I know my son (10 months) <i>loves</i> being surprised. Today he was playing with magnets - finding them sticking to the fridge rather than falling to the floor when he let go of them put him in fits of giggles and kept him occupied for about 10 minutes.<p>Playing peek-a-boo and then showing up wearing a silly costume or face expression or whatever is one of his favourite games.<p>When he first met a water fountain, a balloon, bubbles, etc. Anything that didn't respond as he expected physical things to respond, he absolutely loves it, and becomes totally fascinated by them for ages and ages.<p>Being a dad is awesome. Sleep deprivation, getting puked, peed, and pooped over, changing nappies (diapers), getting screamed at irrationally for hours, etc. is awful at times (and coping with it while sleep deprived makes it all so much worse), but totally worth it.
One difficulty with the hypothesis that babies are born with pre-existing knowledge about the physical world is the question about where this information comes from and how it is coded in the brain. Could it be that the initial physical rule s are random, similar to the Uncarved Block Hacker Koan, inspired by an exchange between Sussman and Minsky (), <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_koan" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_koan</a>? Or is the information somehow coded in the connection of neurons in the brain through evolution?<p>It seems to me that the role of evolution-derived innate world knowledge is relatively small to the mechanism of a powerful rule generation and update scheme, based on probabilistic analysis done in the brain's network. It could be that the rules are pseudo-randomly generated and <i>this</i> is innate knowledge that we use.<p>Here's the interesting thing: As more researchers see the power of such rule-update learning (e.g. see also this 2002 paper by Renee Baillergeon from UIC, PDF file: <a href="http://fitelson.org/woodward/baillargeon.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://fitelson.org/woodward/baillargeon.pdf</a>) I think the weight of Chomskian hypothesis of (in simple terms) "innate language faculty since language is too hard to learn" is decreasing. I found this review of Daniel L. Everett's book <i>Language: The Cultural Tool</i> by John McWhorter explaining this point vey well (<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/08/books/review/language-the-cultural-tool-by-daniel-l-everett.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/08/books/review/language-the-...</a>).<p>You might also find this TED Talk by Alison Gopnik on how babies think interesting (<a href="http://www.ted.com/talks/alison_gopnik_what_do_babies_think/transcript?language=en" rel="nofollow">http://www.ted.com/talks/alison_gopnik_what_do_babies_think/...</a>)
Reminds me of my son's 1st encounter with a balloon. He was in a phase where he liked to drop everything on the floor. We were at a restaurant and he was given a balloon. The look on his face when he "dropped" it was priceless.