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i think it's still an open question how "conscious" that infants and newborns are. It really depends on how you define it and it is probably a continuum of som

• nomel 11mo ago
  > It's probably a continuum of some kind. This is well documented fact, in the medical and cognitive science fields: humans consciousness fade away as their neurons are reduced/malformed/misfunctioning. You can trivially demonstrate it in any healthy individual using oxygen starvation. There's no one neuron that results in any definition of human consciousness, which requires that it's a continuum.
• itsalwaysgood 11mo ago
  True. There's always going to be uncertainty about this kind of topic. I think the jist of the article is that we will use whatever definition of consciousness is useful to us, for any given use case Much the same way treat pigs vs dogs, based on how hungry or cute we feel.
• cellular 11mo ago
  Pain. I haven't publicly stated this before now: Consciousness requires the ability to perceive PAIN. All human learning is based upon the single kernel of pain (vs pleasure). A newborn is hungry or cold and cried. It learned to cry. It learned to smile. Eventually, delayed gratification lead to less pain (more pleasure). The rest is human history.
  • itsalwaysgood 11mo ago
    For sure, pain is useful when it leads to learning. We learn through feedback from our senses. We're completely dependent upon this mode in the beginning. As our brains mature, we learn how to predict our environments in ways to maximize pleasure, and avoid pain (grossly oversimplified). We learn more about others, what works, and what doesn't. An AI also learns from feedback, but is it ever perceiving anything?
    • cellular 11mo ago
      Consciousness is unprovably true.