I Think, Therefore I’m Alive?

Our textbook says that for something to be viewed as a uniquely biological process, a process must be viewed as depending not on psychological mechanisms or physical mechanisms, but on specifically biological mechanisms. This distinction between psychological and biological processes makes sense, but it’s something that I had never really thought about before – I assumed that the two went hand in hand. I hadn’t noticed that I had been making this distinction subconsciously (almost?) all my life until we identified humans and animals, but not plants, as mentalistic agents in class. It fascinated me.

When I was thinking about this, I realized how so many children’s shows, stories and toys utilize the personification of inanimate objects. Very often this is done by giving these inanimate objects morphological features and having them react contingently, which, as we learned, children use to identify mentalistic agents. Do children think of these much-loved characters, such as Lofty and Muck from Bob the Builder, as living creatures because they appear to have psychological processes? Or do they, as essentialists, know that Lofty and Muck, as a crane and bulldozer respectively, are really mechanical objects and are therefore nonliving although they appear to be mentalistic agents? In other words, can they and do they make this distinction between psychological and biological processes?

Six-month-olds don’t seem to make this distinction – they expect goal-directed movement from humans but not from inanimate objects, suggesting that they associate psychological mechanisms with biological mechanisms. From experience, it appears to me that children around the preschool age are convinced that these personified inanimate characters are alive. This seems consistent with probabilistic representations – being a mentalistic agent is a high cue validity for the “living object” concept. There is a slight shift in their understanding here though: instead of something having to be alive to be a mentalistic agent, something that is a mentalistic agent has to be alive. Notice that although there is this shift, children still don’t seem to make the distinction between psychological and biological mechanisms.

How do they go from this to understanding that Thomas the Tank Engine isn’t a live object, or that plants are not mentalistic agents, even if they are alive? We know they get there eventually (because we as adults make the distinction), so the question is at what age do they learn to make this distinction, and how?

It seems most likely to me that this change occurs along the lines of the explanation of the conceptual development that I put forth in my last blog post – when children get to school and learn about the underlying biological mechanisms that make something “alive”, they would then have defining features for what is alive and what isn’t. They would learn how being alive is more than being able to think, and how appearing to be able to think does not necessarily make something alive. In the same way they would also learn that one of the defining features of the “plant” concept is “not being a mentalistic agent”. They would then be able to make the distinction between the psychological and biological processes.

I wasn’t able to find any research in this area, so this hypothesis that children don’t make the distinction between psychological and biological mechanisms isn’t empirically based, and I’m sure there are other explanations for it too. It would be interesting to conduct research to shed some light on how and when we learn to make this inconspicuous but important distinction.