with our pre-existing beliefs. Yeah! I thought. That’s why we don’t see the damn gorilla!

Gopnik distinguished between two mental modes, “explore” and “exploit.” Kids are in the explore mode, absorbing information at a prodigious rate, open to anything, experimenting wildly with ideas, imagining all sorts of possibilities, even fantastical ones. From puberty on, we shift to exploit mode, in which we increasingly focus on goals like finding mates and making money. Kids are humanity’s R&D department, Gopnik said, adults do manufacturing, marketing and sales.

Another metaphor: Grownup consciousness is a spotlight, kid consciousness a lantern, casting light widely. Oldsters can recapture their child-like open-mindedness with meditation, travel, romance and caffeine, which has chemicals like those abounding in kids. Being a child is like being in Paris high on love and double espressos. Psychedelics can also do the trick. “Babies and children are basically tripping all the time,” Gopnik said. I and the other old acidheads in the audience clapped and cheered.

Gopnik’s talk left me wanting to recapture the innocence of childhood, open my eyes, see the gorilla. Maybe it was time to drink ayahuasca again, or give meditation another shot. Exiting Kiva Cave into blinding sunlight, I joined a line of grownups trudging up the path to the main hotel. A boy and girl, seven or eight, descended in the opposite direction on the grass beside the path. They didn’t trudge, they ambled, sauntered, they were loosey-goosey, tipsy. As the boy passed me, he flopped forward and summersaulted the rest of the way down the slope. For an insane instant, I wondered if the boy was in cahoots with Gopnik.

* * * * *

I interviewed Gopnik in Tucson in 2016 and at her home in Berkeley a year later, where I observed one of her experiments on kids. Physically petite, she has an over-sized presence. Her face seems—the word that kept coming to mind was naked. She is ebulliently unguarded. When I posed a question, she didn’t just answer it. She pounced on it, batted it around, grabbed it in her teeth, shook it back and forth. Ideas gushed out of her so fast that her speech could barely keep pace. The faster she talke