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What is it Like to be a Child? Childness in the Age of Neuroscience

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Peer-reviewed

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Article

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Abstract

The title of this article alludes to the famous work that cognitive studies inevitably return to: “What is it like to be a bat?” by Thomas Nagel (1974). While it is possible to imagine what it might be like to be a bat, for instance, to fly, to hang upside down and to use echolocation, a bat's subjective perception is presumably so different from a human being's that it can never become a shared experience (see also Blackmore 2005, pp. 6-9). We cannot access the consciousness of a bat, or a cat, or a rat; we cannot even be sure that animals have consciousness, or whether some of them do while others don't. In 2012, a group of international scholars adopted The Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness, stating that all animals are sentient (Bekoff, 2012). While this is doubtless a decisive step for animal rights movement, from a philosophical point of view it is problematic. The most basic definition of consciousness includes the awareness of being sentient: does a bat know that it is a bat? Does a bat understand batness as a distinctive feature of selfhood?

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Keywords

Cognitive criticism, Evolutionary criticism, Neuroscience, Brain laterality, Memory, Childhood, Childness

Journal Title

Children's Literature in Education

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Journal ISSN

0045-6713
1573-1693

Volume Title

50

Publisher

Springer Science and Business Media LLC