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Consciousness Goes Deeper Than You Think (scientificamerican.com)
An anonymous reader shares a post from Scientific American, written by Bernardo Kastrup: An article on the neuroscience of infant consciousness, which attracted some interest a few years ago, asked: "When does your baby become conscious?" The premise, of course, was that babies aren't born conscious but, instead, develop consciousness at some point. Yet, it is hard to think that there is nothing it feels like to be a newborn. Newborns clearly seem to experience their own bodies, environment, the presence of their parents, etcetera -- albeit in an unreflective, present-oriented manner. And if it always feels like something to be a baby, then babies don't become conscious. Instead, they are conscious from the get-go. The problem is that, somewhat alarmingly, the word "consciousness" is often used in the literature as if it entailed or implied more than just the qualities of experience. Dijksterhuis and Nordgren, for instance, insisted that "it is very important to realize that attention is the key to distinguish between unconscious thought and conscious thought. Conscious thought is thought with attention." This implies that if a thought escapes attention, then it is unconscious.
Indeed, Jonathan Schooler has established a clear distinction between conscious and meta-conscious processes. Whereas both types entail the qualities of experience, meta-conscious processes also entail what he called re-representation. "Periodically attention is directed towards explicitly assessing the contents of experience. The resulting meta-consciousness involves an explicit re-representation of consciousness in which one interprets, describes or otherwise characterizes the state of one's mind.
Indeed, Jonathan Schooler has established a clear distinction between conscious and meta-conscious processes. Whereas both types entail the qualities of experience, meta-conscious processes also entail what he called re-representation. "Periodically attention is directed towards explicitly assessing the contents of experience. The resulting meta-consciousness involves an explicit re-representation of consciousness in which one interprets, describes or otherwise characterizes the state of one's mind.
I typically don't gain consciousness until after lunch since I get up at 4:30AM, catch the express bus at 6:00AM, and start work at 7:00AM. With a few hours left at work, I'm ready to start the rest of my day.
The problem is that, somewhat alarmingly, the word "consciousness" is often used in the literature as if it entailed or implied more than just the qualities of experience. Dijksterhuis and Nordgren, for instance, insisted that "it is very important to realize that attention is the key to distinguish between unconscious thought and conscious thought.
So they're redefining thought so broadly that most animals are conscious too by their definition and the pretending they have some revolutionary insight when all they have done is confused themselves about what they are talking about.
Babies are not conscious. I could see my child make the transition from not recognizing herself to recognizing herself in a mirror; that's a pretty strong test thought not definitive in itself.
Humans do not innately learn consciousness at all, and it was a very recent discovery and it is something that is taught, not picked up automatically:
https://www.amazon.ca/Origin-C...
Helen Keller's own accounts of her youth strongly support that idea.
Anything that senses, decides, and reacts is conscious. The more complex the decision step, the more conscious it is.
Consciousness is clearly a continuum. As a very small child, you have no context to place all the sensory data into, and this restricts what you can do. It's interesting to read about people with hyperthymedia, also known as autobiographical memory, because many of them have clear memories from before the age of 1 year old. Which give you an insight into what is interesting or important to an infant, for example, "these clothes are scratchy". At that level, likely infants are always "conscious". So is a cockroach, no offense either to babies or cockroaches.
What I think is actually being asked, is what degree of awareness of self is present? "I am, and I know that I am"? That's the meta-consciousness referred to in TFS.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
whereas we feel & act responsibly for ourselves & others well being as a priority.. that's the spirit.. tears in the sky until the moms can finally stop crying all the time... hanging on to our hemispheres we chant... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ARgiPJobKnE ..wake up...
My first thought was, "what am I doing here?" My mom gave me consciousness. I feel sorry for those who didn't.
You still don't know what consciousness is, but your pay depends on performing a dance around the issue and using big words.
Yet another thing we've described in black and white terms turns out to be an entire spectrum of variation.
Consciousness is not an on/off switch. It develops gradually over time as the child's brain grows and matures. Trying to pick one particular moment to declare that a child has become conscious is a pointless exercise that accomplishes nothing of use.
Consciousness has many levels. A newborn has no concept of object permanence and won't recognize itself in a mirror. Both of those are signs of consciousness, but object permanence shows up around 4-7 months while self recognition takes 12-18 months to develop. Picking one or the other as the moment that consciousness develops ignores the fact that the development occurs over time and affects many behaviors.
The human condition is never just black and white, so why does everyone spend so much time trying to figure out a way to describe it as if it is?
Then your status as a thinking entity comes into question.
This was written by an AI, wasn't it?
âScientistsâ(TM) are so sophomoric on this concept they might as well not bother. Hint: consciousness has nothing to do with the brain.
I'm an engineer. i can't not experiment with my kids.
I watched my oldest daughter in "4d ultrasound" perform self-soothing by caressing her own cheek. After she was born and experiencing "the end of her previous universe", in the first week of life, I caressed the cheek the way she had, and she responded powerfully. It amazed her. It strongly supported bonding. Her eyes got wide, her pupils dilated, and she took a deep breath of surprise. She then leaned into it.
I played pat-a-cake with my daughter when she was in the womb. I would feel my wife's belly for her hands, and then I would push in. When I pushed in once, she would push out once. When I pushed in twice, she would push out twice. There was a concept of time-series, number, or symmetry.
I observed several signficant transitions (jumps) in capability to interact with the "universe", but her "her-ness", her personality, her character, and her mental acuity were consistent. The leaps were more about costs per level of interaction, but not the fundamentals.
I taught her tongue-signs at 2 weeks old. She can nurse, which means she had basic control of her tongue and lips. It ended up being an indicator of if she had will, opinion, or particular desire long before she could hold her head up, and long long before should could crawl, walk, or drive the complexities of the human vocal apparatus. She was clearly able to indicate her desire for 1) a binkie, or 2) a bottle. There were times I tested this, and I gave her one insead of the other. I tried both ways, and each time, she would spit the undesired object out, and repeat the sign.
My bottom line: she was always conscious. It was not that her consciousness changed, but the physical architecture, in terms of muscle control, methods of communication, energy levels, and emotionally coming to terms with the end of the world she had formerly known that had been the changes.
I think people who do not rigorously watch, and experiment (with purpose of learning, such that learning informs empowerment of the child) have to question whether they are conscious after they are born.
I suspect that evil people would use it as a way to create a new class of murder - if their mind is numbed just a little, then they aren't really conscious when they are killed, and it isn't "cruel or unusual punishment". Whether they apply this to execution of prisoners, to the enemy combatant on the battlefield, or to euthanasia of newborns, I think it is dangerous to provide answers to badly asked questions. I have a substantial problem with the false assumptions behind the question of when, after birth, conscious starts. My clear observations strongly support that it existed before birth, and doesn't go away.
-EngrStudent (mathdad)
To some degree, this just sounds like playing word games, and coming up with new terms to sound like you've discovered something. Traditionally, there has been a distinction between sentience and consciousness. If you just want to say that babies feel and experience things, that's sentience and not necessarily consciousness. We can redefine the word "consciousness" to mean "sentience" and invent the word "meta-consciousness" to mean "consciousness", but you haven't really accomplished anything.
The concept of consciousness has been explored and modified over the past few thousand years (at least, we have records of people writing about it that far back), and it's fair to want to modify it some more. However, I think there's been a general view for a while that newborns are sentient but don't have much consciousness, and then we develop consciousness as we grow up. There seem to be developmental periods where our brains become capable of understanding certain things, and debatably those constitute different levels of consciousness and awareness, but again, that debate will be as much about what terms you want to use as it will be about our actual understanding of human development.
The problem is that, somewhat alarmingly, the word "consciousness" is often used in the literature as if it entailed or implied more than just the qualities of experience. Dijksterhuis and Nordgren, for instance, insisted that "it is very important to realize that attention is the key to distinguish between unconscious thought and conscious thought.
So they're redefining thought so broadly that most animals are conscious too by their definition and the pretending they have some revolutionary insight when all they have done is confused themselves about what they are talking about.
Exactly. The problem is that the word "consciousness" is used differently by different researchers. Whether babies are conscious-- or whether animals are-- or even whether you yourself are conscious when you're driving to work at 8am along a road you've driven 1000 times before-- depends on how you choose to define consciousness.
It's an endlessly debatable question, since the word doesn't have an agreed-upon, measurable definition.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
When I first read it, the summary sounded pretty inane, but the Scientific American post goes much deeper and is actually pretty interesting.
When someone says, "Any fool can see
"if it always feels like something to be a baby, then babies don't become conscious. Instead, they are conscious from the get-go" This logic does not work once you go back far enough. 12 cells are not conscious, neither are 48, but at some point in the brain development consciousness must start. It may be impossible to figure out exactly when that is but there are definitely early points when it's not there and then there is something there.
ÂQue es tu pinche problema, maricon?
Who is the "you" you're referring to? i.e. Who didn't know this already?
What is abundantly clear is that we try to simply consciousness way too much and it's a far more complex phenomenon than we're led to believe when we read its quite simplistic definitions. While these definitions do a good job of describing how consciousness operates, they don't even begin to scratch the surface of what consciousness really is.
It might be possible that consciousness is a quantitative property of any neurological system which also means that consciousness has varying degrees, ranging from simple worms to what human beings experience. Which also means that's it's really hard to define the lower limit of consciousness which also means that even inanimate objects might be considered conscious. And we go further we might arrive at the conclusion that consciousness is a property of this universe and everything in it including quarks and radiation.
All I can say is: duuuuuuuuuuuude, you just blew my mind. But, like, is my mind really my mind?
That they are conscious but just don't know how to react at that stage due to lack of experience in the new world they're in. They go from darkness of the womb to brightest of the world outside and are wondering WTF is going on.
My observations agree with yours. Sample size: 5 Father present at birth: 5 Sex distribution: 4 girls, 1 boy Observations: 1 and 3 of 5, both girls, showed remarkable attention at birth. So much so that the attending doctor commented on both occasions. Both adults now adult with very strong, creative personalities. 2 and 4 of 5 (also girls) showed "normal" attention at birth, turning out to be interesting but not exceptional adults. 5 of 5 (boy) showed little interest in surroundings at birth, was slow to speak (age 2) and somewhat awkward as a toddler. As a teen measured IQ 166, national merit scholar and engineering student. Introvert. Conclusions: Humans arrive at birth largely pre-wired for the personality they will have. Behavior at birth is a gross indicator of that personality. To say personality (and some level of consciousness) is not pre-imprinted in the womb is to ignore ample evidence to the contrary.
I'm sorry, your evidence has been downmodded because it implies that abortion is murder.
And so what? Human species in a global scale commmits countless acts of murder against our own and other species every day, either in war, in recklessness (driving), or in food production. Murdering newborns is quite different than aborting fetuses but at the end it doesn't matter.
One day, we'll understand the difference between us and animals is not in features but rather in grade. We'll really need that lab meat, because we won't be able to bear the thought of killing to get food -- contrary to general belief, IMHO that's something that takes its toll on us... call it karma, if you will.
One day, we will understand that babies -- and equally fetuses -- do have more in common with adults that what is taken into account now.
One day, we'll understand that killing people does not reverse time; we cannot pretend the person didn't exist.
One day, we'll understand how well-intentioned laws make people do horrible acts.
Because some adult folks choose to have no conscience.
Why do we feel things at all? Why does pain hurt? Could we remove complexity from a brain, neuron by neuron, until we arrived at a minimal topology or configuration that had subjective experience, but taking away one more neuron, wouldn't? If so, what makes -that particular- configuration special? Would it still experience things, if we simulated that configuration in a computer? Or if we wrote down the network state in books in ink, calculated the transfer functions by hand on an abacus, would each new volume be an increment in time of a fraction of a second of its experience? Merely by the act of doing that calculation and writing down the result somewhere?
What the _FUCK_ is consciousness and subjective experience, anyway?
When people ask me if I believe that life begins at conception, I tell them that I believe that life begins at consciousness. To which they sometimes respond, "Well, some people never reach consciousness." Yes, exactly.
So you'd be cool with someone murdering you?
K. Cool.
How's that nihilism looking now?
"Newborns clearly seem to experience their own bodies, environment, the presence of their parents, etcetera -- albeit in an unreflective, present-oriented manner. And if it always feels like something to be a baby, then babies don't become conscious. Instead, they are conscious from the get-go. "
If THAT is what you are calling consciousness, the self-aware higher order though which makes humans... humans then you've set the bar so low that pretty much all life (and certainly anything with a CNS) and even robots meet it.
The word "conscious" has many incompatible meanings.
It is commonly used by religious people to mean "has a soul." It is just commonly used by medical practitioners to mean "intelligently responds to stimulus." It is also commonly used by philosophers to mean "has sensory experience (as opposed to mechanical reaction in an absence of sensory experience)." That's just scratching the surface.
People equivocate this word terribly, mix these meanings together and jump from one to the other over the course of a single sentence. It creates terrible communication problems.
So when you ask "are cats conscious" that depends entirely on which of the myriad definitions of "conscious" you are choosing to invoke.
That's a glum, defeatist attitude you have going. With that logic, why do anything at all?
I think people accept abortion because it's absolutely terrifying to consider the alternative. Ignorance is bliss, or at least convenient.
Nothing 'twisted' about it. The idea that women should be enslaved to their embryos is fundamentally tyrannical.
I remember things back to 3 weeks of age - I was aware and thinking at that point. I would guess that consciousness goes back to before birth because there is nothing magical about 3 weeks or birth that would all of a sudden turn on consciousness.
Abortion is killing, that's true. Whether it is murder — a prosecutable kind of killing — is up to the laws to define.
And they can define it as a killing of a born human. Both sides of the abortion debate are remarkably inconsistent:
Those, who'd like it banned These people tend to be Conservative and are appalled at the efforts to insert the government into other aspects of parent-child relationship (such as mandatory schooling, vaccinations and other medical treatments). Those, who insist, it is "Constitutionally protected" These so called "Liberals" are Ok with the mother outright killing the child a minute before birth, but want her prosecuted (and the child taken away to the gentle care of government employees) should she decline administration of a government-mandated vaccine or a hearing-test a minute after.In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
This leads me to wonder what theories of cloud mind have been constructed out there by people unfamiliar with buffer bloat.
Some of the qualms and presumptions must be truly staggering.
Consciousness is fundamental to reality. We are not physical experiencing the non-physical consciousness, we are consciousness experiencing the physical.
Remember, energy was the only game in town right after the big bang until things cooled off enough for stellar nucleosynthesis to start and make...y'know, stuff.
I'm one of those people who just remembers more than is typical. I've also had a ball learning deep meditation. A neat side effect is recalling very old memories.
We suppress them because pre-conscious thinking is very different than conscious thinking. They don't fit our "grown up" mold very well, and some of the memories can be very uncomfortable. With a practiced and steeled mind they could be frightening in their alienness.
I recall my consciousness process which was gradual and somewhat frustrating. Each day would be remembering how to think again and adding a little bit to the skill after getting re-oriented until the point when you "just do it" when you wake up. Not at all unlike learning to ride a bike.
I must've been hearing "Humpty Dumpty" from my parents at the same time because my memory is that it felt like "putting [myself] back together again" every day. This indicates to me that I had some basic verbal skills first, at least comprehension. I have a few memories from before I really understood words (it's the poorly understood sounds that I can only interpret meaning from in retrospect, the way you might repeat your best guess at a foreign language word you heard) but they're of the alien type so my memories don't just start after language acquisition.
Anyway, there must be thousands of people in the world who can remember one way or another, so maybe researchers should go looking for them rather than just using guessing and philosophy.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
I'm not sure why, but it looks like slashdot keeps deleting my comments. What's going on, slashdot?
Cats endlessly follow the dot unaware of it's source.
Trump immediately recognizes the dot existing solely because of himself... a left wing conspiracy created it solely to get his wife to swat at his hands.
capcha: crimes
My bottom line: she was always conscious. It was not that her consciousness changed, but the physical architecture, in terms of muscle control, methods of communication, energy levels, and emotionally coming to terms with the end of the world she had formerly known that had been the changes.
You may have done a little bit of experimentation, but that's a tiny sample size, colored through the perceptions of you being her father, and (it sounds like) not having a background in psychology. There has been extensive scientific study on these topics, and it's pretty well established that your daughter's consciousness has changed. Being able to control her limbs and tongue does not constitute consciousness.
I don't mean that as an insult against you or your daughter, by the day. It's just that newborns have very limited awareness and understanding of what's going on around them.
If what they claim were actually true, then I know a ton of people who aren't conscious even as adults. It is a simplistic effort to quantify something that is both extremely complex and elusive (as is life it'self). I would agree that infants comprehension of the world starts off very rudimentary, and their attentiveness is also very limited, but anyone who says that babies aren't fully conscious is pushing an agenda or intentionally trying to deceive you. From the moment they are born, babies are both sponges of information and little scientists looking for logical patterns and cause and effect events. It is how they learn essentially everything about the world around them. To engage in those activities requires consciousness.
If you disagree, please post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like
"I want the ball. Throw the ball. I'm watching. Throw it. Let's play ball. Please, please, please throw the ball. OH! OH! Did you just say something about the ball?! Yes! I'm wagging with approval! Throw the ball! Ball! Let's play ball!"
"Food. Give me food. Food. Are you going to finish that? Food. You have my attention. Food? I want food. Look at me, because I'm cute. You should give me food."
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
My first child burst into laughter on her first day. My wife opened a gift in bed and my daughter burst into giggling fits at the ripping of the paper.
How is that not conscious? Fear, startled could be an automatic reaction, But Funny?
...So I'll hijack this.
If true, the fact that a newborn is "conscious" could have a profound affect on the Abortion Debate.
If conscious at birth, when did the child become conscious? 8 months? 7? etc?
Now the argument over, "is it a person" is dramatically changed.
Interesting.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
into remaining good infant eye.
They have limited awareness because they're brand new. You could make a similar argument that I wasn't conscious when I was five years old because I didn't understand how big the world was and wasn't as "self-aware" as I feel now.
Both sides of the abortion debate are remarkably inconsistent:
Oh, you are one the the people that assume there are only 2 possible sets of people in a debate?
If that were indeed true, then your strawman indignation about this well trodden debate would be well deserved.
Of course that argument has a few logical fallacies. Mostly the conjunction and red-herring variety, but that's common fallacy to appeal to when you want to denigrate as specific belief shared of set of people rather than address their arguments. Even stopped clocks are right twice a day, right?
Anyhow, carry on ;^)
I don't know what that sentence means.
My bottom line: she was always conscious. It was not that her consciousness changed, but the physical architecture, in terms of muscle control, methods of communication, energy levels, and emotionally coming to terms with the end of the world she had formerly known that had been the changes.
You may have done a little bit of experimentation, but that's a tiny sample size, colored through the perceptions of you being her father, and (it sounds like) not having a background in psychology. There has been extensive scientific study on these topics, and it's pretty well established that your daughter's consciousness has changed. Being able to control her limbs and tongue does not constitute consciousness.
I don't mean that as an insult against you or your daughter, by the day. It's just that newborns have very limited awareness and understanding of what's going on around them.
I would argue that *humans* have very limited awareness and understanding of what's going on around them. We are mostly limited by our visual cortex's representation of reality which is only slightly augmented by our sensory inputs (we can only sense an extremely limited amount about our environment). We mostly spend our lives living out the allegory of cave of our own creation.
What many call "consciousness" is probably mostly just the brain focusing attention. In the human brain, this happens mostly in the pre-frontal cortex (more specifically, the inferior frontal junction) which temporarily synchronizes with the visual cortex and object matching areas such as the fusiform face area or parahippocampal place area. It is hypothesized that this ability of "synchronization" between brain functions is the actual feeling of consciousness (where unconsciousness is simply non-synchronization between these functions).
In math, a single counter-example equates to disproof. So what if my sample size was one. That neither validates nor invalidates my assertion.
I am the father. Neither my genetic material, nor knowledge that she contains my alleles pre-disposes me to affection. To presume so is to presume an understanding of the operation of my mind which you do not and cannot have. I have measured where the affection comes from in the self talk. I know where the affection comes from.
Just because I have and share data that does not necessarily agree with the current scientific opinion does not make my assertion wrong.
Able to control is not the same as what she does with the control. A monkey could bang on a typewriter, and so could a Shakespeare (assuming we had one), but the what they did with it would be nearly infinitely different in fundamental nature. My argument was not that she could control it, but the way in which she controlled it. She was performing "error correction" while looking at my face and eyes.
There was a time when she discovered her face. She learned facial expressions, and explore both the domain, and the impact of facial expressions. That doesn't necessarily mean she didn't have a self knowledge and other knowledge before then.
-EngrStudent
What many call "consciousness" is probably mostly just the brain focusing attention. In the human brain, this happens mostly in the pre-frontal cortex (more specifically, the inferior frontal junction) which temporarily synchronizes with the visual cortex and object matching areas such as the fusiform face area or parahippocampal place area. It is hypothesized that this ability of "synchronization" between brain functions is the actual feeling of consciousness (where unconsciousness is simply non-synchronization between these functions).
You are supposing. Your use of "probably" means you do not know what it is. It is less valid than saying "the rest mass of an electron is probably constant". Without extensive data, nobody really knows. Science is about "provable, testable, repeatable". Probably is the front-end of a hypothesis, a question that can be answered with an experiment.
I like Hausdorff dimension, also known as fractal dimension. Before the discovery and exploration of fractals, dimension was considered integer. Afterwards, there was a need to become much more rigorous about the way the words were used, defined, and measured. I suspect that the modern enthusiasm for machine-learning and "artificial-intelligence" is similarly motivating a deeper dive into definition and measurement.
Even if, at some point, us humans get a decent "brain aproximator" machine, it is still both false and dangerous to presume that just because it has fair input-output mapping compared to our brains, that it also has the same interior "physics", or that it is a qualified diagnostic model of the nature instead of a talented mimic of the behavior.
-EngrStudent
You lost me at Dijksterhuis and Nordgren.
Nothing 'twisted' about it. The idea that women should be enslaved to their embryos is fundamentally tyrannical.
I agree, but why limit it to women? Should men also be enslaved to an embryo?
I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.
Go back to Europe, Anglo. This is the red man's land.
Newborn are like insects, they move on instinct, not consciousness.
What many call "consciousness" is probably mostly just the brain focusing attention.
I think that's sort of... I don't know... begging the question? Your explanation seems to be reductionist. "Oh, that consciousness thing? That's just signals int he brain." as though to dismiss an attempt at a more holistic explanation.
On the other hand, the way you're saying it is that it's "mostly just the brain focusing attention." First, it's mostly just the brain focusing attention? Whenever someone says anything is "mostly just" anything, I feel like they're probably trying to hide something. Like if you handed me a beverage and I asked, "What's in this?" and you responded, "Oh, it's probably mostly just juice," I wouldn't find that answer satisfying. What else is in it?
But back to why I said it was kind of begging the question: It's mostly just the brain focusing attention? What does that mean? What is the brain doing when it focuses attention? At least how I'm thinking about this at the moment, something would need some level of consciousness in order to have attention, let along focus it. Consciousness would be the precondition necessary for attention, and therefore consciousness can't be defined by being "probably mostly just focusing attention".
Does that make sense? So for example (and this isn't the best example, but I'm just making something up), you need some kind of computer to access the Internet, right? So let's say I'm a time traveler from the past and I didn't know what computers were, or anything about them. I ask you to define what a computer is, and you say, "Oh, well a computer is probably mostly just when you access the Internet." Yeah, it makes a certain kind of sense, but there are several problems with this explanation. First, if I don't know what computers are, then I don't know what the Internet is either, so your explanation didn't actually explain anything. But second (and maybe more importantly), it's wrong. That's not what a computer is. You need computers to exist for a while before the Internet was possible, which is already a big clue that computers involve a lot more than just accessing the Internet.
Like I said, it's not a great example, but I'm hoping it makes my point a little more clearly. In order to focus your attention, you first need sentience, awareness, the ability to direct your attention, and some kind of motive force to cause you to direct your attention. On top of that, you'd need the ability to focus, which implies not only directing your attention, but tuning out other things that would draw your attention away. Even then, it's not clear that having the ability to focus attention is sufficient for consciousness.
And then also, you're talking about the contrast between "consciousness" and "unconsciousness", which implies "awake" vs. "asleep". I don't think that's really what we're talking about here. I think the discussion is about when a baby becomes a conscious being, i.e. when its development reaches a point where it has a level of "consciousness" comparable to an adult person. That's a tricky question all by itself, because it's not even completely clear that adults generally all have the same level of consciousness. We've never really settled on an explanation of what we're talking about when we say "consciousness", let alone how we would go about measuring it.
However, it takes a while for kids to develop a coherent concept of reality. They don't even start with a sense of object permanence.
If babies are not conscious, can they be "aborted" after birth? This sounds dangerously like hyper-liberals trying to justify post-birth abortion. Or at least it could be used by them as an argument in support of such a position.
E Proelio Veritas.
There is a growing movement of 'baby sign languge'.
I watched a couple teaching their daughter. The communication level after about a year and then increasing to about two years old was amazing. (Afterwards it could speak)
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
It's just that some newborns have very limited awareness and understanding of what's going on around them.
FTFY.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
What a bunch of outrageously false bullcrap.
No, there are ZERO liberals who are OK with killing a fetus one-minute pre-delivery for no valid reason.
That is not only hyperbolic bs, but demonstrates a severe ignorance of what Roe v Wade says, and what it does not. It also demonstrates a tragically ignorant comprehension of the reality of abortions, and the infinitesimal numbers of second and third-trimester abortions.
Those who want women to be enslaved to their embryos are tyrants who want to punish women for having sex, and make vacuous and evidence-less arguments about 'life beginning at conception'. These people are the ones behind the fact that maternal mortality in the US is higher than it is in the UK - because they don't care about adult women, only about embryos and fetuses. Focus on saving the baby, the father can always find another brood mare....
Those who don't want women to be enslaved to anyone are also interested in the PUBLIC HEALTH - which means vaccinating everyone who can be, so as to create the 'herd immunity' that is what really stops the epidemics in their tracks. Those who are actually interested in HUMAN BEINGS rather than 'souls' are also interested in the health and well being of the children, and understand that large numbers of unwanted and un-cared-for children are not in anyone's best interests, which is why these people are ALSO supportive of material supports to the poor - unlike the 'every sperm is sacred' crowd, which doesn't give a flying F about babies, only about fetuses.
"...these conservatives are really something, aren't they? They're all in favor of the unborn. They will do anything for the unborn. But once you're born, you're on your own. Pro-life conservatives are obsessed with the fetus from conception to nine months. After that, they don't want to know about you. They don't want to hear from you. No nothing. No neonatal care, no day care, no head start, no school lunch, no food stamps, no welfare, no nothing. If you're preborn, you're fine; if you're preschool, you're f**ked."" George Carlin
No, I was right the first time. We don't have examples of newborns who come into the world with anything approaching adult-like consciousness and awareness.
Some may be more aware than others. I'm sure that's true, to some limited extent. But no, there aren't babies popping out of the womb with a solid understanding of the world around them. It just doesn't happen because it's not possible.
We don't have examples of newborns who come into the world with anything approaching adult-like consciousness and awareness.
Just because we can not ask them right away and no one is asking them later?
But no, there aren't babies popping out of the womb with a solid understanding of the world around them.
What has that to do with: "consciousness and awareness" ?
It just doesn't happen because it's not possible.
Hahaha, and on what "insight" do you proclaim that?
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
On the grand scale it doesn't matter. On a smaller scale I am a murderer too. I murder close to 125 dinosaurs weekly just to feed myself. So while on the grand scale someone murdering me does not make a difference, I would give quite the resistance to someone trying to murder me. That is, unless that someone is in a lifted truck and I am in my subcompact.
I feel like nobody really read the article (at least from looking at the comments with 5 mod). The idea is that thoughts can be conscious or not. You can think about what you need to do today, brush your teeth, drive to work, all unconsciously. But without _attention_ you won't develop meta-notions about it. You can have sensations and processes going through you and be totally unaware of any of it. That, I think, is the idea being put forward here. It has nothing to do with "what is consciousness". And it doesn't matter if you have managed to learn something. The emphasis is on the 'meta' - becoming aware _that_ you are thinking.
Just because we can not ask them right away and no one is asking them later?
Because we've done extensive testing on babies and children and we know (roughly) how human brains develop.
What has that to do with: "consciousness and awareness" ?
WTF do you think we're talking about here?
Again, make it BOLD for you to grasp:
But no, there aren't babies popping out of the womb with a solid understanding of the world around them.
What has that to do with: "consciousness and awareness" ?
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Because we've done extensive testing on babies and children and we know (roughly) how human brains develop.
You can not test consciousness.
You can only test reactions in some experiments/tests and draw conclusions.
Bottom line we have no real idea about consciousness, regardless if human, animal, child or plant.
Point is: 99% or only 95% of all babies fail your tests. Most likely the 1% or 5% who "passed" get sorted out as outliers. Just like you are dismissing parents reporting that in their impression their little babies where self consciousness from birth on (which implies they were before already).
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
What has that to do with: "consciousness and awareness" ?
WTF do you think we're talking about here?
You can not test consciousness.
By that logic, then certainly nobody should claim that their babies have consciousness. You also can't claim that anything doesn't have consciousness. A rock could have consciousness-- we have no tests that can determine that it doesn't.
But we can test a lot about how people are processing and understanding things by testing their reactions. From that, psychologists have a decent understanding of what babies can and cannot understand, and essentially, they don't have the tools to understand anything or think about much of anything. They don't have the ability to attach significant meaning to stimuli.
Lots of people have subtly different meanings in mind when they use the word consciousness, but most of those meanings somehow include the to interpretation of stimulus to attach meaning, and development of some kind of understanding of themselves and the world. Very often, it includes some kind of abstraction that provides a generalized narrative or theory about one's own existence and place in the world. That is, it's not just being able to understand individual an stimulus, but to contextualize all of stimuli into a story about who you are, where you are, why you're here, and what you should be doing.
Babies absolutely cannot do that. We know enough about how babies brains work and what they're capable of understanding to know that 100% of human newborns do not have consciousness. Unless there's some weird mutant psychic genius baby that's been covered up by the Men in Black or something, absolutely zero newborns have consciousness. Now, if you just mean "conscious" as in "awake and responsive to stimuli", then sure, lots of babies are conscious for large periods every day.
For Conservatives, life beings at conception and ends at birth. (In some cases, it starts again at brain death.)
For Liberals, once you're born, you're alive. At that point, you're an independent human being, to be treated as such. This means that parental rights are limited, since a child has rights to health care. You're confusing parental rights with individual rights. The individual right to proper health care overrides parental rights.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
My mom was a middle child in a large family and had a lot of experience with young children, along with being the neighborhood baby sitter. She said that I almost never cried, even when only a few weeks old. Even after birth I was noticeably quieter. The doctor took note and thought I may have had some disability, but my mom noticed I like to make noises and shortly realized I made different noises for different wants. A simple example is when I wanted to feed, I would periodically make a sucking noise. If nothing happened in a short while , I would make a short whine+grunt to get attention, then make the sucking noise again. It wouldn't be until some fairly longer time later that I would actually start to cry like a normal child if I didn't get fed.
She always got asked about how she kept me so quiet. I also had a great propensity to keep myself preoccupied, rarely ever wanting attention or interaction from others.
My first sibling has a very strong personality the moment he was born. When the doctor/nurse, can't remember was handing them to my mother, the doctor did something and my brother let out a grunt that sounded like he was pissed off. It startled the person. My sibling was very impatient from those early moments. Made grunting sounds that quickly graduated into whining then crying. Made it very clear what they wanted the situation fixed. The crying shutoff like a light once they realized they were about to get what they wanted.
From that, psychologists have a decent understanding of what babies can and cannot understand, and essentially,
And this again, has nothing to do with consciousness.
We know enough about how babies brains work and what they're capable of understanding to know that 100% of human newborns do not have consciousness.
No, we don't know this. Your repeated claims does not make it true. Point is you have no clue about the topic. You have not even a proper definition of consciousness.
If a baby grabs its own foot and pulls it to its mouth, does it know it is his own foot? Yes or no?
This is consciousness, not the nollocks you invent in your halb arsed arguments.
A new born who isopneing its eyes imediatly, grabbing for the fingers of his mother and smiling, making noice and trying to communicate: most likely is fully consciousness. You might _believe_ otherwise, but you don't _know_.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
psychologists have a decent understanding of what babies can and cannot understand
This does not include outliers. My abstract reasoning at the age of 6 was beyond what most adult programmers will ever peak at, yet "abstract reasoning does not start to develop until about age 11". Whatever. In my case, I was born with learning disability that forces me to use Abstract reasoning for nearly everything. The other parts of my brain don't work correctly. I actually have an inverse issues that I don't learn well from concrete examples, but I learn very well from abstract examples. This is the opposite of young children and it's always been this way for me.
My brother taught himself Algebra at the age of 9, and he didn't even have any Algebra books. He just got bored with Arithmetic and created a system of number manipulation to keep himself preoccupied. By the time he was a freshman, he was breezing through AP Calc and actually helping to teach the class. He completed the entire year of work in a few days while in class.
Excluding outliers is very common in research.
A lie. If this were true, Conservatives wouldn't have opposed assisted suicides. That's just one counter-example, but it crashes this part of your argument utterly.
Another lie. Nobody has a right to health care — to assert such a right is to advocate slavery.
Even if we were to stipulate for a second, that a child has a right to health care, that's irrelevant. The child is not capable of exercising that right even if it did exist — someone else must do it for him. Illiberals insist, that someone can and should be the government — that same government, which could not (in their opinion) defend even his very life 10 minutes ago...
As usual, your post is full of fallacies and outright lies. knew, I should've stuck to my policy of ignoring you...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
The modern miserable excuses for Conservatives are full of things they don't want anyone doing, and suicide is one of those things that (I've heard) the Bible is against.
Dead wrong, of course. Slavery is when you have no choice of what to do specifically. I have had to work during most of my adult life, but I was able to choose what I wanted to do (as long as someone was willing to pay me for it), so it wasn't slavery. I pay some of my money in taxes, and that isn't slavery. If we decide to pay for medical care for everyone, using taxes, and hiring people who chose to make a living in health care, no slavery is happening.
The child is capable of receiving good health care. Someone else does have to enforce that right. In most cases, letting the parents decide what's best for their children works well. In some cases, it doesn't, and someone should intervene for the sake of the child. In some cases, this means finding other people to take care of the child, and the government usually tries to avoid detailed decisions.
If you check Roe vs. Wade, you will see that it's not a blanket ban on abortions, but has restrictions on government action (giving people freedom, of course) that vary by time spent gestating. That pretty much reflects the closest thing we have to a consensus on abortion. Therefore, the government is perfect capable of banning late-term abortions except for the life-or-death reasons that are the only reason late-term abortions are currently performed for.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
My abstract reasoning at the age of 6 was beyond what most adult programmers will ever peak at
Did your mom tell you that, or did you take an online IQ test?
A new born who isopneing its eyes imediatly, grabbing for the fingers of his mother and smiling, making noice and trying to communicate: most likely is fully consciousness. You might _believe_ otherwise, but you don't _know_.
To the extent I don't know, you also don't know. Neither of us will ever fully know, in the same sense that I can't know if you have any consciousness now, or whether you're some kind of automaton that gives the appearance of consciousness.
However, insofar as we can know, we know that a newborn opening its eyes and grabbing fingers is not consciousness. There are basic instincts and sentience, but not consciousness.