"Resolving it could help solve one of science’s most stubborn mysteries: what consciousness is, how it emerges and how we can know if another being possesses it.... Amid all the uncertainty, there’s one fact that everyone can agree on. In each of our lives, there was a time when our brains were still too rudimentary to support consciousness, and there was a time when that changed. Even if we can’t say
when babies gain consciousness, Dr. Austin said, “one thing we can be certain of is that they
will become conscious.”
From
"Are Babies Conscious?" (NYT).
From the comments over there: "My first memory is waking up in my crib when I was 3 years old. I recognized everything around me and it all felt familiar but I had no specific memory of anything. In reflecting upon this as I grew older I felt like this was the moment I became conscious."
Also there's this quote from Charles Darwin: "There is no trace of consciousness in very young children."
Posts
78 comments:
Yep, here we go: "Newborns aren't actually conscious, see, so it's not a problem to abort them! Up until what, 3? Only then should there be a moral issue! Until then, let's fire up the statue of Moloch and get rid of those unwanted babies!"
Six weeks correlated with nervous system function, and life evolves from conception. #HateLovesAbortion
Darwin is the secular god of mischief and dysfunction.
“There is no trace of consciousness in very young children."
Not even a Spark of Divinity, Charlie?
More inhuman than a human are these corksoakers…
"My first memory is waking up in my crib when I was 3 years old."
Long-term memory isn't reliable evidence of anything. For instance, the commentor says he was 3 years old. How could the infant know his age if he were not already conscious of formerly being 2 years old?
Active scientific debate? That's the propaganda style in action. If records of the time are to be trusted, in Germany ninety years ago, there was "active scientific debate" over whether Jews were human beings. Make no mistake, this is part of an effort to expand abortion rights into full-blown Lindsay Clancy-style infanticide.
In the last days, perilous times will come. Men will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boasters, proud, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy, unloving, unforgiving, slanderers, without self-control, brutal, despisers of good, traitors, headstrong, haughty, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, having a form of godliness but denying its power. For of this sort are those who creep into households and make captives of gullible women loaded down with sins, led away by various lusts, always learning and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth. Sound familiar?
Althouse is chumming.
The thrust of the Times article is that "science" says yes, they are, and the Darwin diary quote from the article is meaningless misdirection.
I don't think Althouse often plays this game but here she does and y'all are biting.
Also agree with Q on the silliness of the 3 yo's memory.
The "clump of cells" argument is the most intellectually disingenuous argument pro-choicers ever make. It is the 'slippery slope' on steroids, and is designed to sound scientifically appealing while simultaneously being definitionally opaque, and that on purpose.
They’re not conscious. Just “bundles of cells.” Let’s kill ‘em!
Yet again, another debate on a question that is impossible to answer. How pointless.
"meaningless misdirection"
A common feature of discussion involving this subject. Hmm, why is that?
Darwin is the secular god of mischief and dysfunction.
He was an acute observer and deep thinker, well worth paying attention to.
OF COURSE newborns don't have consciousness..
If they did.. then late term abortions would be MURDER..
so, OF COURSE newborns don't!
now, our pet dogs/cats/birds/fish/plants and Even the planet earth..
EACH of THOSE obviously has consciousness.
i have that right? don't i?
our dogs and cats have souls and consciousness
it's just unwanted children that are simple lumps of cells.
well, them and the unwanted elderly.. and redheads
What part of your brain is conscious? Let’s follow the science! Which says…we haven’t got a clue.
In 1998 neuroscientist Christof Koch bet philosopher David Chalmers a case of wine that within 25 years scientists would identify the neural patterns underlying consciousness. In June of 2023 Koch, the meritorious investigator at the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle, Washington, conceded defeat at the annual meeting of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness. “It’s clear that things are not clear,” Chalmers said, and Koch, grimacing, concurred. He stalked off the stage and reappeared with a case of wine as the audience laughed and applauded.
Koch then doubled down on his bet. Twenty-five years from now, he predicted, when he will be age 91 and Chalmers will be age 82, consciousness researchers will achieve the “clarity” that now eludes them. Chalmers, shaking Koch’s hand, took the bet. “I hope I lose,” Chalmers said, “but I suspect I’ll win.”
Not only are scientists unable to define how consciousness works, they don’t even agree who or what is conscious. Are whales conscious? Apes? Worms? Broccoli? One presentation at the conference foundered when critics pointed out that under its criteria DVD players are conscious.
Science does not, cannot discern origin and expression. Science is a philosophy and practice in a limited, near-frame of reference.
Satan is indeed the master of deception.
They want to legalize 25th trimester abortions, so Lindsay Clancy doesn't get retired.
"There is no trace of consciousness in very young children."
Never trust a single sentence quote taken out of context. Nor should we interpret "very young children" to mean anything outside of the larger context.
I don't have a searchable copy of "The Descent of Man", Darwin's 1871 follow-on to his "Origin of Species", but it's my library, though it has lain idle for decades. Nevertheless, I believe the quote, probably inexactly cited, is from that work. The difference between newborn human and the neonates of all the Great Ape species is remarkable and stark. Human babies are utterly helpless for months after a full-term pregnancy, many can't even rise from a supine into a sitting position without being lifted and set down into that position, or remain sitting without a support, whereas newborn apes are able to cling firmly to their mothers within hours. Within a few weeks these same ape babies are ambling about on all fours, standing upright without help, and even inspecting their mother's food if not actually sampling it. Within a year, ape babies achieve a degree of independence humans don't acquire until age 6 or 7. In "The Descent of Man", Darwin uses the complete dependence of the human infant on its mother for a period of many years as the origin of the husband-wife relationship, and not as an argument in favor of murdering children for fun and profit.
Well that should assuage your guilt when you star offing children up to 3.
i have memories from back in march, 2000;
of living on the brain rehab ward of Iowa Methodist in Des Moines;
and IN those memories i REMEMBER having NO memory of EVER being ANY PLACE else..
EVER!
earlier (which i STILL don't remember) i had NO lasting memory. Friends would come to visit every day, and i wouldn't remember EVER seeing them before.
I'd Talk to them though, and walk around the floor (so they tell me).
Later i began to recover memories of a life BEFORE my motorcycle accident, but for a while i had NO memories of ANY Place other than THAT FLOOR (and for awhile not even of yesterday).. so, OBVIOUSLY i had no consciousness, right?
i GUESS what i'm trying to say in my brain damaged way is:
memories are NOT the same as consciousness
You have to start with a definition of "consciousness."
What was Darwin's, Mr. Grok?
"He never published a formal, systematic definition of consciousness; his published works (such as The Descent of Man and The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals) discuss mental powers, self-consciousness, and expression in evolutionary terms but leave the precise nature and origin of consciousness largely open."
So I would say that the acute observer and deep thinker didn't know what he was talking about. Literally.
If we use a strict enough definition it could be argued that a person without an "inner monologue" is not truly conscious.
I wouldn't, but Darwin or my 3 yo self might.
An active scientific debate usually requires subject matter than can be measured in some way. Science needs data, something that can be verified. No one is talking about anything like that because no one has a clear idea about what there is to measure that might answer the consciousness question. The usual suspects are neural activity (variously defined) or observable responsiveness, neither of which is synonymous with the ordinary understanding of consciousness, but as the saying goes they're close enough for government work. On both scores, an infant will pass the test easily. So will, as it happens, your friend and teacher, the octopus (or your dog).
Years ago, Althouse had a post or two about Antonio Demasio (Descartes' Error, Looking for Spinoza), a neuroscientist who liked to dabble in topics like this and wrote books about it. I read his books in response to her posts, but can't say I found his effort to use neuroscience to clarify the conceptual confusion all that helpful. This seems like a replay, courtesy of the NYT.
The trouble with defining consciousness is that other than maximum possible definition the line is somewhere that will reject those who actually have it. If we make it about fixed memory, then a lot of older or injured folks are not conscious (Canada may have this perspective...). There could be, and historically has been, a definition that assumes outside of certain privilege or education no one is really conscious. A good argument could be made that a lot of people, including many who have opinions in the NY Times, are just NPCs following the external script they have adopted as guidance. Older usage might have called them gollums not npcs.
Where's Inga to tell us that little babies clearly aren't conscious so it's ok to Lindsay Clancy them? Or RC and Jaq to tell us that Jews aren't conscious either, just like noted scientists in 1930s Germany said?
"Where's Inga to tell us that little babies clearly aren't conscious so it's ok to Lindsay Clancy them?"
If she shows up and claims that then refer her to the Times article linked.
If the lefties get fully in charge, they are going to kill babies. They have been talking about it since the 1920's. No need to make up some bullshit reasons, they will just do it.
"Darwin is the secular god of mischief and dysfunction."
- He was an acute observer and deep thinker, well worth paying attention to. -
Advice is not direction, not a script for rebellion. Thus Darwin candidates. Show me the fitness function! And a moral code to temper its incitement.
If not - go ahead and kill them - said all the D.
"The trouble with defining consciousness is that other than maximum possible definition the line is somewhere that will reject those who actually have it."
I'm convinced that more than half the American and Canadian population "peaked in highschool". We're awash in middle-aged 17 year olds. So yeah, that's a chance I'm willing to take.
“ Newborns can recognize their mother's voice immediately at birth because they have been listening to it in the womb during the third trimester. They also recognize other frequent caregivers' voices within the first few days.”
Gee, what do you suppose is the agenda behind this article?
Sometimes you can anchor young memories, and sometimes you cannot. My first anchored memory is from about 15 months old. Totally frightened by a nasty thunderstorm, and comforted by my maternal grandmother's aunt, whom I could describe in some detail once I was verbal. She had died about a month later. Never saw a picture of her.
Before I turned two, I remember my grandmother telling me that I had a little sister, and Grandma was shocked that I could tell her which dress she was wearing that day -- it was the one she was wearing the day my grandfather had died in 1925 and she wore only foe hopeful occasions, and I pointed it out in her closet. Before I was three, things like ice storms and fires in our little coastal town in Connecticut.
The unanchored memories may be even deeper. In my mid-30s I hosted a German Agronomy student on my farm for 8 months as an apprentice -- I've had my P.Ag. licence for nearly 50 years. By the end, I was comfortably fluent in German, much to our mutual surprise, but he, being from northern Germany, could not understand why I spoke with a Bavarian accent.
I asked my mum about it and she sai "Oh, I got all torn up and beat up from birthing [your sister] so Adelle [a German immigrant neighbor] took you for a few months. She was from Bavaria and said you spoke pretty good German." Whence the Bavarian accent, long buried isa remote corner of my brain.
On my desk, right now, is a 50 pfennig coin from my birth year, 1949, and it features someone planting a tree. I look at it every day as I forge through the writing of a major book on Ecological Fruit Production in the North.
And Meadhouse folks, I hope those Saskatoons I recommended are starting to give you some enjoyable fruit.
We keep upping the age at which they can be killed.
What is it now? +3 years?
Memories are not the same thing as consciousness. It is abundantly clear to me, as someone who has both a puppy we have raised from birth and a year-and-a-half old grandson, that "consciousness" starts well before memory. Just look in their eyes. You cannot tell me that young babies are not "conscious" somewhere around 6 months, if not sooner.
I've been watching the consciousness debate between the materialists and dualists over the last ten years from the layman's peanut gallery. It's fascinating to me. Not just the core concepts of the debate itself, but that we...just...don't...know. So I find it funny that anyone is even debating this about an unborn human. We don't know how it works for born humans.
Even more fascinating...the very real conversations going on now about consciousness being a fundamental force in the universe.
Game prep for killing newborns. "She wasn't conscious."
And once again, the hard left identifies another class of "useless eater" that may be killed for the greater glory of the all-power State and its Social Justice acolytes.
They will start by killing the handicapped.
National Socialists always start with the handicapped.
It's not consciousness that's missing but memory. There are no good hooks to hang memories on.
A baby who could talk could tell the nurse, after waking up, "I am conscious now."
It's kind of insane that you can kill them up until birth in 11 states. And the NYT is going, "They're not conscious yet." It's like they keep pushing the window of evil, they can't help themselves. The left recognizes no stopping point. "There is no God. How far can we go?"
The thing about infants is that you learn to be human. It's a skill that's taught by say-foring, etc.
You take your child out to eat. The child wants to pay the cashier. You hand him the money and he hands it to the cashier. Did the child pay for the dinner?
Not fully, but he's practicing the role, and everybody acts as if he'd paid for the dinner as part of it.
How old do you have to be before you pay for dinner? fully.
Cogito Ergo Sum, I think therefore I am. And Popeye said “ Eye am’sk what eye am’sk, and that’s all what eye am’sk.”
Why does the question of consciousness of infants have to be looked at as a Yes/No question? Why isn’t consciousness looked at as something that evolves over time in human development?
Consciousness is a non-functioning word. There was no interest to provoke inventing it. The working form is "conscious," as in telling the nurse "I am conscious now."
Reification errors are provoked by a picture: if you are conscious now, it must mean that you have something: consciousness. At that point the language has gone on vacation. It's enough to screw up philosophers and especially amateur philosophers. If the word exists, the thing must exist. Like phlogiston, the cause of fire, must exist because fires exist.
See Rawls for the specific examples and Wittgenstein for the general argument.
416. ``Human beings agree in saying that they see, hear, feel, and so on (even though some are blind and some are deaf). So they are their own witnesses that they have *consciousness*.''--But how strange this is! Whom do I really inform, if I say ``I have consciousness''? What is the purpose of saying this to myself, and how can another person understand me?--Now, expressions like ``I see'', ``I hear'', ``I am conscious'' really have their uses. I tell a doctor ``Now I am hearing with this ear again'', or I tell someone who believes I am in a faint ``I am conscious again'', and so on.
Wittgenstein
"Why isn’t consciousness looked at as something that evolves over time in human development?"
Because doing so would rob a certain cohort of their "clump of cells" argument and introduce potentiality as a deciding factor. This would be followed by the usual ad hominems, accusations and looks of bewilderment and confusion.
We need a precise definition of "Consciousness"....and at what age. Do we mean a sense of self?? One day? unlikely..but possible. One year? Probably. 3 years? Certainly
The awareness of pain, pleasure, difficulty, frustration at being unable to achieve a goal?? Absolutely.
Ability to learn from experience?? Certainly....even flatworms have this. Does this hurt? then don't do it again. Is this comforting. Yes...I want more.
Awareness of consequences of actions.? Most of the time eventually...it is a learned ability. Even adults can lack this ability. See: Democrats. and hence the term "hold my beer.
Infants are learning, gathering information every second that they are out of the womb and possibly even before. Hearing their mother's voice... father's voice.
If "consciousness" is a process or progression rather than a defined demarcating event, then it naturally follows that it has a beginning and possibly no end. Furthermore that it can be thought of as "inevitable" in all but an extreme minority of cases. Even further still that its willful interruption, at any point, introduces moral hazard regardless of individual or group interpretation of whether they believe that process has begun or not. The wise person would err on the side of caution, and adopt a "do no harm" based on first principles, which is precisely why that interpretation must never be allowed to become the commonly accepted framework.
The cells must remain a clump for as long as definitionally possible to justify termination and absolve possible guilt.
Maybe I missed it as I skimmed the comments, but I’m surprised no one has mentioned the movie The Silent Scream. An ultra sound movie of 12 week abortion.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=gON-8PP6zgQ&dp_isNewTab=1&dp_referrer=serp&dp_allowFirstVideo=1
Memory and consciousness are two separate things...if you can't remember it, it never happened (?).
Are these so called scientists - and the commenter - conflating self awareness from consciousness? All of this seems to be a prelude to...something.
A very confused person with (hopefully temporary) anendophasia.
Consciousness and causation. Consciousness and expression. Consciousness and sympathetic, empathetic, correlation, perhaps. Consciousness and faith.
Artificial systems have memory. Artificial systems reason through correlation and decoding. Artificial systems express themselves through audio and visual cues. Number five is alive.
"Memories are not the same thing as consciousness."
Thank you!
Is consciousness understanding? Or is it the simple awareness of existing within the context of other things?
"Consciousness" is a word and what it means depends on who is defining it.
"consciousness(n.)
1630s, "internal knowledge," from conscious + -ness. Meaning "state of being aware of what passes in one's own mind" is from 1670s; meaning "state of being aware" of anything is from 1746. Consciousness-raising is attested from 1968."
- etymonline.com
Consciousness is like a cat with a Cheshire grin.
The precautionary principle would have us abort her and worry about forcing climate change later. Either that, or file her under a minority report, equitable, and permissive.
Maybe what we call "the self" and "consciousness" are the same thing and experience is their development.
“Also there's this quote from Charles Darwin: "There is no trace of consciousness in very young children." “
Or in adult Democrats.
And as for me, I remember getting into a car inside my Daddy and getting out insulide my Mom.
(The old jokes are still the best )
old liberal women show no signs of conscienceless…
Serious now, I have witnessed two newborn sons and four newborn grandchildren respond to stimuli and *learn* so my take is that this is just a “debate” where the hardcore pro-abortionists attempt to justify “”aborting” a baby born alive:
The real question isn't "is an infant conscious" it's whether the infant has a soul. Humans are, biologically, nothing more than any other animal. Except we have souls and the ability to make choices, and thus are above animals. Hence why it's murder to kill a human and just dinner to take a chicken.
This whole argument fails to consider humans souls. And, pray tell, does any of these "scientists" have a clue as to whether their soul existed after they die, or before they were born?
I am loathe to comment more than once, but I returned to this thread and found that there have been many commenters who seem to think that "human-ness" is something that is dependent on consciousness. If you accept that proposition, there is nothing to limit your ability to justify murdering all sorts of human beings who are unable to demonstrate to your satisfaction that they are "conscious." Babies are only the most prominent among such a group, but it also includes many handicapped or disabled humans, not to mention those who are asleep or under sedation, to take the argument to its logical conclusion. To be a human being is much, much more than only consciousness. Once you start putting qualifiers on that status, there is no end to the mischief you can do in the name of eliminating those who fail to satisfy your definition of consciousness. Commenter Vance has it precisely right. We should all be so perspicacious.
In my case, I was so awestruck by the process of my birthing that I couldn't speak for over two years.
At the risk of sounding Clintonian, it all depends on how you define "conscious". And as usual, the philosophical debates are smart people arguing about the "correct" definition, as if there is a correct definition given us by the universe. There is just what humans feel is conscious, which is like what humans feel is "beauty" or "art" or for that matter "God".
As commenters Vance & IamDevo mention above the author of the NYT article takes an ontological state (i.e. being "conscious") and for philosophically dubious reasons makes a yuuuge moral judgement that consciousness is what entitles an entity to moral respect as a "person".. There are lots of moral traditions in Western moral philosophy that beg to differ, for example, the Christian idea that we are all entitled to moral respect because we are made in the Image & Likeness of God.
Also, there seems to be a telescoping of consciousness as being the same as cognition. None of the German Idealists (Kant, Schelling, Fichte, Hegel) for whom consciousness was central to their philosophies would ever accept the reduction of consciousness to cognition.
"state of being aware of what passes in one's own mind"
Now define "aware."
How could the infant know his age if he were not already conscious of formerly being 2 years old?
Read more carefully. The “commenter” has a memory of being 3 because he recognizes items in that memory from that age. Get back to us when you gain consciousness.
One of my earliest memories is being told by my mother that she was expecting, which puts the memory at about exactly 3 years old, at the screen door to the front porch with my nose pressed against the screen.
I have another memory of sitting in my daddy's lap in the bleachers at a baseball game, and the ball coming straight at me, and a mit rising and catching the ball just before it brained me. Hopefully my dad would have handled it, but my mind wasn't that sophisticated to work that kind of stuff out then.
I bet liberals will use this as an augment for abortion after birth....
As soon as we imagined it, it existed.
Maybe our first expression of it is deception which happens very early.
Dogs often appear to feel guilt and have consciousness of it.
My first memory is a dream I had at 3 years old of wrestling with another child. I can still remember it and the mildly sexual feeling it created, which is weird. I know I was no older than 3 because that's when we moved from the house where it happened, and I remember waking up in that bedroom and wanting it to continue.
Indeed, there is an active sociopolitical debate over whether elective abortion is an insane Choice or a Choice of the insane, a euthanistic passion, an enthusiastic convenience.
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