Descartes' Baby: How the Science of Child Development Explains What Makes Us Human

by Paul Bloom

All humans see the world in two fundamentally different even babies have a rich understanding of both the physical and social worlds. They expect objects to obey principles of physics, and they're startled when things disappear or defy gravity. Yet they can also read emotions and respond with anger, sympathy, and joy. In Descartes' Baby , Bloom draws on a wealth of scientific discoveries to show how these two ways of knowing give rise to such uniquely human traits as humor, disgust, religion, art, and morality. How our dualist perspective, developed throughout our lives, profoundly influences our thoughts, feelings, and actions is the subject of this richly rewarding book.

Genres: Psychology, Science, Philosophy, Nonfiction, Biology, Parenting, Religion

288 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2004

About the author

Paul Bloom is the Brooks and Suzanne Ragen Professor of Psychology and Cognitive Science at Yale University. His research explores how children and adults understand the physical and social world, with special focus on morality, religion, fiction, and art. He has published more than a hundred scientific articles in journals such as Science and Nature, and his popular writing has appeared in the New York Times, the New Yorker, the Atlantic Monthly, Slate, Natural History, and many other publications. He has won numerous awards for his research and teaching. His newest book--Just Babies: The Origins of Good and Evil--is coming out in November. Paul Bloom lives in New Haven with his wife and two sons.

Reviews

[Tim · Rating 4 out of 5]

A materialist attempts to explain why human beings intuitively believe in a dualist interpretation of humanity. In plainer terms, if we are only thinking matter, why do we believe we are more than thinking matter? The premise from which he begins is as follows : 'There is something that many find disturbing, even revolting, about the notion of a soulless body, a purely physical creature that acts as if it were a person. This reaction is worrisome, given the scientific consensus that Descartes was mistaken. Modern science tells us that the conscious self arises from a purely physical brain. We do not have immaterial souls; we are material beings.'

I suppose I could take issue with the wording of the passage. Much of modern science does 'tell' us that in the sense that it asserts it to be true, it does not tell us it in the sense that it has ever been proven conclusively. You need not take my word for this. Google the phrase 'the hard problem of consciousness' and see for yourself. Even so, it was his starting premise so I accepted it as true in reading the book even though I am far from convinced of it myself. The task of the book then became: if we are only material bodies, why do we have an intuitive sense we have (or are) immaterial souls? Where did that idea come from? Why is it so deeply ingrained in our thinking even as children?

In his quest to explain this conundrum and many of the things bound up in it (morality, humour, the human propensity to create art, etc.) the author ranges over three broad swaths of ground: 1) The Material Realm 2) The Social Realm 3) The Spiritual Realm. There was a lot of interesting material in this book – some of which I agreed with, some of which I didn't – but almost all of which was compelling. Some interesting questions were posed along the way. Was cold and logical Mr. Spock actually motivated by emotion? How many times do you baptize siamese twins, once for the body or twice for the minds? It also contains a lot of amusing anecdotal material: A social experiment where staunch atheists displayed an incredible reluctance to draft and sign contracts wherein they sell their souls to the Devil. An art forger who passed off his work as the genuine article in order to demonstrate that much of art criticism is, in fact, a psychology of bias, snobbery, and prejudice – something he made clear by exposing his works as forgeries so a choice had to be made: would the critics retract their earlier statements now that the truth was known or would they acknowledge he was as great an artist as they had previously stated he was?

Ultimately, the author failed to convince me we are only thinking meat. A lot of the evidence he cites to bolster his claim could easily be turned around and used as evidence that we are not only thinking meat. For example, he cites a psychologist named Margaret Evans who 'tested the children of Christian fundamentalists and the children of non-fundamentalists parents who endorsed evolutionary theory. She asked them to judge the likelihood of different accounts of where things come from – from human intervention, from God, or from evolution. Her central finding was that children were consistently more creationist than their parents; they were drawn to the God explanation even if the parents who raised them were not.' The author explains this behaviour by means of artificialism, a human propensity to view complex structures as the result of intentionality. Within the materialist mindset this might make perfect sense. The dualist – and in particular the theist – can take that very same evidence and construct a completely different and no less valid explanation: the reason children think this way is because it is innate to do so, such reasoning comes pre-loaded in much the same way a copy of the latest version of Windows 10 comes pre-loaded on a new PC. Children think the complexity inherent in nature looks like the result of intention because in some sense it is the result of intention and so is their propensity to see it. After all, the claim here is that you have to train people not to see it. You must make them unlearn something they know instinctively.

This book really highlights the problem of ontologies like materialism and dualism. They are, in a sense, as foundational as axioms. You cannot get beneath them and prop them up with some unassailable evidence, instead you start with one or another and pile the evidence atop them. Different premise, different conclusion. If you are already a committed materialist, you will probably accept most of what this book says. If you are a committed dualist, I am willing to lay odds you won't.

It would be very disingenuous of me to give a book a low rating just because I disagree with some of the things it says. There is far more to writing a book than placing a number of propositional statements in a bowl, stirring it around with a spoon, and emptying it out on a table to see what you get. It takes time and effort. The fact of the matter is this book was very well written and engaging. I thoroughly enjoyed reading it.

[Kas Molenaar · Rating 1 out of 5]

Ik vond het niet best.

Een rommelig geschreven boek dat pretendeert een basis in filosofie te hebben, maar bijzonder relevante literatuur negeert; een boek waarin het beloofde thema na de eerste twee hoofdstukken nog slechts een rol speelt die niet veel groter is dan een paar voetnoten; een boek waarin geen enkele term gedefinieerd of gestipuleerd wordt, ook niet als de termen leiden tot een argument dat de auteur als doorslaggevend lijkt te bedoelen; een boek waarin conclusies ofwel overhaast worden getrokken, ofwel worden onderbouwd dan iets anders dan wat er geschreven staat.

De auteur schijnt een gerenommeerd academisch psycholoog te zijn. Uit dit boek komt dat vooralsnog niet over.

[Robert Day · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read much of this book without any clear idea of what I was reading and what the author was trying to say. I write now with only a vague impression of what it was all about.

I do know that I read a book by Steven Pinker called How the Mind Works a little after this and found there to be many, many similar things written in both tomes. I'm not sure which volume came first but I have read that Bloom and Pinker are friends or colleagues. I don't think this excuses the overlap and I feel slightly cheated to be reading the same things twice.

There are ideas in this book that are not in Pinker's book, but there is hardly anything here that I haven't read elsewhere.

Are there no new things under the sun anymore? It seems that everything I read these days is either a rehash of a subject that has already been covered, a summary of some earlier work or an in-depth treatment of something purporting to be ground-breaking (but was not).

I think part of the problem is the way we learn things at school. We seem to be encouraged to compare this, synthesise that or review the other in search of what? Re-treating and referencing what has come before is hardly likely to lead to new knowledge, if indeed such a thing exists. I remember reflecting, as a teenager, that there is nothing new to be invented, just things to be re-discovered.

Is this the end?

Hopefully not.

Hopefully I'm just jaded and need something to refresh my palate.

Let's see; something new; hmm; how about an in depth treatment of the inner life of ... me!

Advantages - familiar subject to me so easy to write about, and completely new territory to most of the 7,366,254,062 people on this planet right now (according to the World Population Clock ).

Disadvantages - most people are mostly like me so would mostly know what I'm like already, unless of course I'm the only real person and the rest of y'all are zombies.

That'd explain why I don't get many likes for these reviews. Of course, the other explanation is that people like reviews that stick to the point rather than being a rambling ramble through the mind of the reviewer.

Then again, I make no excuses, I find 'me' to be more interesting than books. So why do I read so many books then (I hear myself ask)? Simple - I find me by the light of others.

'I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together' as Lennon explained to us on one acid tripping weekend and if Lennon had reviewed this book on the same weekend, he couldn't have done a finer job.

Quick return to the point - book is nicely written, interesting in detail, confusing as a whole, not ground-breaking and has an interesting, but unintelligible cover.

[Deb · Rating 5 out of 5]

*Physical bodies, immaterial souls*


What makes us human?

Paul Bloom's book of _Descartes' Baby_ offers a rich and satisfying exploration of this existential question. At the core of this book is the premise that "we are dualists who have two ways of looking at the world: in terms of bodies and in terms of souls." (p.191). In other words, we see our bodies and souls as separate entities and "we do not feel as if we *are* bodies; we feel as if we *occupy* them." (p. 191)

This dualistic lens allows us to come into this world with a basic understanding of physical bodies as well as an innate empathy which allows for an appreciation of souls. As the author notes, "these two modes of seeing the world interact in surprising ways in the course of development of each child, and in the social context of a community of humans they give rise to certainly uniquely human traits, such as morality and religion." (p. xii) Dualism also helps us approach the concepts of self, identify, consciousness, and life after death, and also create and appreciate art.

Our innate dualism also underlies how we respond towards others: our intuitive feelings of empathy towards their souls allow them in, while our visceral feelings of disgust towards their bodies keep them out. And, it is the interplay between our empathy and intelligence that allows for an evolved moral understanding which results in our abilities to understand the beliefs, experiences, drives, motivations, desires, intents, and goals of others--traits that define the essence of being human.

I enjoyed this book so much that I read it twice. (Interestingly, the last time I did that was with the author's more recent book of _How Pleasure Works_.) And, as I sit here and write this review and reflect on the book's engrossing content and skillful writing, I find myself tempted to read it yet again. Clearly, the physical book has excited my immaterial soul. (Dualism in action!)

[Hamdy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Bloom's style is unsurpassed, he is both interesting and intellectually fulfilling which is a hard thing to do. He also has a central theme in that he's using developmental psychology as a lens to look at essentialism being a wired-in property of human nature. This makes things much more interesting and provides a common thread to the book that keeps its direction well-maintained. His discussions of the nature of art, disgust and the understanding of the relationship between morality and disgust were particularly insightful.

[Andrew · Rating 4 out of 5]

Humans have evolved to think in intuitively Cartesian terms in making a distinction between the res extensa (bodies) and the res cogitans (selves, souls, minds). We have the twin capacities to reason about physical, material objects and a different way of thinking about minds and people. People treat objects and people differently; but while the human capacity for understanding the physical world is no so different from other species, the human capacity for mindreading is qualitatively different from that of any other species. We see the world as comprising bodies and souls, and we understand different things by these different terms.

- WHY ARE WE INTUITIVE DUALISTS? Autistic children extend the physical modes of understanding to people, when they should understand them as agents with souls. For ‘normal’ people, they extend their capacity for mindreading to the object realm. (Which is why movies made by Pixar are so popular; we’re good at projecting our emotions onto things that have none.) Humans always put things that we experience into categories. Why? A perfect memory, one that treats each experience as a distinct thing-in-itself, is useless. The whole point of storing the past is to make sense of the present and to plan for the future. Without categories, everything is perfectly different from everything else, and nothing can be generalised. We categorise so that we can learn. So what makes a category the ‘right’ one? Appearance is a useful beginning; but there is a difference between appearance and reality. And one way to get at the ‘reality’ of a situation is to know what the essences of something may be, despite the variation in appearance. Essentialism is a human universal because it’s an adaptive stance to take towards the natural world. For natural kinds, the essence is seen as some internal property; for artifacts, the essence is seen as the creator’s intention; all categories are believed to have essences.

- WHAT MAKES ART ART? What sorts of things to people think of as art? Some things are definitely art, others definitely not, others are maybe. So there must be some notion of what art is. What makes art art has to do with particular sorts of intention. We judge something to be an artwork if we believe that it was intended to be seen in the same way that we see other, already existing artwork. This definition is bulletproof; once an artist makes something with the intent that it be seen as an artwork, then it is an artwork. But why value art if art is completely useless? Several reasons: we like art because:
It’s pleasurable to engage in displays of status and power; any moron can gawk at a Rembrandt, but appreciating ‘modern art’ takes a special expertise.
It’s pleasurable because of our basic systems of perception and emotion; there are certain things that we enjoy looking at, and if we can’t have the things themselves, we’ll settle for a representation. Also there are certain formal properties that some art has, aspects of balance and form and colour that look good to the eye.
There’s an intellectual appeal; art can give rise to the same pleasure as an elegant mathematical proof, a clever argument, or a brilliant insight.
A priceless masterpiece becomes worthless if it is found to be a forgery; why? Our understanding of history and origins is relevant to our enjoyment in every domain that one can think of. Art isn’t special in this respect. Our pleasures are related to how we see the nature of things, and this includes their history, their origin. An adequate theory of the psychology of art needs to acknowledge that there are two ways to look at any human creation, including artwork. This corresponds to the two ways of seeing the world. One can see art as seeing, where one responds to its perceptible properties, but one can also see art as art. When we do this we see it in terms of the performance that has given rise to its existence; we attempt to reconstruct its history, including the intentions of the artist. This determines the name we call it and the category we place it in, and also our aesthetic reaction, sometimes overriding our more primitive mode of seeing the object as a mere object. So a picture of an ugly thing can be beautiful.

- MORALITY; The roots of morality are innate; our moral feelings are adaptations. Emotions enable us to set goals and rank priorities; you couldn’t do anything without emotions. Empathy is the foundation for all that follows. We are constituted so that in the normal course of affairs, our empathetic response to the pain of others leads to compassion, and this often leads to our helping them. But the problem with morality based on kin selection and reciprocal altruism is that it’s too local. Humans possess a moral understanding that transcends our innate endowment. When it comes to morality, there are universals (killing a healthy baby is wrong), and there are views particular to cultures. There is much to the idea that morality is a post-hoc justification, reason being a slave to the passions; but at the same time, humans also possess reason and an enhanced ability to take the perspective of others. Vegetarianism illustrates this; cows have no political clout; the existence of people who hold this position shows that there is more to moral competence than simply soaking up the views of the people around you. There is no evolutionary advantage to feeling the pain of distant strangers; and yet, our enhanced social intelligence allows us to reason about how other people will act and react in situations that don’t yet exist. The expansion of the moral circle occurs because of several considerations. Children grow to be more leftist (generous in their moral perspective) if they are brought into increased contact with other individuals, interact with them in situations where cooperation leads to mutual benefit, are exposed to stories that motivate them to take the perspective of distant others, and are exposed to the moral insights of previous generations.

- DISGUST: there is good reason to believe that disgust has a lot to do with food and eating; disgust is an emotion revolving around meat and meat by-products, substances that carry risk of disease and contagion Disgust is at root a biological adaptation that evolved as a result of the benefits it gave our ancestors long ago. There is both an innate and a learned aspect to disgust; although some things (feces) are universally repellent because they are always bad for you to eat, there is going to be some variation as well, since the danger level of certain foods in a given environment cannot be specific by natural selection. Rozin suggests that disgust developed from the protection of the body against certain foods, to the protection of the soul from certain thoughts, behaviours, people, etc. But this is too cognitive; disgust is limited to sensual domains, to a class of things that strike our senses in a certain way. It’s not a thoughtful cognitive process. Further, calling people disgusting is a way to dehumanise them, make them less morally worthy of saving. Disgust is a response to people’s bodies, not their souls. If you see people as souls, they have moral worth: You can hate them and hold them responsible; you can view them as evil; you can love them and forgive them, and see them as blessed. They fall within the moral circle. But if you see them solely as bodies, they lose any moral weight. Empathy does not extend to them. And so dictators and warmongers have come across the insight, over and over again, that you can get people to commit the most terrible atrocities using the tool of disgust. When you love a person, you see the person not as a body but as a soul.

- LAUGHTER: What makes us laugh? Perhaps we laugh when there is incongruity between what we expect and what actually happens. But this isn’t right, since many incongruous situations aren’t funny. Perhaps the essence of humour involves a shift in perspective; the punchline doesn’t make sense within the original frame of reference but it does within another one. But these jokes aren’t funny. Perhaps jokes are also wicked towards a particular person. But it’s too simple to see humour as a shifting frame of reference with a dash of cruelty; what kind of cruelty? Loss of dignity; laughter can serve as a weapon, one that can be used by a mob. It’s contagious and involuntary and has great subversive power; but it can also be playful and establish friendship. Several factors make something funny: a shifting frame of reference (incongruity between set up and punchline), and a loss of dignity.

- GODS, SOULS, AND SCIENCE: We don’t feel as if we are bodies; we feel as if we own bodies. People who think that humans are nothing more than meat-machines might be sincere in their beliefs, but at the gut level, souls exist. You can doubt you have a brain; but this doesn’t make it true that brains and thoughts are separable. Children are dualists in the same way that they are essentialists, realists, and moralists. We see the world as containing two distinct domains: physical objects, and mental states and entities, or bodies and souls for short. People intuitively believe that souls can survive the destruction of the body, and this is a natural consequence of our intuitive Cartesian perspective. I can easily imagine my body being destroyed; but not my mind or soul. Are we correct when we divide the world up into two separate realms of body and soul? There is no reason to doubt that the world does contain bodies as we understand them (to be material entities that move through time and space); but what about souls? At the core of our attribution of souls is a belief in the existence of entities with mental lives. Their actions are not to be explained in terms of brute physical forces, but are instead the results of what they know and desire. What people get wrong is in separating the world of the body from the world of the soul; the mind really does emerge from living matter. All thought is the result of biochemical processes, and damage to the brain leads to mental impairments, destroying capacities as central to our humanity as self-control, the ability to reason, and our capacity for love. There may be a soul, but it isn’t distinct from the forces of matter. Cognitive scientists believe that emotions, memories, and consciousness are the result of physical processes. Common sense tells us that our mental life is the product of an immaterial soul, and this intuition gives rise to the deeply reassuring idea that the soul can survive the destruction of the body and brain.

[Domhnall]

Philosophy is replete with speculation about the human mind, novelists and playwrights are endlessly creative, Freud constructed a whole (and wholly dubious) theory of child development and human nature based on the reflections of adults and his reading of ancient Greek drama. Others have built castles of theory on these foundations. Neo Hegelians argue at length regarding subject and object, master and slave; Neo Freudians and feminists devise complex alternative accounts of the Oedipus Complex or the story of Orestes. The issues seem to be either aesthetic or political and theories of the human mind typically serve moral agendas. It can be very hard to remind yourself that sophisticated theories often depend on extensive chains of logical reasoning that are highly vulnerable to being proven wrong by the most brutal of methods: reality testing. A false premise invalidates the most refined logical argument and it is regrettably (but inevitably) the case that many popular and influential theories are demonstrably built on false premises.

Experimental psychology at its best deflates such pretensions and puts common sense to the test. Psychologists demand empirical evidence for every and any claim. They can be wondrously inventive in devising experiments to answer questions about human behaviour and they think of the most surprising questions. Individual experiments often seem quite banal but from time to time a psychologist sets out an extended discussion in which the string of experiments work together to support a whole narrative. Empirical evidence is not a guarantee that the psychologist is right – it certainly does help – but it sometimes does call an important belief into question.

In this book, a psychologist explores a range of philosophical questions and looks for answers in the evidence of child development. He is particularly interested in knowing if the child thinks and behaves in specific ways of its own accord or if it learns from adults and from experience. The major question he examines is why do people typically have a dualist understanding of the world – that mind and body are radically different - but along the way he touches on all sorts of topics and offers insights based on empirical evidence that may be unwelcome to some readers, depending on your fixed beliefs.

The book is written in clear language for a general audience; academic references are available at the back of the book but don’t get in the way. I found a number of particular insights that I especially value and I am confident this will be the case for other readers.

[Paul C. Stalder · Rating 3 out of 5]

The concept this book explores is fascinating: common sense tells us our thoughts, emotions, memories and other physical processes are the product of an immaterial soul (admittedly, soul is a loaded term, and smuggles in unnecessary and unhelpful baggage, but it is what Bloom uses, so I will use it too), while science tells us these arise from physical processes - why does this disconnect exist, and how does it shape who we are as humans? Fascinating, right? Bloom, however, seems to lose track of this concept about halfway through the book. I found myself asking, on numerous page turns, what he was trying to tell me. Sure, the information is interesting, but is it necessary to have a discussion about the moral changes in society surrounding slavery and abortion? As I write this, I am seeing more clearly the connection he was drawing, so it may simply by that the book was put together out of order. Maybe Bloom should have put the final chapter earlier, and then explored real world examples. Regardless, my experience of reading this book was like leaving a walking path, getting lost, and then finding your way back home. Looking back, it wasn't the worst, but in the middle of the experience you are confused, worried, and grasping for any kind of path. Even though you eventually find your way back, you wish that someone had been kind enough to mark the path.

[Ayoub · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've first discovered Paul bloom on YouTube, watching his Yale courses (intro to Psychology) and i loved his eloquoncy and infrences. So i was determined to read some of his work. Descartes' baby was the first and i highly enjoyed it. It answered a lot of questions i had and created other ones that i never dared to ask.
Now onto another work of his ( how pleasure works)
Peace out

[Femke · Rating 2 out of 5]

Dit boek bevat veel interessante onderzoeksbevindingen en hypothesen. Het was enigszins lastig daar van te genieten omdat de argumentatie van het boek zeer te wensen over laat. Zo wordt niet duidelijk wat de auteur precies verstaat onder ‘intuïtief dualisme’ en waarom dat zogenaamd aansluit bij Descartes’ filosofie.

[Louise · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was an old book I had on my shelf that I've been meaning to read since 2007. I wish I had read it earlier, as much of the research feels dated now. Interesting premise, would have been more interesting 15 years ago.

[Bolti · Rating 4 out of 5]

Entertainingly written, and with many funny and surprising case studies. I wish this book had a conclusion chapter - the book just ends without warning. It would have been nice to have a summary of the main themes of the book.

[Kara Mealer · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have no idea what this book is about, but I love his writing style. His anecdotes and summaries of psych research were interesting!

[Ushan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Humans, even small children, are as adapted to dealing with other people - understanding their intentions, judging their feelings and beliefs - as they are to dealing with inanimate things. The exception are autistic people, such as the author's brother, who consider people to be things; the author once worked in a camp for autistic children, and a boy climbed him to get a toy from a shelf as if he were furniture. The fact that autistic people have one ability working fine and the other completely broken suggests that they are provided by two different mental facilities. Bloom claims that this duality is at the root of religion. People believe in God(s) because they ascribe human intentions, beliefs, feelings to forces of nature and features of the natural world; in fact, small children questioned by psychologists ascribed them to geometrical figures "fighting" in an animation, imaginary friends, toys in make-believe games. So the progress of science will not destroy religion any more than it will destroy love, because religion is a consequence of human nature. Bloom criticizes Stephen Jay Gould's concept of science and religion being "non-overlapping magisteria", one talking about the natural world and the other about ethics and values: religion has always made statements about the natural world that are more commonsensical than the ones science has made. Abrahamic religions say that there exists a soul separate from the body, and small children agree; many believe that a dead mouse can still feel hungry and think. Science disagrees, and Bloom thinks that the war between religion and science will spread from evolutionary biology to cognitive science.

[Jstoutgator · Rating 3 out of 5]

Generally, I think the title is a bit misleading. It is not until the very last chapter that Bloom begins to tie the meditations and evidence of the book's content to the question of God's existence. And even here I would not compare it to Descartes; though still a philosophical writing, Paul examines things from a more general realm of understanding.

Personally, I found the research Bloom has done, and his accounts of others' research in this book very interesting. However, I found more intellectual benefit in pondering these cases on my own than considering his given conclusions. I found they were either vague or I just disagreed with the logic or application of the evidence.

I recommend only reading this book if the content is of particular interest to the reader.
Bloom's own noted interests on his Author Page sum him up well: "I am interested in the development and nature of our common-sense understanding of ourselves and other people."
Here are some specific discussion areas that stick out in my head
- The nature and implications of innate reactions like "Disgust"
a. Instinct/Evolution vs Learned/Developed
b. associated emotional and physical reactions
c. Adults vs Children
- The development of a child's capability to distinguish between actual/representative or real/fake, such as a picture of a an item vs the actual presence of the item.
- Child's understanding of complex emotions and state's of being, e.g. dead or alive or neither

[Tony · Rating 4 out of 5]

Accessible cognitive and developmental psychology, perhaps best suited for parents (of a secular bent) of infants and young children looking for general insights. This is not a parenting book but an extended thesis with some philosophy and experimental observations by a famous professor of psychology.

And the take-home message:

"Children take 'thinking' in the narrow sense, in terms of conscious problem solving and reasoning. If you ask [a six-year old] whether they can go for long periods without doing any thinking at all, they will say yes. The natural conception of the brain by children, even after science education, is that it is a tool we use for certain mental operations. It is a cognitive prosthesis, added to the soul to increase its computing power."

We are derived dualists. As the author says, most of us never unlearn our inborn (mis)conception of mind/body segregation; it's an evolved delusion. Like much of physics and evolution, theory of mind cannot be conceptualized innately.

[Luke Meakin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Descartes' Baby is a great book, a great discussion of the complex processes and theories that govern our social consciousness.

Bloom puts forward fresh and exciting ideas that arise in childhood and eventually shape us into the socially-conscious animals we are. His use of a vast amount of research keeps the reader directly involved with the theory, the theory is always moving towards the eventual answer that is seemingly quite obvious.

Covering topics such as; the social construction of art and artefacts, the governing factors to cognitive perception, to the deeper, more abstract discussions on the afterlife, the mind and body and religion.

Paul Bloom does not let you down with this book.

A great read.

[Kate · Rating 3 out of 5]

"The senselessly cruel mother here is Mother Nature."

Consider the different ways in which one can die:

Aged
Bleeding
Executed
Found dead in the streets
Grief
Killed by several accidents
Lethargy
Mother
Plague
Poisoned
Suddenly
Vomiting
Wolf

"The art world was our conceptual oyster, and we ate it raw."

(It must be hard to be a psychopath—so much effort, all the time.)

St. Augustine was greatly influenced by Cicero's vivid image of Etruscan pirates' torture of prisoners by strapping a corpse to them face to face. This, Augustine maintained, is the fate of the soul, chained to a physical body as one would be chained to a rotting corpse.

[Ann Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not as thorough a take on this idea as I might have wished, but quite readable--a book that should be understandable for the non-philosophy-based reader as long as one has an idea of Descartes' mind-body problem (though he does cite Ryle and Wittgenstein to call up and refute certain ideas). Bloom is somewhat convincing in his claims that human beings develop naturally into essentialists and dualists based not so much on culture as on how the brain and body mature (per studies of infants). He covers some other areas as well--why we have art, how metacognition arises, & where culture/society are more likely to play roles in thinking and consciousness.

[Kin Guan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Kingsley Amis: "It is no wonder that people are often so horrible; after all, they started off as children". Although it sounds awful to children (after all they are little cute walking creatures that resembles us incidentally), the quote sheds light upon the nature of this book - how child developmental psychology reflects our behaviour as an adult. Our curiousity, morality, sense of good and evil can trace back to how children think and behave innately. Another excellent book on psychology - my favourite subject.

[Jen · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book discusses recent studies of brain development and early childhood, and makes the case that the way we perceive and understand the world explains human philosophy and art from an evolutionary perspective.

It's an intriguing thesis, and every section of the book had some interesting facts. Overall quite readable. But in the end I was left feeling that the book didn't quite pull together all of the threads and some sections really didn't seem relevant to the main point.

[Ellyn · Rating 2 out of 5]

The author of this book contends that people are natural-born dualists, and even babies see the world in terms of bodies and souls. I thought that this book had the potential to be very interesting, but instead I found it to be slow-moving and disjointed. It definitely did not contain as much information and theory about child development as I would have hoped, based on the title. By far the best chapter was the one on disgust, which was quite amusing.

[Liam Porter · Rating 4 out of 5]

I had already heard about a lot of the content in this book. This is probably because of its heavy crossover, in content, with the writings of Bloom´s mentor and fellow linguist Stephen Pinker, and through reading other allied popularizers like Dennett, Dawkins and Baron-Cohen. But had I not already learnt of the content before, I should think that it would have made for a fascinating single collection of insights in the genre of cognitive science.

[Mary Noberini · Rating 5 out of 5]

Paul Bloom is a respected developmental psychologist who describes recent findings that suggest that babies are natural born dualists. He borrows from the evolutionary psychology approach to show how this innate dualism eventuates into the human concerns with art, spirituality and the moral sense. This is an easy to read book, not a professional tome.

[Pavel · Rating 3 out of 5]

I expected more of this book. In particular, I would have liked to read about a larger number of different experiments with babies and children, supporting the view that we are natural-born Cartesian dualists. Besides, the main idea of the book seems to owe more to the psychologist Henry Wellman than Bloom actually gives him credit.

[Skylar Lee · Rating 3 out of 5]

mindreaders, artifacts, anxious objects, and the moral circle most interesting.
not a page turner, partially because I've heard Paul Bloom's lectures before.
nature of such books, but it lacks a natural stream of ideas it wants to present.
not the most coherent read, but worth reading as food for thought.

[Tracey · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a very interesting read, and gave me quite a few new things to think about. I don't agree with a lot of the things that the author takes as givens in his arguments, but found his logic and thought processes quite fascinating. Overall, I really enjoyed this read.

[Avray · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fascinating, informative and most importantly, highly readable. It trots along with just enough content and pace. I kept thinking he would run out of ideas or start to be less interesting, but no, consistently excellent all the way through. An inspiration of a book.

[Julie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fascinating, informative and most importantly, highly readable. It trots along with just enough content and pace. I kept thinking he would run out of ideas or start to be less interesting, but no, consistently excellent all the way through. An inspiration of a book.

[Sally · Rating 4 out of 5]

Each chapter examines an area or issue of child development, creating a mosaic of characteristis that contribute of our humanity. It is well-written, the author is appealing, and the research is very interesting, though the book is more episodic than comprehensive.