Big Babies:From Diogenes in Diapers to Nietzsches in Nappies.

"Be excellent to each other" - Bill.

Dude, when it comes to the meaning of life it seems that Bill and Ted had a greater understanding of it than all the most learned philosophers that ever lived. From the Milesian, Ionian, and Pluralist schools of ancient Greece to the Deconstructivism and Structuralism of Jacques Derrida and Jacques Lacan, nobody has ever come up with a better manifesto for life than those two bodacious slackers from San Dimas, California.

Except, that is, one group of people. A group that is around us all the time and whose wisdom we ignore simply on the basis that the members of this group cannot yet speak. I'm talking, of course, about babies and the reason I am talking about babies is because, last night, so was Dr Caspar Addyman, a lecturer in psychology and director of the InfantLab at Goldsmiths who has worked with the musician and songwriter Imogen Heap to create a song scientifically designed to make babies happy.

Dr Addyman's talk, Life lessons from laughing babies and murderous philosophers, was one of the most enjoyable, illuminating, and funny I've attended since this whole Skeptics in the Pub business went online. I'd been feeling a bit fed up, no real reason for it - just happens, earlier that day and had been tempted to sack it off and go to an actual pub now they've reopened instead.

I'm glad I didn't because, as so often in the past, these Skeptics events can really lift my mood. Hosted, again, by Brian Eggo of the Glasgow branch of Skeptics (who started off by reciting the lyrics to Together In Electric Dreams before erroneously crediting that song to The Human League, it wasn't - it was a Philip Oakley solo collaboration with Giorgio Moroder but I'd never be pedantic enough to point that out), Dr Addyman began his talk with a simple question :-

Who knows the most about the meaning of life? Philosophers or babies?

Each side was given roughly twenty minutes to make their case and it's no spoiler at all if you've read this far to say now that babies absolutely walked this one. As a big fan of Douglas Adams Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy series of books, Dr Addyman (the Doc as I shall refer to him from now on in) found himself, in 2003, with a list of the names and addresses of all six hundred and forty four registered philosophers in the UK.

So he wrote to each and every one of them and asked them one simple question. What is the meaning of life, the universe, and everything? Out of six hundred and forty four philosophers, a meagre twenty-two bothered to reply and the answers could be broken down, roughly, into a few generic categories.

There were several who palmed the doc off with book recommendations, a few who wasted no time bringing God into it, and there were others who quoted the likes of Kant and Aristotle. One, from Cardiff University, replied, quite tersely, that "the meaning is life is preparation for death. I hope you are well prepared". Which borders on a death threat if read in a certain manner.

Dame Nancy Cartwright, a respected philosopher from the London School of Economics answered, refreshingly honestly, with "I'm sorry. I haven't a clue". But, overall, there was a general feeling that the best way to bring meaning to life was to be rational, to be reasonable, to be creative, and to communicate with others. Or, in other words, "be excellent to each other, dudes"

Over a decade later, in 2015, the doc found an essay online by the American philosopher John Messerely, 'Cosmic evolution and the meaning of life' outlined, quite snappily, Messerly's theory that we may not have an answer to the question of the meaning of life now but cleverer beings who will come after us may do. Our job is to create an environment in which those that come after us can thrive.

Essentially, like a holiday cottage, we should try to leave the world better than we found it. Or, as somebody suggested in the Q&A that followed the talk, "try not to be too much of a cunt before you die". To put this theory even more succinctly, I refer you to the comments made earlier in this piece by Bill from Bill and Ted.

The doc threw the question open to students at Goldsmiths and asked them to approximate, as best they could, the meaning of life and write it on a Post-it Note. Alongside a selection of spunking cocks (obviously - this is Britain), the legend "SUCK UR MUM" (same), some Douglas Adams inspired 42s, and a sentence that read, quite simply, "pray to Allah and you're good mate" there was a sense that for a lot of people the meaning of life is food.

Curry, falafel, tzatziki, edamame, and chocolate all featured but the outright winner, and this is quite regionally specific, was Morley's Fried Chicken, a South London chain that is dominant south of the Thames and barely heard of anywhere else in London, let alone the country. 

You are, it seems, what you eat and if food makes you feel good to be alive then that is, in some way, the meaning of your life. Babies like eating too. Even though they make quite a mess of it and rarely rhapsodise about the experience like adults. But babies can, the doc said - taking us into the second part of his talk, teach us a lot about what it means to be alive.

His contention was that babies, while still being quite helpless creatures really, and the fact that we all were, once, babies provides us with six 'super powers' that help us in our lives and the doc set about enthusiastically explaining to us what those super powers are. 

Starting at the start. Human babies give us a great start in life. One that is unique to humans. Baby giraffes famously slip around on their feet as soon as they're born but they are, normally, up and walking, if not particularly gracefully, within half an hour of their birth. Contrast that with a human baby who can't, to begin with, even sit up or hold their head up straight.

Human babies are given a chance to roll around the floor, throw food around, and to experiment with what being alive means. They impersonate those around them and they learn from the experience of being able to do so. This learning becomes easier as they age because of super power number two. They develop big brains.

Because human society has developed most successfully by living in large groups the human brain has had to grow to make sense of it. As a human we don't just need to know what we think of John and what we think of Claire and what they think of us but we need to know what John thinks about Claire and what Claire thinks about John. As well as what they both think about Emily, Bill, and Ted.

We need to store vast amounts of information in our heads so we know how to act best in given situations. Human biology has historically made it impossible for babies to be born with large brains so these brains must, and do, grow outside of the womb.

Thirdly, having been babies is the reason we, at least most of us, live such long lives. The American anthropologist Kristen Hawkes' grandmother hypothesis asserts that when grandmothers become directly involved in the care of their grandchildren they increase the chances of passing on genes associated with longevity. When this is practiced over generations the effect becomes quite profound.

Another 'super power' instilled in us as children is that of the ability to 'do a science'. Childhood curiosity, even all those times your kids drove you mad asking "why", is what created scientists and gave us the scientific breakthroughs that have made life safer and easier than ever in history for us. The American professor of psychology Alison Gopnik once said "it's not that children are little scientists - it's that scientists are big children".

Often, in adult life, a false binary is created between art and science but, for children, there is no such distinction. Learning is learning. Being creative is being creative. Sectioning it up, curating it, and placing it in silos is something that comes with adulthood.

When the author Ellen Dissanayake looked for the origin of art she went beyond campfire singalongs and cave paintings to the idea that underpinned both those things. A sense of collective, emotional, communion. The purest, and simplest, iteration of that is the simple act of a mother singing to her baby, reading them a story, or playing games with them.

Which brings us, neatly, to the sixth of those super powers and the one that shows us, more than even the others, that babies have answers that philosophers do not. Happiness. Why are babies happy? What makes them so happy?

We all know that babies aren't always happy. They scream and cry quite a lot - and there's been a lot of research into why that is. Dr Caspar Addyman, for quite understandable reasons, prefers to study happiness in babies. It's been discovered that babies wake up happy, on average, 80% of the time - which is probably a higher percentage than for most grown ups I know.

Studies of other happy people, happy adults - imagine, has found that those most satisfied are the ones who manage to exist in a state of almost constant learning and who are presented with challenges but nothing beyond their immediate skill set. They navigate the space between anxiety and boredom without ever, or at least rarely, straying into either of those areas.

Babies do this naturally. Babies don't beat themselves up because they've not mastered a second language (or even a first), they don't fret about appraisal scores, and they don't compare their lives with other babies so they're rarely anxious in a way adults are. Equally, boredom is less of a problem when almost everything is new. If throwing a biscuit off a table twenty times in a row can be exciting then how can a baby ever be bored?

Like the big baby I am, I was not remotely bored by my evening with the doc and with Skeptics in the Pub - Online - and though I took some of the conclusions with tongue in cheek, I also thought that some very interesting and valid points had been made. With that, and already in my pajamas, I had a Farley's Rusk and a quick read of The Very Hungry Caterpillar and went to bed. Pulling my Peppa Pig duvet tight up to my chin to keep the monsters away. Which made me happy.