What do childrens minds tell us about truth, love and the meaning of life?
Those are all big philosophical questions and you might think very small children wouldn’t have much to say about them. But it turns out all three can be illuminated by thinking about children. Let’s start with truth. One of the great philosophical puzzles is how we learn the truth about the world around us. We’ve discovered very young children – even babies – have powerful learning mechanisms such as the ability to do statistics, do experiments and use logic. They help them determine what the world is like. One of the basic questions is how do we get truth about the world. Well, we have brains that even as young children are designed to let us find out the truth. Take the second one: love. It turns out that the evolutionary strategy is that we have this need for a period of protected immaturity while we exercise learning mechanisms to figure out the world. But while the young children are doing this they need to be protected. Children can learn so much because they are taken care of a
