Consciousness Goes Deeper Than You Think (scientificamerican.com) 288
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.
What ignorance gets published these days (Score:5, Interesting)
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... [amazon.ca]
Helen Keller's own accounts of her youth strongly support that idea.
Re:What ignorance gets published these days (Score:4, Interesting)
Are cats conscious?
I can make a cat chase a laser dot around the room endlessly.
When I waggled a laser dot infront of my infant, he identified me as the source of the phenomenon after about 2 seconds, gave up on the dot and came for the emitter itself.
Re:What ignorance gets published these days (Score:4, Interesting)
I've actually had exactly the reverse experience. One of my cats knows where the light comes from, and goes for there. My child when she was very young did not, and was just as fascinated as a cat at the little red dot flying around the floor.
Re:What ignorance gets published these days (Score:4, Insightful)
Clearly, depends on the cat and the child - I've often thought that the line between human and animal consciousness/intelligence/etc. is much fuzzier than is traditionally taught.
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I've often thought that the line between human and animal consciousness/intelligence/etc. is much fuzzier than is traditionally taught.
Fuzzier? Why does it have to be blurry at all? You don't think our 4-legged friends can achieve consciousness? They're not going to be discussing Descartes, but that doesn't mean they're not self aware.
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Clearly, depends on the cat and the child - I've often thought that the line between human and animal consciousness/intelligence/etc. is much fuzzier than is traditionally taught.
When some of us are willing to strap C4 to their chest in the name of a fairy tale character they believe is real without any evidence, I don't believe you can classify our species as remotely intelligent. I also wonder what process it is by which we learn to invent imaginary things that we believe are real to the extent that we will go to war over differences of opinion over them thus causing much suffering. I hope some day we do become intelligent enough to stop this nonsense.
Re:What ignorance gets published these days (Score:5, Insightful)
And my dog loves chasing the red dot around but as soon as I shut it off I get a dirty glance. She knows the source but still loves chasing it.
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You're making some assumptions about things you can't know. For instance, what if your dog is looking at you for some indication about what to do next and not looking at you to ask why you turned off the toy.
Well I can expand on that. When she wants to play with the laser she looks at the ground and her tail wiggles, often the result when she sees us pick up the laser too. When the laser shuts off and she wants to play more she glares up at us, whines and then stares back at the ground and her tail wiggles. I know my interpretation, make of it what you will.
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Are cats conscious?
I can make a cat chase a laser dot around the room endlessly.
When I waggled a laser dot infront of my infant, he identified me as the source of the phenomenon after about 2 seconds, gave up on the dot and came for the emitter itself.
You are confusing the activity with the thought process. Our cats identified the source of the light pretty quickly, but continued to play.
This probably had a lot to do with the fact that other than playing with the dot, the cat doesn't have much use for the laser.
Over time, and watching and associating with all manner of animals, that there is a consciousness of sorts going on. It isn't necessarily the same sort of self awareness that humans have, but then again, believing that only the human sort of
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It's not approximating bullshit, it's straight up species based racism/bigotry. Which is how things have always been, and is a big part of the macro attitudes that allow exploitation of the natural world to a point that we're going to collapse its ability to support the human race. But, hey, that's mostly my grandkids' problem, why should I even care?
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++insightful
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It's not approximating bullshit, it's straight up species based racism/bigotry. Which is how things have always been, and is a big part of the macro attitudes that allow exploitation of the natural world to a point that we're going to collapse its ability to support the human race. But, hey, that's mostly my grandkids' problem, why should I even care?
Well, since we are on the human bashing bit, I believe that humanity has a fatal flaw that will lead to our eventual extinction. While we have evolved a big smart brain that allows us to do many things, we are constrained by our "lizard brain" which largely rules most of us. We delight in killing other humans - if there is no good reason, we'll make one up, such as an "enemy" believing in the wrong nonexistent entity that wants us to kill others. That's the seeds of our destruction, and I believe at some po
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Frank Herbert had an interesting take on that in Dune. You might have human form, but unless and until you can control the lizard brain, you're just an advanced animal. To be human requires more.
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Are cats conscious?
No, not the meaning of conscious we are using here.
They are not unconscious however, so it depends on the definition, but they do not have the abstract processing required for self-reflection.
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They are not unconscious however
I dunno, some cats are pretty freakin' lazy.
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Are cats conscious?
No, not the meaning of conscious we are using here.
They are not unconscious however, so it depends on the definition, but they do not have the abstract processing required for self-reflection.
Not unconscious means conscious. By definition.
Try again. If you think you have a strict definition of consciousness that allows for whatever bullshit you're trying to sell, please post that definition.
Here are some facts for you:
There is no known physical mechanism that manifests consciousness.
There is no objective test to determine whether something is conscious or unconscious.
There is no strict definition of consciousness.
You can faff about with bullshit and wankery all you want, but none of it will be
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My cats would get ready to pounce when they see me pick up the laser pen. They know it's me but love to chase the red dot anyway.
My brother's cat was the same way... reach for the pen and they get ready to jump on the red dot.
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And let's not forget that some kids are more "special" than others.
Re: What ignorance gets published these days (Score:2)
Who's Moran?
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Me! I am moran!!!1
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Or, just in case that was a serious question: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Re: What ignorance gets published these days (Score:2)
It was a serious question. Not his best song but he's still the best musician around.
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Looked more to me like he spotted the sparkles of laser on dust in the air and traced that back, but, yeah, many many things could have happened. (though, visual acuity is probably one advantage humans have over cats...)
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Red is defined as "not blue or green"
Green is defined as "not red of blue"
Blue is defined as "not red or green"
Welcome
A word with many definitions (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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The problem with this definition is that inanimate matter suddenly becomes conscious as well.
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You've just shifted the problem with the definition to "aware." Is a slime mould aware? They solve maze problems.
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Well, awareness has to be the minimum aspect of consciousness. I think part of the problem is that it's inherently difficult to treat consciousness as a binary state. Clearly there are gradients involved. How narrowly do we want to define this? A slime mold reacts to various stimuli, and so do we. On the other hand, most higher orders of life have the ability to process more complex stimuli and have a richer choice of decisions in most scenarios. But I've seen cats make strategic decisions when playing (as
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Yes, I think we agree on a need to define consciousness precisely. My criticism of your definition is that it replaces one undefined term (consciousness) with another (awareness). How do you know a crystal isn't aware? How do you know you are? If you don't remember something, were you aware when it happened?
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Objects can make decisions too. Even a 1980's chess computer decides which move to play. Modern autonomous cars make hundreds of decisions per second.
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The problem with this definition is that inanimate matter suddenly becomes conscious as well.
Define "inanimate matter"
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That definition sounds like circular reasoning returning to the bad philosophy which spawned it.
Consciousness is the subjective perceptual experience, and has nothing to do with self-awareness (or speech or linguistics for that matter.)
More likely, as a real phenomenon, it may have something to do with memory -- does it exist as a facility independent of memory, or does it exist inside a walled off virtual recall garden through which memories are passed for feelings magnitude analysis, for storage emphasis
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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
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Thanks for the pro-life pitch but, according to that argument, a slug is as conscious as a fetus...which is actually a fair argument for the pro-choice side.
It's a non-argument for both sides. The legality of abortion was settled on the basis of the adult's freedom, not the fetus' consciousness, awareness, sentience or sapience, or lack thereof.
If the latter at all mattered in the legal debate, then it would have set precedence to kill children who do not demonstrate consciousness, awareness, sentience or sapience at birth (i.e. most all of them).
Pro-choice is literally "give me the choice".
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Babies are not conscious.
I'm not sure I agree with that. I have many very clear memories going back to when I was VERY young. At least two of them are from before the time when I was even attempting to walk, and at least one of them predates my ability to roll over from my back to my stomach. To me, the fact that I remember those moments so clearly, (along with the emotions I was feeling), is indicative of consciousness, and even self-consciousness. I realize now that in those moments I was very definitely experiencing the 'self /
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You are defining "self consciousness", the self-reflective awareness as distinct from the environment. However, recognizing your own reflection is essentially connecting an outside image with yourself. Not recognizing your reflection as a representation of yourself does not disprove self-consciousness, but recognizing it does prove self-consciousness. What babies seem to lack early on is "meta" consciousness and abstract reasoning. There is a level of abstraction to recognizing that your reflection is a rep
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Lots of thought about consciousness, AI, etc. eventually devolve to versions of: "it is hard to think that there is nothing it feels like to be a newborn."
That's a pretty shaky foundation.
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Aren't you conflating consciousness (i.e. being awake and aware of one's surroundings) with sentience (i.e. being able to perceive and feel)?
Being able to recognize oneself is not a mark of consciousness; it's a mark of sentience. Animals are conscious by every definition I've ever seen, as are babies. These researchers aren't redefining the term. Rather, they're pointing out that it's occasionally being co-opted by others to suggest something more than what it actually means, which has led some of them to
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> Babies are not conscious.
[[citation]]
How are you _measuring_ consciousness ?
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> So they're redefining thought so broadly that most animals are conscious too by their definition
The fact that consciousness doesn't even exist according to the Standard Model [wikipedia.org] should be your first clue that scientists don't have a fucking clue what consciousness is.
Second, you DO realize that animals communicate with one another, right? And that they demonstrate free will. If you actually had a pet such as a cat or dog you would know this.
Third, the problem is scientists are too stupid to realize Ev [youtube.com]
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You're delusional. Just thought you should know.
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I find it Interesting that you introduced Helen Keller. I thought of her as well. My assertion is that how we define consciousness is conflated with the development of recursive thought, which is directly related to language development. The two are intertwined because to even define something is to presuppose the possession of language. And, in having language one also acquires recursion as a part of their thought process.
We see consciousness through the inalienable lens of thinking about thinking abou
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This is nothing but half-assed, garbage-can philosophy. No doubt it always "feels like something" to be a frog, but that doesn't mean the frog is "conscious" by any reasonable interpretation of the word.
But that brings up a question which seldom fails to raise a strong reaction in some people: if a newborn is not "conscious" then to what degree, and by what measure, is it actually a human being?
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Like a lot of "science" about consciousness. We desperately need a break through in its understanding and it seems like we haven't learned much in the past three thousand years. However we have a ton of ideas, suggestions an assumptions. Maybe we should direct our energy, resources and minds towards the openworm project. It makes sense to start with something
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I wouldn't say that. Several experiments in the last five years have consistently shown that we make many of our decisions before we are consciously aware of having done so. People just don't like the implications of that. It is appearing more and more that "consciousness" is a thin layer of executive decision making and memory on top of deeper unconscious processing. We don't engage it as often as we'd like to think and it's slow and inefficient.
minding your Qs and Ps (Score:2)
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.
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An example is the enthusiasm with which the free will people jumped on quantum uncertainty. Classical mechanics concerned philosophers because it didn't leave any room for free will. So when quantum mechanics, with inherent unknowability came along, they were relieved. Except that quantum mechanics probably leaves even fewer places for free will to hide than does classical.
The Slashdot hive mind reaction to "AI" is similar. Neuroscience research is suggesting that the majority of our behaviour and decis
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You are familiar with learned reflexes, yes? Once practiced, they become "unconscious" and occur before we are aware of them.
As adults, we have made up our minds about many kinds of decisions beforehand: likes, dislikes, morality.
So who is to say these are not "learned reflexes", which occur before we are aware of them, just like other learned reflexes?
That would mean those decisions were made consciously... just in advance. In the sa
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if a child does not learn to see by a certain age, they will never be able to perceive even if they regain their sight later in life
You are grossly ignorant about such things [dailymail.co.uk].
Plankton are conscious (Score:4, Insightful)
Anything that senses, decides, and reacts is conscious. The more complex the decision step, the more conscious it is.
Re:Plankton are conscious (Score:5, Interesting)
So Tesla cars are conscious?
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Anything that senses, decides, and reacts is conscious. The more complex the decision step, the more conscious it is.
By that token, you could claim atoms are conscious. It lost an electron so it "decided" it wanted an electron to replace it. Not complex enough? How about microprocessors "deciding" to compute the instructions you give it?
I suppose what I'm getting at is that the distinction for "deciding" needs to be clarified.
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A microprocessor does not choose, it only does what its told to do based on variables given to it.
How is that different from a brain?
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I don't agree. Consciousness is the act of being aware. Autonomic actions are, by definition, not signs of consciousness.
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A continuum (Score:5, Insightful)
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 [wikipedia.org], 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.
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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 [wikipedia.org], also known as autobiographical memory, because many of them have clear memories from before the age of 1 year old.
Yup. My first memory as a child is some time before I was one. I toilet trained very early. I also contracted some sort of illness and spent a day or two in the hospital. While my mother told the nurses that I was trained, the nurses insisted that no kid that young could be toilet trained. So they put me in a diaper. Which pissed me off royally.
So at some point during the day, I had to whizz. Now we get to the part of my memory. I recall looking out the window from the crib I was in, and removing my diap
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Are you sure you remember. Or did you hear your mum tell the story so many times that you subconsciously rewrote the experience in your mind. And now you remember that instead? Every time the brain thinks about something, remembers it, it can easily be subtly changed. All those changes can and do add up to what amounts to a memory of something that never actually happened.
Well, I brought it up first when I was older. What I think etched the memory was me being quite angry about the diaper, and looking outside the window and wishing I was outside. As well, there was a feeling that pissing on the floor because I didn't want to go in the diaper was an act that I believed would piss off the nurses, and was a sort of revenge feeling.
My memory was of being angry and taking revenge, while my mother's memory and apparently the nurses was one of it being kind of cute. So while I u
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I know these are genuine memories because my family talked about this recently, and I described things to them that they had completely forgotten about and were surprised I could recall. Meanwhile, I can't remember what I did yesterday. Memories are strange.
And in different people, minds operate so differently. I can remember those early memories easily. I can memorize a list of numbers easily. But I am horrible with names without little mental tricks - like repeating a person's name I've been introduced to. And the funniest one I've discovered is with television and movie actors. I can name an actor's filmography or television history without being able to give their name. Wife calls me RainMan some times.
Why is anyone suprised? (Score:2)
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 conscio
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they remember the womb, emotionally and literally (Score:5, Interesting)
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)
Re:they remember the womb, emotionally and literal (Score:5, Interesting)
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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:
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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 newb
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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
Word games (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Consciousness (Score:5, Informative)
"You" (Score:2)
Who is the "you" you're referring to? i.e. Who didn't know this already?
Strange things (Score:3)
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.
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From the blog post: "Instead, they [children] are conscious from the get-go".
God, not so fast! Could you define this "get-go", please? Is it when a sperm cell fertilizes an egg cell? Or some time later? And if some time later then when exactly [unsw.edu.au]? At 2 weeks? 3? 4? 5? 20? 40?
Consciousness Goes Deeper (Score:2)
Lack of awareness goes to the bone (Score:2)
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.
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You are setting the bar pretty low... (Score:2)
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 ro
3 weeks (Score:2)
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.
Why Guess When You Can Ask? (Score:2)
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.
Biased or Intentionally Deceptive (Score:2)
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
My dog is conscious (Score:2)
"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."
Re: (Score:2)
lol
Re: (Score:2)
Your dad was involved but your mom was committed.
Why Waste a First Post? (Score:2)
...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.
Re: (Score:2)
4th term abortions are already highly frowned upon.
Re: (Score:2)
Now the argument over, "is it a person" is dramatically changed.
The argument was never "is it a person?". The argument has always been "do we care?". The problem is that we don't want to be called callous, so we wrap our feelings in a layer of obfuscations. Because our feelings aren't going to change, a new approach to consciousness isn't going to change anything, let alone dramatically. We'll simply modify our expressed reason for staying with the same outcome.
Re: Go back to Europe. (Score:3)
As an actual Native American, feel free to stay. Just, you know, grow up and be smart.
Seriously, feel free to stay and immigrate legally. Be kind to nature by using it responsibly. Stop being a jerk to each other. Basically, don't be an asshole.