Sublime

mordant

Children with autism don’t seem to have the fundamental presupposition that they are like other people and other people are like them. This unquestioned first principle, this axiom of our everyday psychology, is, paradoxically, part of what allows most children to go on to discover all the differences between themselves and others.

At birth, infants possess a rich set of core skills and knowledge. Object concepts, number sense, a knack for languages, knowledge of people and their intentions . . . so many brain modules are already present in young children, and these foundational skills will later be recycled in physics, mathematics, language, and philosophy classes.

In other words, the brain seems to love to learn from other people.

I do believe that you can understand most of moral psychology by viewing it as a form of enlightened self-interest, and if it’s self-interest, then it’s easily explained by Darwinian natural selection working at the level of the individual. Genes are selfish,3 selfish genes create people with various mental modules, and some of these mental modules

Such cultural norms are incorporated into our models in childhood, a period in which the brain is rapidly working out who it needs to be in order to best control its particular environment.

Our own view is that children’s whole conception of people, objects, and words changes radically in the first three years of life. And it changes because of what children find out about the world. We already said that babies start out with complex, abstract, coherent representations of the world and rules for manipulating them. They use those repre

past observations, past actions, education, and cultural mores,