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.

Comments

Consciousness

[Translation Error]

When I first read it, the summary sounded pretty inane, but the Scientific American post goes much deeper and is actually pretty interesting.

Re:What ignorance gets published these days

[Anonymous Coward]

You're being too black and white when you say "babies are not conscious" (because of an inability to recognise themselves in a mirror). Consciousness is a spectrum of response involving reaction to a stimulus. At the extreme low end you could argue a simple automated greenhouse window opener was conscious - it reacts to the stimulus (temperature) by taking an action to control something (opening the window). Plankton, and plants, are a bit more conscious. Collectives (as in ants in an anthill or neurons in a brain) operate at a higher level of consciousness again. Higher animals reach such a degree of consciousness that we regard them as "sentient" (but while we might be able to define sentience, it seems impossible to sentience (or lack of) in every case. To a very few animals (humans, a few higher apes, arguably some birds) we ascribe the highest level of all: sapience.

Babies are actually quite a good example because they progress through all these stages. At fertilisation they're barely conscious: I'm not sure if there are any stimuli that a fertilised egg responds to in order to attract it to the wall of the uterus or if it drifts there. However as the embryo develops it definitely begins to respond to stimuli and therefore "becomes conscious". Through gestation the degree of consciousness increases: by around week 24 it reaches the level where if you poke a baby through the mother's belly it will push back. My wife has noticed that if she sits in certain positions our baby gives her a good hard kick until she moves, in a response to feeling uncomfortable. That seems to pass the bar for sentience, given how it's applied to other animals. Newborns can already react to hot, cold, hunger, tiredness, wetness / poo-coveredness. At some point the baby becomes sapient: I expect that's normally some point in the first year or couple of years after birth.