JAD ABUMRAD: Hey I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT KRULWICH: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: This is Radiolab. And today ...

ROBERT: Things.

ALISON GOPNIK: I just—I wanted to check in. This is the usual Radiolab style which—it means that I can basically natter on forever.

JAD: Forever.

ROBERT: Whatever you like.

JAD: All right, so this is Alison Gopnik. She's a professor of psychology and philosophy ...

ALISON GOPNIK: ... at the University of California, at Berkeley, and the author of The Philosophical Baby.

JAD: And the reason we called her up is that, you know, truthfully after the egg situation ...

ROBERT: We broke an egg to make this programming, if you're just joining us.

JAD: We weren't planning to, it just happened. We feel really crappy about it, frankly. But it got us thinking about the fragility of objects. And for me that called to mind an idea that I've always been thinking about, you know, being the father of two young kids, about object permanence, which is this whole idea in child psychology that when babies are really young, when an object disappears from their view they think it's gone forever.

ROBERT: Right. So that's the peek-a-boo game.

JAD: Exactly. That's what makes it fun. Because, like, from their perspective, the thought is, "You're gone forever, and then you're back, and then you're gone forever, and then you're back." So I thought this would be a cool idea for us to explore about how, like, from the very beginning we're born with no concept that objects stick around. But when we talked with Alison Gopnik, the first thing she told us was that ...

ALISON GOPNIK: Well, it's—it's a little more complicated than that.

ROBERT: Of course.

ALISON GOPNIK: Of course, right? It's science.

JAD: And so we got into a conversation that went in some strange directions. But she began by telling us about some new research which shows that actually babies do have an idea that objects stick around. You know, if you do these experiments where you show them an object behind a screen, and then make it disappear, they think, "Whoa, where did it go? It should be there."

ALISON GOPNIK: Exactly.

JAD: How do you know the "Whoa"?

ALISON GOPNIK: You know the "Whoa" because babies look much longer at things that they don't expect, that are surprising.

JAD: Oh, I see.

ALISON GOPNIK: It's as if they're sitting there saying, you know, "What the ...?"

ROBERT: [laughs] They very rarely finish that expression, though.

JAD: All right, so I was wrong. Fine.

ALISON GOPNIK: But here's the really surprising thing. Now suppose what happens is a yellow duck goes behind the screen.

JAD: Moving left to right, and then out the other side ...

ALISON GOPNIK: Instead of the yellow duck there's a little blue bunny.

JAD: Now, most adults if they saw this, would be like ...

ALISON GOPNIK: "What the ...?" But the babies are totally blasé about that.

JAD: What?

ROBERT: Oh.

ALISON GOPNIK: If a yellow duck goes in one side of the screen, and then magically the blue duck appears on the other side of the screen, until they're about a year old, babies don't seem to be fazed by that.

JAD: And she suspects that the reason for that is that the most important thing about the duck to the babies is not that it is yellow, or round, or duck-like in any way. It was its trajectory, its story.

ALISON GOPNIK: What it did in the past, what its history is.

JAD: Like, this is an object that was moving left to right, and when it emerged from the screen it was still an object moving left to right.

ALISON GOPNIK: And there are experiments with adults that are kind of amazing.

ROBERT: Where you sort of see the same thing.

ALISON GOPNIK: You take a roomful of students, divide them in half. You say, "Okay, everybody on the left half of the room is now going to get a University of California at Berkeley mug." And then you say to them, "All right, all of you guys who have a mug, how much would you sell your mug for?" And then you ask the people on the other side of class, "How much would you pay to buy that mug?" And you get people to write it down on a piece of paper. Well, it turns out the people who actually already have the mug on their desk think that it's much more valuable than the people on the other side. So they would demand much more for their mug.

JAD: Keep in mind they've only spent one minute with this mug, but somehow over that minute, she says, that the mug gets imbued with something. Some kind of ...

ALISON GOPNIK: Essence. There's something—and again you can see this even with children. There's something about mine-ness, there's something about possession, about the relationship that I have to the objects that I care about that goes beyond just what their superficial features are.

ROBERT: Oh, I think that makes such deeply obvious sense to me. I'm surprised that it was even a discovery. If I have a relationship with a thing, like I'm going to see my girlfriend and the railroad man gives me the ticket, and it turns out to be a fabulous date, then I put the ticket in my pocket, and I save the ticket for 40 years. Any time I want to go back to the day that I had the great date, I just touch the ticket.

JAD: Yeah, I don't have that at all.

ROBERT: You don't have that at all?

JAD: Well, no, I have it a little bit, but I just—no, I throw—yeah.

ROBERT: You throw them away?

JAD: I throw them away. You gotta purge, man.

ALISON GOPNIK: You know some of us are more sentimental about the past, and about objects than others are.

JAD: And she says, interestingly, for those weirdos like you, Robert, who get super-romantic about their things, there might be a deep evolutionary reason for it. Now you always have to take these evolutionary reasons with a grain of salt.

ALISON GOPNIK: But ...

JAD: ... she says ...

ALISON GOPNIK: ... if you look at patterns of caching, for example, is what it's called in biology, you know, like the squirrel who hides his nuts. The squirrels keep really good track of which nuts they have, and what their histories are. And one possibility is that some of our relationship about at least physical objects stems from this history of—history of being mammals who keep track of what we've got and what we don't have.

ROBERT: It's my inner squirrel?

ALISON GOPNIK: Right. You know, we do talk about people squirreling things away, because there's something that's got this kind of deeper evolutionary background. And I think there is some evidence that ...

JAD: But isn't there also, like, a counter-squirrel instinct? I mean, like, there's that famous thing with observation that young male baboons, when they get to a certain age, will get gripped by wanderlust, and then just wander away from the troop. Which is good, because it prevents inbreeding.

ALISON GOPNIK: Yeah, I think there is actually reason to think that we all live on this kind of emotional bungee cord.

JAD: You know, boinging between the squirrel and the baboon. And she says it's interesting to think about, like, what's gonna happen to our bungee-ness now that we're entering a world where objects are becoming just information?

ALISON GOPNIK: What will happen when we have 3D printers that are gonna be like the replicators on Star Trek that can just keep producing replicas of objects?

JAD: It might actually mess with some of our most basic instincts.

ALISON GOPNIK: Philosophers—philosophers are always great about having wonderful, crazy thought experiments to try to demonstrate this. So one of them is the swamp man.

JAD: It's a famous thought experiment. I'm not exactly clear why it's a swamp man and not some other kind of man, but here's how it goes.

ALISON GOPNIK: Here's the story of the swamp man.

JAD: Imagine you're standing next to a swamp. You're you.

ROBERT: Mm-hmm?

JAD: And in the swamp ...

ALISON GOPNIK: ... there's a bunch of bubbling gasses ...

JAD: ... chemical reactions ...

ALISON GOPNIK: ... bubbling and interacting in some weird, organic way.

JAD: But whatever, you're just standing there. But then, a bolt of lightning comes out of the sky and kills you.

ROBERT: Ooh!

JAD: And then another one comes out of the sky and hits the swamp, catalyzing all that chemistry into overdrive, and somehow miraculously, for just a moment, the reactions come together in just the right way to form ...

ROBERT: Hi, I'm Robert.

JAD: ... a man.

ALISON GOPNIK: Completely identical to you, Robert.

ROBERT: Yeah, I'm Robert.

JAD: A brand new you.

ALISON GOPNIK: If you took every single molecule in the swamp man's body, it would be exactly like yours at this very moment. So here's the question: does Swamp Robert remember that date, or does swamp Robert care about the ticket?

JAD: You're saying that Swamp Gas Robert is molecule for molecule, atom for atom, identical to this Robert right here?

ALISON GOPNIK: Molecule for molecule. Exactly.

JAD: So you're saying, are the memories and experiences of his life suddenly contained in that facsimile?

ALISON GOPNIK: That's the question. And most people's intuition is ...

ROBERT: No.

ALISON GOPNIK: Nah. Absolutely not.

ROBERT: Absolutely not. I'm not even hesitating.

ALISON GOPNIK: Absolutely not.

JAD: Wait, why not?

ROBERT: Because I believe that my date, and the ticket that took me to that date, they belong to me and not to atoms. And if you ask me, what's the difference between me and my atoms? I don't know, but I know it's there.

ALISON GOPNIK: Right.

JAD: Because the atoms of you sitting right there actually went on that date, whereas the atoms of swamp gas Robert weren't there.

ALISON GOPNIK: Right. I think you got it exactly right, Jad. It's something about the history. It's the fact that, you know, Robert's atoms really were in that place. They really were there with that person. And—and ...

JAD: Although I could tell a version of the Swamp Gas Robert that would, I think, solve this problem. If Robert—this Robert—instead of the lightning, he just got into the swamp, submerged himself, co-mingled his atoms with the swamp gas atoms, and then he got out and went on his way ...

ALISON GOPNIK: Mm-hmm?

JAD: If then later, even like years later the swamp ...

ROBERT: Hi, I'm Robert.

JAD: ... spat out a copy, the fact that the real Robert was there to begin with, and that the copy somehow touched, almost like a baton passing. I could see that the date would be in the copy too.

ROBERT: I think you might be ...

JAD: Do you agree with me?

ROBERT: I think I might. I've always explained to myself as a sense of touch. That is—my wife has a very different view of this than me—but I, one day, while sitting around in the office, get a letter, unbidden, from the first man on the moon. From Neil Armstrong.

ALISON GOPNIK: Huh!

ROBERT: Just writes something about—I had written to him. And it says, "Commander Neil Armstrong." That's very flattering. And if it had come in any other form but by email, I would have framed it, I would have given it a special place of honor. But since it arrived from a machine to my machine, and then out of the machine to another machine, to a flat piece of paper ...

JAD: You can't give it that thing?

ROBERT: I can't give it the ticket-to-the-date thing.

JAD: Huh.

ROBERT: I can't.

JAD: That's weird. Why?

ROBERT: Because Neil Armstrong never touched it.

ALISON GOPNIK: Hmm. Yeah, but you and I are old Robert, so maybe that's ...

JAD: No, but the ...

ROBERT: Well, yeah. So Jad, you don't have that feeling?

JAD: Well, no. The moment you said it I thought—I was constructing an image in my mind of Neil Armstrong at a computer touching the keyboard, and there's an unbridgeable gulf between his fingers and that paper you're holding. They never actually touched each other.

ROBERT: Hmm.

JAD: I mean, if you think about it as touch, then you're right, I guess.

ROBERT: Because he's now dead and I think if, just touching the paper, he would just be a little, I don't know, closer somehow.

ALISON GOPNIK: Well, it's a funny tension, I think. Because, you know, what both science and at least some philosophical and even religious traditions tell us, is that the world is impermanent. Nothing in it stays the same. We don't stay the same, our bodies don't stay the same. The people that we love and the things we love don't stay the same. That's just the truth of the matter is that there's this constant impermanence and this constant flux. And some philosophers have argued over the years we should just embrace that. We would be freer if we didn't—if we didn't try to hold that flux for a moment.

ALISON GOPNIK: I have to say my feeling about it is, part of what makes everything so precious to us is exactly the fact that we know it's gonna disappear, we know it's impermanent, we know it won't last. But what we love is this thing now. We love our—for me, the most dramatic example of this is our relationship to our children. So we know they're gonna go, we know that in 20 years from now if they treat us with affectionate contempt we'll be doing really well. But that doesn't change the fact that right now it's this child, and not any other child in the universe. Just this one. And I think that there's something really deep and profound about our human lives that—the fact that we can do both of those things, that we recognize the impermanence, but that we feel the attachments. That seems to me to give our life its very special texture.

ROBERT: Wow, that's exactly—I could just put that whole thing you just said in a frame. And I'd just bow down to it.

ALISON GOPNIK: [laughs]

JAD: Well don't bow too soon my friend, because the next segment is going to ...

ROBERT: Hurt.

JAD: It's gonna hurt. A Tamar wind is blowing, that's all I'll say.

ROBERT: [laughs]

 

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