Scientific Realism 3: Infancy

I can only guess what it is like to awaken to this world from that pre-human state of being where the mind is first developing its consciousness. On first seeing the sky, clouds, buildings, water, grass, the forest, and the countless other things we call the world, there must be a sudden shock, or pause that grips one. Undoubtedly, the conscious life of infancy is a mystery. Researcher can only guess at 'what it is like to be' a baby. But one thing is for certain, they seem to be in awe of EVERYTHING around them.

This awe, this ever pressing passion that seizes the mind and pulls it away from numbering things, distinguishing things, and takes it all in as a sort of shock of what IS may have something more to it than merely something one may call an undeveloped mind. Maybe, as we mature, and develop our ability to communicate, we actually lose sight of this awe. Perhaps there is something in the awe that is absent in the acquisition of language, of mathematics, of what we call logic reasoning skills. It could be the case that as Jesus stated, one must be as a child to enter into His kingdom, we must exchange awe for the words we use to understand all that is around us.

Consider how we develop language. According to St. Augustine, the process involves the child observing the parent and mimicking his or her movements as to get his or her attention. But why does the infant wish to get the attention of the parent? There is much debate on this, but the simple answer is to satisfy some desire, some craving, of the child. He or she may be hungry or thirsty and this is why they are crying in pain. They recognize that their body is in pain for something and they are expressing this pain of want. However, they also notice that the parent is providing for them relief from this want, this pain, through feeding them. Therefore, the infant further notices that he or she can mimic certain sounds the parents make, usually as a cue by the parent to successively approximate a specific word such as carrot or meat, so as to avoid the pain of want which gets worse as time goes on.

Soon, the child is able to acquire a wealth of mimicked behaviors and sounds which serve as a complex of preventing the pain of want. The infant growing into the maturity of childhood, is drawn into a world of language by communicating mimicked sounds and behaviors all related to want and its prevention. He or she learns that it is an 'I' and that this 'I' does things 'for' other things. Subject and predicate are born as to be more specific on what it wants to satisfy its cravings. But the language it develops ultimately grows more and more peripheral to the original motivation of satisfying a desire to where the desires are still there but the object to satisfy the desire is proliferated into many things.

All along, we the parents are under the impression the child is 'learning' through this process. But is this really learning? Or is it adapting? For what did the child 'know' before it had to start mimicking behaviors and focusing all its energies on this (on what brings the body pain and want) and not on those things which feel 'good' to the body? We cannot say what it is since we would be using language we had developed to satisfy the want of satisfaction or rather the negation of pain and want. Ultimately, this really puts into perspective the question of what we really do know. After all, our language could be said to be nothing more than a garden of words and terms grown out of our pain, not out of our joy and happiness. Indeed, the terms joy and happiness, presumably stem from some desire we had as children to avoid pain. It is nothing more than an inspired term from the shadow of joy and happiness.

Indeed, we number things, we count them, as to see some specificity in them. I see one tree, two trees, three and so forth. But their number is only in their being trees. And trees are only those things which have some use for the prevention of pain. Mathematics is painful, not only in practice but ontologically according to this. In short, we only know the shadow of things when we speak of them with the words we have learned in this Life. The awe and wonder the infant experiences which it cannot communicate (for we residents of this world of pain we live in are unfit to give them proper names to use for joy) we see as nonsense and unlearned babblings. But maybe we are the ones babbling, groaning until as the Bible says all of creation gives birth to the joy it has hidden behind the pain of its birth.