Do you think there’s a certain “point”, such as a certain development in utero or the event of birth itself, or perhaps even a period after birth - where the brain structures “click” and the child becomes a sentient being? Or is it more of a gradual gradient towards consciousness with no particular landmark or “awakening”?
I read a pretty good argument that put the case that birth “wakes up” the mind because fetuses do not get enough oxygen to think until they breathe their own air, but I’ve also heard a lot of evidence that fetuses do have some limited amount of memory and perception. Personally I can’t remember anything before I was 2, but it’s possible I was conscious prior to then and just forgot.
Is there a formal definition of the boundary between infancy and toddlerism?
I think that studies pretty well demonstrate that the first hints of abstract thought arise around 18 months of age. Is an 18-month-old an infant or a toddler?
I think it’s close to birth, possibly before, but consciousness is not very useful with sensory input and it’s just not doing anything until the baby’s senses mature from experience. I’m one of those who think consciousness is no big deal and not at all the same thing as sentience.
Babies don’t even pass the mirror test until about 18 months. A lot of mental development goes on between birth and ages 3-4, all the way from object permanence to a theory of mind. When it comes to puzzle solving even toddlers are kinda dumb compared to chimpanzees.
I don’t think there’s a point at which it simply clicks. It’s a process of development. We might break that development up into phases, but it’s not that simple. Even when we look at intelligence cross-species, we see a broad continuum of intellectual ability, and if you’re going to create a binary yes/no scale, you’ll have to break the idea of intelligence/awareness down into dozens of specific capabilities.
In terms of answering the question, I think we’ve got a substantial barrier in terminology. The OP seems to be using consciousness to mean something other than the definition I think of. A fetus in the womb is aware of external stimuli and able to respond to them. For example, if you shine a line in their eyes, they will move a hand to block it. This is no great feat of abstract thinking, obviously. Higher thought comes later.
My granddaughter is 7 weeks old, and it’s hard to convince myself there’s a heck of a lot going inside there other than rotting for a breast and crying when she gets her diaper changed. I think she knows her parents’ voices, but I think it is pretty much stimulus/response at this point. You can see her trying to focus her eyes on thigs, but it is hard to tell what.
So I guess we’d need to define sentience. At this point, she is definitely less self aware and capable of less interaction than my dog.
Like dracoi, I think it’s too complicated and too poorly understood to say that there’s a consciousness switch that flips “on” at a particular date. I believe the current understanding in neuroscience is that whatever it is we call consciousness involves several distinct cognitive processes, brain regions, and/or neural circuits. These almost certainly develop at different rates, and larger scale connections and patterns of activity between modules may take even longer to develop.
That said, I do have a rather distinct first memory from when I was two or three years old. I remember waking up and walking down stairs to my parents. I had a feeling of familiarity and recognition of everything and everyone I saw, while simultaneously feeling that this was the first time I had experienced anything. (Of course, by now that memory must have been tainted by decades of recollection and mixing with “booting up” metaphors…)
Yes, this question cannot be answered. On a personal level the only thing we associate with ‘achieving consciousness’ is recalling our earliest memory. But I think it’s pretty obvious that a lot has to be in place way before that. Unless we evolve some kind of Vulcan-like telepathy where we can communicate directly with a ‘consciousness’ somehow, there will never be any way to say…
The mirror test is a measurement of self-consciousness, not the same thing as consciousness. It’s also not the boundary between self-consciousness and non-self-consciousness.
I remember being in a strange crib with chrome rails. It was night and the white sheets were glowing. I may remember a bottle of milk that was glowing also. Many years later I put some pieces together. I learned I had spent my 2nd birthday getting my tonsils removed, so I figure that crib was in a hospital that had UV lights in the nursery.
We just covered the transition from baby to toddler in a class I’m taking, and they defined it as “around 12 months of age. A baby becomes a toddler when they start to walk, which is from around 12 months old for most babies”.
Babies have been shown in studies to remember, once out of the womb, sounds that they heard inside it.
I don’t think you can have memory without consciousness. So I had to answer “late pregnancy”, though I’d prefer “mid-pregnancy” if that were an option.
Question for those who answered “toddler” - do you think small mammals like mice or hamsters are conscious? (I would say yes)