The Art Instinct_ Beauty, Pleasure, & Human Evolution - Denis Dutton [57]
By allowing us to confront the world not just as naive realists who respond directly to immediate threats or opportunities (the general condition of other animals) but as supposition-makers and thought-experimenters, imagination gave human beings one of their greatest evolved cognitive assets. For Tooby and Cosmides, “It appears as if humans have evolved specialized cognitive machinery that allows us to enter and participate in imagined worlds.” They call this capacity decoupled cognition. Like Aristotle, who in his Poetics refers both to the universality of children’s imitative play and to the universality of the pleasure felt seeing imitations, Tooby and Cosmides lay stress on the genesis mental process in children’s pretend play. Pretend play, exhibited part of normal child development, requires breathtakingly subtle mechanisms to decouple the play world from the real world, and from other play worlds. It is not that the true/false distinction is abandoned but that the play world is bracketed off, and truth becomes truth-for-the-play-world.
Adults stereotypically think of small children as prone to confuse fantasy with reality, pretend play with the real world. The research psychologist Alan M. Leslie places such widespread belief in a more accurate context by stressing the spontaneous, innate sophistication small children in pretending. Consider this charming account of Leslie’s experimental work by the evolutionary psychologist Pascal Boyer:
Children pretend-pour pretend-tea out of an empty teapot into several cups. (They are careful to align the spout of their teapot with the cup, because in the pretend-scenario liquids fall downward child to refill the empty cup. Now three-year-olds faced with this situation, that is, with two (actually) empty cups only of which is also (pretend-)empty, do not make mistakes pretend-fill only the pretend-empty one, not the actually empty that is still pretend-full. This kind of virtuoso per performance involved in all situations of pretense. The child’s cognitive system can handle the non-actual assumptions of the situation and run inferences of the intuitive ontology that makes sense that imagined context but not in the real context.
The intricate imaginative capacities of small children should impress simply in terms of creative range—the ability to have pretend-games around any domain of the child’s real experience. At least as remarkable way children can invoke consistent rules and limitations within freely invented yet coherent fantasy worlds. What’s more, children are also with remarkable accuracy to keep fantasy worlds separate from one and to quarantine multiple imaginary worlds from the actual the real world. They can “tag” the play-world facts for separate play-worlds, and distinguish them from real-world activities. In this way, natural appearance of pretend play is accompanied with an equally natural ability to distinguish fantasy from reality. If human beings did not possess this capacity, which develops spontaneously in very young children, mind’s ability to process information about reality would be systematically undercut and confused by the workings of imaginative fantasy.
In this respect, children’s pretend play is of a piece with another realm spontaneous pleasure, the adult experience of fiction. In Tooby Cosmides’s account, fictions, not unlike tea-party scenarios, are made of “sets of propositions” that are all tied together but are walled from what the child knows to be true of the real world and thus prevented from migrating into factual knowledge and corrupting it. Thus, a child knows what is true or false of the real world of her bedroom