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Do Babies Know Anything?
Having recently become a father for the first time, certain questions about human nature hit me that for some reason I had never contemplated in my daily life. One of those questions was related to life’s absurdity, which I wrote about in another post.
Seeing my daughter absolutely captivated by seemingly mundane things in the world is a joy to behold, but it is also bewildering.
It’s like life is being rejuvenated all over again through what Zen Buddhists would call Shoshin (初心), which translates as beginner’s mind. The term is normally applied to students of Zen Buddhism who are encouraged to approach their studies with openness, eagerness, and a complete lack of preconceptions. To me, it looks like that’s how my baby’s mind works when learning about life in her early months.
Thinking about this stuff then led to the following interesting question:
Does a newborn baby have innate knowledge about anything in this world?
If the answer is no, then everything any newborn child learns about the world is solely based on living and taking in data through the five senses, and genetics are irrelevant. It turns out that this is quite an important debate in Western philosophy that traces its roots back to Aristotle.
According to Aristotle, who is sometimes described as the Father of Western Philosophy,
“What the mind thinks must be in it just as characters may be said to be on a writing-tablet on which as yet nothing stands written.”
John Locke, an influential British philosopher, elaborated on this idea and formulated the blank slate theory, or tabula rasa.
What is the Blank Slate Theory?
The blank slate theory says that knowledge and reason arise in the human mind only by forming memories from experience. There is no prior knowledge embedded in the mind. Locke explained his theory using a blank sheet of white paper as a metaphor for the mind that has yet to formulate memories and learn things.
Quoting from locke’s famous text, “An Essay Concerning Human Understanding“:
“Whence comes it by that vast store which the busy and boundless fancy of man has painted on it with an almost endless variety? Whence has it all the materials of reason and knowledge? To this, I answer, in one word, from experience.”
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The viewpoint posited by Locke favors nurture in the famous nature versus nurture debate. Taking the position of nature—a combination of genetic and biological factors—one argues that these factors influence human behavioral traits.
Proponents of the blank slate theory argue that external factors alone—experience and learning—determine human behavior, and no prior knowledge or behavioral proclivities are embedded in the human psyche.
Eastern Thought and The Blank Slate Theory
I am far from a philosopher or an intellectual. I am simply a writer who enjoys exploring and sharing ideas on my blog, so I am not going to make an effort to resolve these debates between empiricism (nurture) and innatism (nature) in the manner of a philosopher or an intellectual.
In fact, I’ll most likely be talking out of my arse at some point in this post, although believe me, I do my best to avoid talking nonsense and I research the hell out of everything I write.
What I want to do is approach the blank slate theory from the perspective of, say, Eastern ideas, to see what kind of answers we get from thinking about the fundamental question differently. To me, the beauty of Eastern thought is that it always provides a new way of thinking about the problems and big questions of life.
Buddhism and Biology
Within Hindu and Buddhist schools of thought, the body-mind, or Namarupa, and consciousness, Vijñāna, both carry with them remnants of a previous existence. Latent dispositions are embedded into us from birth and they influence our behavior toward actions motivated by ignorance and desire.
It is the goal of Buddhist liberation to escape the continuous cycle of death and rebirth by understanding the Four Noble Truths and following the Noble Eightfold Path. Among these noble truths is the maxim that life is suffering and that the causes of suffering are craving (or desire), ignorance, and hatred.
Both of these Eastern religions use the concept of Samsara, which is a continuous cycle of birth, existence, and death. It’s a merry-go-round that doesn’t stop until liberation.
It can be difficult for the Western mind to get on board with the idea of Samsara, particularly when it is imbued with less credible ideas like reincarnation as alternative life forms, beneficial and protective forces (Merit), and an afterlife.
However, when it’s couched in terms of evolutionary development, Samsara becomes a credible concept.
Evolutionary biology states that we are all descendants of creatures who behaved in such a way as to reproduce most successfully. We now inherit and embody those characteristics as living beings.
Humans are dynamic processes but we are also historically conditioned and born with physiological structures that are expressed in tendencies to behave in certain ways. Don’t we have an ingrained proclivity for certain behaviors, like the desire to reproduce and the drive to survive?
You might say you don’t want to reproduce, you don’t want kids, but I know you have the desire for sex. If you want to separate that from reproduction, that’s your choice. Still, it appears that sexual/reproductive desire is biologically ingrained. Is this not a form of knowledge and a way of behaving that is innate in us? Is the mind’s blank sheet of paper ever truly blank?
From an excellent paper titled Beyond Nature\NurtureBuddhism and Biology on Interdependence, the writer W.S. Waldron has this to say:
“They (Buddhist ideas) point toward a vision of evolutionary development in which not only are organisms inseparably intertwined with their surrounding environments but the attempts to separate certain dimensions from others – whether nature\nurture, seems an artificial exercise that obscures as much as it edifies.
A full recognition of this radical interdependence, this inseparability between mind and world, genes and environment, individual and society, arguably helps ameliorate rather than exacerbate our sense of alienation or separation from the ‘natural’ world.”
Evolutionary biology says that human beings in form and structure are a result of past actions over countless generations. Early Buddhist ideas say we are the result of karma (action) and we now experience manifestations of those actions as behavioral tendencies. To me, these sentences are the same.
However, in light of the constant flux of life and each individual’s interdependence and interaction with our environment, it seems to me like there is no fixed human nature at all; it’s always changing.
And if there is no unchanging human nature, there’s no pure nurture or blank sheet of paper to compare it to. That blank sheet of the mind is already influenced by evolutionarily acquired structures that predispose us to certain behaviors.
As the not-quite-blank sheet of the mind is increasingly colored by interacting with the environment and acquiring knowledge, nurture influences future nature, if we’re redefining human nature as a continually flowing and changing process.
It seems to me that Buddhism says there’s no intelligent way to distinguish between nature and nurture because the two always influence each other, so the debate is pointless. Everything is relationship.
The Uncarved Block of Taoism
Pretty much everyone is familiar with the above symbol. It is the yin-yang of the Ancient Chinese philosophy of Taoism (or Daoism).
A really interesting idea in Taoism is that of the uncarved block, or pu (朴). This pu is the original nature of not only the pure mind in its natural state, but of the Tao itself; the rhythms and way of the universe.
It is a state of being and perceiving without prejudice or dualistic distinction. It is experiencing the world and flowing with life without reifying what we interact with. It is spontaneity in all its glory. Pu is the ideal state of how I imagine my newborn child’s mind to be in but that doesn’t necessarily mean it is like I wish it to be; it’s just a nice thought.
Returning to the Blank Sheet of Pure Mind
What all of this says about my the contents of my six-month-old daughter’s mind as she laughs for ten minutes at a red apple, I’m not entirely sure. 🙂
Perhaps it should be a goal for all of us to temporarily return to that pure mind, child-like state where everything around us is vibrant and wonderful and hilarious and spontaneous. Whether one can pursue that child-like wonder through meditation, asceticism, or psychedelic substances, I can only speculate. It might not even be possible to get there, although many sources claim it is.
I hope you at least found this an interesting and stimulating read. Please check out my recommended further reading suggestions for more on these topics. Thanks.
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