Why Don't Babies Remember?

On Analogy, Meaning, and Worldliness

Douglas Hofstadter speculates that babies are unable to remember the past because they don’t yet have enough life experience on the basis of which to analogize from one thing to another. He writes:

Why do babies not remember events that happen to them?”…it has to do with the relentless, lifelong process of chunking — taking “small” concepts and putting them together into bigger and bigger ones, thus recursively building up a giant repertoire of concepts in the mind…babies’ concepts are simply too small. They have no way of framing entire events whatsoever in terms of their novice concepts. It is as if babies were looking at life through a randomly drifting keyhole, and at each moment could make out only the most local aspects of scenes before them. It would be hopeless to try to figure out how a whole room is organized, for instance, given just a keyhole view, even a randomly drifting keyhole view.

Analogies are the building blocks of worldviews. Without being “thrown” into the world, as Heidegger describes it, one will have no basis for analogizing. Meaning emerges from worldliness, is a reaction to it.

But analogies are faulty, because as similar as any two things are, they are also dissimilar. Thus, a Zen Koan states:

Before seeking Enlightenment, I thought mountains were mountains and valleys were valleys. On the path, I understood mountains were not mountains and valleys and valleys were not valleys. In my Enlightenment, I realized, mountains are mountains and valleys are valleys.

The seekers who follow the Zen dialectic described above achieve what Paul Ricouer calls “second naiveté,” the earned ability to look at the world as if a baby, without actually being one; they use analogy without being captive to the pitfalls of reductionism. They treat phenomena as unprecedented without being so over-awed that they have no basis on which to retain and apply their learning.

Given that most people remember, but that remembrance seems to be an emergent property layered on top of perception, the great challenge and the great skill posed to us adults is not “how can we analogize more, how can we remember more?” but “how can we unlearn our analogies? how can we hold our remembrances softly?”

Thus, a medieval description of the great Arabic poets describes their achievement of mastery not when they memorized 100,000 lines of verse, but when they totally forgot the 100,000 lines they had committed to memory.

Why am I wrong? Do babies really not remember? How do you think about the relationship between memory and perception? What do you make of the Platonic myth that all knowledge is recollection, that we arrive at truth exclusively through memory?

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