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A human child receives millions of "training" lessons every day for two years, and only then does it learn that you, indeed, are its "mother". This knowledge i

A human child receives millions of "training" lessons every day for two years, and only then does it learn that you, indeed, are its "mother". This knowledge is composed from other, simpler and more basic facts, that it slowly learns along the way: 1) you are a reliable source of warmth and comfort 2) you make me feel safe when I'm anxious and scared 3) you feed me when I'm hungry 4) you always come back after going away 5) you make me laugh and feel happy These can be broken down into more basic facts, as the concepts here are still rather advanced (for a baby). The baby doesn't actually know what the it means to feel "safe", "fear", "happy", etc. It just has fuzzy experiential feelings that slowly become sharper and more contextualized as the baby is "trained" every second of every day by interacting with the world around it.

duaneb 11y ago
This strikes me as highly speculative. If only we could ask a one year old, but we can't. I personally find it pretty suspect that it builds a definition of a mother from disparate logical components.
- dwaltrip 11y ago
  I think I didn't properly communicate my thoughts in the first post. Let me try to write them out more clearly. I wouldn't describe them as disparate logical components. The numbered points I wrote are the abstract, rough, adult-level interpretations of the messy "knowledge" that the baby develops. The baby doesn't have this type of vocabulary or even scope of understanding. But I think those would be the flavor of the pillars of knowledge the baby builds up to develop a conception of "mother". The 2-year old's conception, when they first speak "Mama", will still be incredibly rough. It will be a faint glimmer of what we actually mean when we use the word as fully grown adults. But each additional day more understanding is built up as the network of neurons and their activation patterns, etc is being modified through further interaction. The experiential data from every additional moment of time that passes are pattern matched, integrated, and added to what it already "knows". Humans are really, really good at loose pattern matching & loose analogies. It feels to me as if most of how we think and what we know is just many, many layers of this. Side point: I would say that even two adults never mean the exact same thing when they use the same word, as they have built an understanding of that word/concept from different life experiences. We can try to communicate to others what we think a certain word/concept means to us, however we have to use other words/concepts to do that, which makes the problem a little difficult! This is why people very often talk right past each other. You are 100% correct, this is a lot of speculation. Hopefully we will make more progress towards knowing the hard science of how it actually works in our lifetime =)
  - animal531 11y ago
    Interestingly, from your list most of those are (also) applicable to a father. A baby can nearly immediately after birth also recognise its mother by smell and sound.
    - dwaltrip 11y ago
      The baby is learning in the womb too, I would imagine, so it should recognize the mother's smell and sound.

duaneb 11y ago

This strikes me as highly speculative. If only we could ask a one year old, but we can't. I personally find it pretty suspect that it builds a definition of a mother from disparate logical components.

dwaltrip 11y ago
I think I didn't properly communicate my thoughts in the first post. Let me try to write them out more clearly. I wouldn't describe them as disparate logical components. The numbered points I wrote are the abstract, rough, adult-level interpretations of the messy "knowledge" that the baby develops. The baby doesn't have this type of vocabulary or even scope of understanding. But I think those would be the flavor of the pillars of knowledge the baby builds up to develop a conception of "mother". The 2-year old's conception, when they first speak "Mama", will still be incredibly rough. It will be a faint glimmer of what we actually mean when we use the word as fully grown adults. But each additional day more understanding is built up as the network of neurons and their activation patterns, etc is being modified through further interaction. The experiential data from every additional moment of time that passes are pattern matched, integrated, and added to what it already "knows". Humans are really, really good at loose pattern matching & loose analogies. It feels to me as if most of how we think and what we know is just many, many layers of this. Side point: I would say that even two adults never mean the exact same thing when they use the same word, as they have built an understanding of that word/concept from different life experiences. We can try to communicate to others what we think a certain word/concept means to us, however we have to use other words/concepts to do that, which makes the problem a little difficult! This is why people very often talk right past each other. You are 100% correct, this is a lot of speculation. Hopefully we will make more progress towards knowing the hard science of how it actually works in our lifetime =)
- animal531 11y ago
  Interestingly, from your list most of those are (also) applicable to a father. A baby can nearly immediately after birth also recognise its mother by smell and sound.
  - dwaltrip 11y ago
    The baby is learning in the womb too, I would imagine, so it should recognize the mother's smell and sound.