The surprisingly simple reason kids have imaginary friends
vox.com
vox.com
Kids, on the other hand, are simple creatures. They’ll demonstrate exactly what they feel and think. That makes observing this effect much easier.
We aren't "supposed to" be like the other animals on our planet? Or are many mothers and newborns "supposed to naturally" die during child birth?
It's difficult to have a productive, thoughtful conversation when it starts this way.
Maybe those traits are good for working better in tribes, but irrelevant, or worse, harmful in the modern age?
The sense of "supposed to" above is: the human system was "designed" for a certain environment, and its behaviors make sense there. Outside of that environment many behaviors won't make sense, but can easily be explained by reference to the original environment. This is not a moral point, although it is one often employed in moral arguments.
My thinking aligns here, insofar that it's not apparent to me that the current situation is somehow less bad than any historical scenario.
In some sense it all comes down to what we're measuring. What are we measuring here exactly?
Let’s go with what his rewritten suggestion is saying, and see how it reads in various contexts…
“Aren’t humans supposed to be not exclusively homosexual? The only species with actually observed exclusively homosexual individuals are humans and domesticated sheep. In every other species, including Bonobos, individuals may be seen engaging in occasional homosexual behavior but then “defect” eventually and hook up to impregnate the females. So perhaps gay men and lesbians doth protest too much. Maybe they are all open to a heterosexual encounter here and there. The drop in genetic fitness of a purely homosexual preference would be so low that it would have been heavily selected against by evolution.”
Of course, this can show that humans have recently made biological evolution not apply as much, with sperm banks, contraception, reducing child mortality to negligible levels etc. They moved past historically high levels of war, polygamy, forcible intercourse, human trafficking, etc. As Steven Pinker details in “The Better Angels of our Nature”.
And before that, they already used rudimentary technology to make eunuchs, castratos, Shakesperian actors playing women etc.
And therefore the idea of “should have” is relative now. “This is how it’s always been so this is the way it has to be”. And with AI, it gets fuzzier still!
(Yeah, that probably sounds like moving the goalposts. In a lot of cases the goal will be implicit and you can just talk in your debate partner's languages of "supposed to", and that's the situation I was imagining in my first post. But if it gets messy, then yeah, you'll need to get explicit about is-ought.)
Besides, isn’t evolutionary psychology too full of unfalsifiable just-so stories LOL
Your statement intuitively feels false to me, and I would like you to defend it.
On the subject level…
Have you ever seen a troop of monkeys hanging out? They definitely aren’t operating as modern atomic families, and we’re pretty closely related.
Geez, it was only several generations ago that multigenerational family cohabitation was common. And from my personal experience, growing up in a small town and hang out with other kids at will was great.
This shouldn’t have bothered me so much but, since when the burden of proof is on those who question the validity of a statement?
That would mean everything I say must be taken as valid unless you can prove them wrong. In some cases you would have to prove the absence of things which is impossible. And if I have the loudest megaphone, my “facts” would dominate.
I don’t think you would prefer that to everyone being responsible for providing proof of validity for their statements.
Anyway, only because something feels intuitive, it doesn’t make it true. In this instance the original claim seems to contradict the article which states imaginary friends are not the result of loneliness but the process by which children explore the complexities of real relationships… i.e. a form of subconscious thought experiment.
Like, it sounds plausible, but you'd need to show something like an increase in imaginary friend development in places where children are isolated or lonely.
It sounds like ass talk that is hard to refute or confirm.
I could just as easily say we have imaginary friends to help in cognitive development/processing that the real world isn't adequately fulfilling.
It sounds great and might even be possible.. but it came from my ass.
My experience growing up had many friends who had imaginary friends, and the highly social ones with grandparents and other extended family at home also had imaginary friends. It's not my anecdotal experience that humans living in groups would lead to fewer imaginary friends.
I queued up a DeepResearch question, and got back the following result: "imaginary friends are by no means a purely “Western” phenomenon – the potential for children to imagine friends is a human trait that transcends culture" [1]
It does seem to be the case that communal upbringing results in lower rates of imaginary friends, but it does *not* seem to be the case that imaginary friends are a byproduct of children living only with their parents.
[1] https://chatgpt.com/share/67ea28bd-d674-8000-b4da-188bb56fe2...
Real world data is a messy thing
Only thing is, how do I know for sure that I’m not the imaginary one?
Cogito, ergo sum?
Young kids struggle to think about things in abstract; re-enacting situations is a natural part of how they come to understand their experiences. In this case, it's the experience of being left alone with Daddy because Mommy is going to work.
Children will repeat / re-enact things (and just try stuff in general) while adults are too stubborn about looking foolish.
> One study found that Japanese children played with their personified objects more during the pandemic than they had beforehand, suggesting an increased role for these imaginary companions during times of isolation…
So lonely isolated kids turn to imaginary friends more often. But imaginary friends are not a sign of loneliness.
Right.
A runny nose is a sign of a cold, even though you can have a runny nose without a cold.
Similarly, an imaginary friend is not "a sign of" loneliness. On its own. When grouped with other data, maybe together they are.
It's just a difference in language usage. "A sign of X" might be taken to mean that on its own, X is implied. Or it might be taken to mean that it can be a contributing factor, but on it's own is meaningless.
Personification is something everybody does all the time.
Imaginary friends are something children sometimes do because the culture transmits the idea that they should.
Self play works for games with bounded rules and clear definitions of success. The majority of ML algorithms including LLMs don’t train on their own outputs because it makes their results garbage.