5 ms·

When Does Your Baby Become Conscious?

35 points by Mitt 13y ago

ignostic 13y ago
Interesting, but this touches on the surface of a question that the study couldn't hope to answer. The journey towards becoming a human is a long and complex process, and any attempt to pinpoint a moment must be arbitrary at some point. It's like trying to say when something turns from red to orange. There's a point where it's definitely one or the other, but there's never going to be a clear moment where you can draw a line on the spectrum between the two. When it comes to the pro right/choice debate, we're just getting started. If viability is what matters, does the proper age to curb abortions change as technology gets better? Given the difference in our view of killing a mosquito vs. a human, it's intelligence that seems to matter to us. If an adult dog is smarter than a newborn, why the disparity in legal protection? Science can and should inform our views, but we also need applied reason and logic to sort through matters of morality.
- mapleoin 13y ago
  > If an adult dog is smarter than a newborn, why the disparity in legal protection? That's a very interesting question to ask. I think in the end, what we are rightfully protecting with our current laws is potential. The baby (or the embryo?) has the potential to become a fully developed human being and maybe change (save?) the world in the most significant of ways. A dog will not. There is an infinitude of possible worlds that a baby can make possible and an infinitude of ways in which it could develop (which we are more sensitive to perceiving compared to those of an animal). Killing a baby is basically killing an infinitude of possible worlds.
  - pgsandstrom 13y ago
    Legal protection is not and should not be related to intelligens. How about mentally retarded people? I have also heard people defend the eating of animals with that we are so much more intelligent. Funny thing is, we would not be accepting of a superintelligent alien consuming humans. We simply protect things that are sufficiently alike us. The line we draw for this protection is arbitrary and has changed throughout history.
  - mbrock 13y ago
    It seems fundamentally erroneous to attribute rationality to what's so obviously driven by instinctual processes and deep emotions. A baby is not a potential, it is a holy being, Christ, an intrinsic value, whatever you want to call it. Most of us don't see dogs like this (unless it's our dog).
  - ignostic 13y ago
    This doesn't make sense. As we engineer stem cells from skin cells, it becomes theoretically possible to turn every cell in your body into life. When you shower, you're killing millions of potential humans. We must treat things as they are, and not as they might become.
- vidarh 13y ago
  > Given the difference in our view of killing a mosquito vs. a human, it's intelligence that seems to matter to us. I'd argue you're making the wrong inference. It is emotions that matters to us most. Intelligence is part of that: Something that can appeal to us would be harder to kill than something that doesn't. But also: Something that is cute and fluffy is harder to kill than something that stings us. And: Something that appears similar to us is harder to kill. Religion, politics and other factors all impact the emotions of the issue. We mould morality to fit our emotions more than the other way around.
- DanBC 13y ago
  > If viability is what matters, does the proper age to curb abortions change as technology gets better? Important to say here that even though technology has increased and pregnancy is much safer now than it used to be, but it's still the case that most children born before 24 weeks will die. The details are very distressing, and I don't particularly want to go into them here, but people suggesting that technology means we can keep these very ill children alive for any meaningful use of the word "alive" is wrong and cruel and heartless. The Dutch went the other way - if viability is what is important should we limit killing of children to just those that are unborn? This would affect about 15 babies a year in the netherlands, about 1,000 worldwide. (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/4093965.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/4093965.stm) > If an adult dog is smarter than a newborn, why the disparity in legal protection? People might say that they dog will stay at its limited intelligence while the newborn will develop. Another example could be any of the more intelligent apes compared to a human with very severe mental disability. (I'm deliberately choosing to use the words of anti-abortionists, because even when the discussion is framed so emotively I am still firmly pro-choice; pro-abortion.)
- belorn 13y ago
  I doubt this kind of research will ever have an impact on the pro right/choice debate. If babies were to be find to be in a mental state similar to an unconscious adult, what would that actually mean? Most people treat unconscious adult as they would with an conscious one.
- skrebbel 13y ago
  > If an adult dog is smarter than a newborn, why the disparity in legal protection? Because, like it or not, us humans rule the world, so we get to make the rules. And we chose to protect our kind better than others.
  - waps 13y ago
    Then why do we abort so many more babies than dogs ? While foetuses obviously don't have optical processing (you know, no eyes and all), the brain actually "boots up" on the 18th day after conception. So just before/just after a woman will start to suspect she's pregnant, there's an brain actively processing information in her womb. If we took that as the standard, you know, that'd be more conservative than any religious grouping even asks for. (the reason for this is that a human foetus "is not human". Our DNA is only human in that it contains a set of instructions that will transform an ape foetus into a human foetus. But the ape foetus isn't grown from scratch either, it's grown from some four legged animal. Basically the first recognizable animal you start out as is a bilobite (which is extinct, it's essentially a hollow ball of cells), grow into a trilobite (a 2-part ball of cells), grow into something that looks a lot like a tadpole, grow into ... and a tadpole requires a functioning brain, and so a human foetus at that development stage has a functioning brain) The point is we don't protect life at all. We protect ways to make the life of the decision makers (which are nearly all adult humans) easier/more enjoyable. Kids, dogs and abortion are merely parts of that, as is freely killing dogs, intelligent or otherwise. Really the reason we don't kill kids is because humans would rebel. You can try to explain the problem, like stating that a kid, even a small one represents a massive investment of time, money, sweat, and (I'm sure any mother will be glad to remind you) inconvenience and pain, and I'm sure that's a rather good explanation. But in the end it comes down to adult, mostly male, humans vetoing it. We support abortion because it's a way to vastly limit that investment and get rid of both "the product" and the investment (and, frankly, because without abortion anything remotely resembling today's nightlife would be completely out of the question). So really "us humans" don't rule the world. Too bad, not really. A small number of adult, mostly but not all male humans rule the world.
    - robbiep 13y ago
otikik 13y ago
I've always thought we get conscious around the 28 years old mark.
hopeless 13y ago
I thought the most fascinating thing (mostly because I hadn't considered it, despite having 2 kids) was that babies aren't conscious at birth or even, optimistically, before 2-5months. That's kinda neat.
- cristianpascu 13y ago
  Consciousness and self-consciousness are two different things, I think. A baby in the womb of their mother will hear and learn to recognize mother's voice. That's a good sign of consciousness. The physicalist view on consciousness tends to put everything we do on the basis of 'mechanic' impuse-reaction phenomena in our brain. But, so far, in no way explains very much of what living organisms do, I mean those that show conscious interaction with the environment, animals and humans alike.
humanrebar 13y ago
From a pro-life perspective, articles like this underscore the current (and perhaps eternal) lack of settled science that establishes a bright line between a proto-person and a full-fledged human individual. In Western society, it is more illegal and more socially unacceptable to kill a pet (dogs, cats, horses) than it is to have an abortion. From a dispassionate micro-economic perspective, that must mean that at some point a developing human becomes worth more than a puppy. Can we make a rule that clearly draws that line? Reading new research in human development just shows me how blurry that line still is. In the face of uncertainty, I consider it wise to draw the line early in pregnancy to avoid killing out of ignorance.
- celticninja 13y ago
  That is a terrible analogy. Comparing an abortion to killing a live animal is bullshit. Compare human abortion with the termination of animal pregnancies if you will but not a full formed live animal and a fetus. Aditionally we could say the reverse, an old animal is worth more than an old human, because if an old animal is dying we will euthanise it to save it pain and misery, you canot legally euthanise an adult who is living in pain and misery. So by your own terms at some point an old dog becomes more important than an old human.
  - humanrebar 13y ago
    "Aditionally we could say the reverse, an old animal is worth more than an old human, because if an old animal is dying we will euthanise it to save it pain and misery, you canot legally euthanise an adult who is living in pain and misery." That's a good point... one that I've considered. But it's a little off topic considering it has its own moral swamps to get caught in. I'll just say euthanasia is a related but different thing that should be discussed separately. "That is a terrible analogy... Comparing an abortion to killing a live animal is bullshit." I disagree and I'd appreciate a good reason for that opinion. In fact, I disagree that it's even an analogy. In my defense of my ahem point (when to define killing living things as legal), it is empirically true that even an embryo is a human life. 1) If an amoeba is alive, certainly an embryo is. 2) What species would a human embryo be other than human? Now, in the West, we can kill some categories of animals with legal and social impunity: pests, livestock, terminally ill pets, etc. Killing other types of animals is clearly socially unacceptable and is often illegal as well: healthy kittens, harmless creatures, endangered animals, etc. Right now, abortions fall almost entirely in the justified killing category legally and slightly less so socially. I think they are not as justified as the current laws and attitudes reflect, especially considering how arbitrary "exiting the birth canal" is with regard to the development of human life.
shawndumas 13y ago
Note: The following is not original to me... Construction -- a car on an assembly line. When is a car first there? At what point in the assembly line would we first say, “There’s a car”? Some of us would no doubt go with appearance, saying that there is a car as soon as the body is fairly complete. I suppose that most of us would look for something functional. We would say that there is a car only after a motor is in place. And a few might say, “It’s not a car until it rolls out onto the street”. There would be many differing opinions. Development -- a Polaroid picture that is unique and valuable; let’s say a picture of a hitherto unknown species darting out from the jungle. You’ve snapped the shot and the camera is noisily pushing out the developing photo. The animal has now disappeared, and so you are never going to get that picture again. You pull the tab out and as you are waiting for it to develop, I grab it away from you and rip it open, thus destroying it. When you get really angry at me, I just say blithely, “You’re crazy. That was just a gray smudge. I cannot fathom why anyone would care about gray smudges.” Wouldn’t you think that I was the insane one? Your photo was already there. We just couldn’t see it yet.
morgante 13y ago
While his research is very interesting, I'm not sure Sid Kouider actually can say much about consciousness. He came to speak at my school and his philosophy basically boils down to "working memory = consciousness." However, this definition of consciousness is highly disputed. Specifically, it fails to account for any of consciousness's phenomenological aspects. One might feasibly construct a computer to simulate working memory, but it seems unlikely that such a mechanism would be truly "conscious." Ultimately, Koudier is attempting to answer with science what philosophy hasn't even yet established a framework for.

35 points by Mitt 13y ago

Interesting, but this touches on the surface of a question that the study couldn't hope to answer. The journey towards becoming a human is a long and complex process, and any attempt to pinpoint a moment must be arbitrary at some point. It's like trying to say when something turns from red to orange. There's a point where it's definitely one or the other, but there's never going to be a clear moment where you can draw a line on the spectrum between the two. When it comes to the pro right/choice debate, we're just getting started. If viability is what matters, does the proper age to curb abortions change as technology gets better? Given the difference in our view of killing a mosquito vs. a human, it's intelligence that seems to matter to us. If an adult dog is smarter than a newborn, why the disparity in legal protection? Science can and should inform our views, but we also need applied reason and logic to sort through matters of morality.

mapleoin 13y ago
> If an adult dog is smarter than a newborn, why the disparity in legal protection? That's a very interesting question to ask. I think in the end, what we are rightfully protecting with our current laws is potential. The baby (or the embryo?) has the potential to become a fully developed human being and maybe change (save?) the world in the most significant of ways. A dog will not. There is an infinitude of possible worlds that a baby can make possible and an infinitude of ways in which it could develop (which we are more sensitive to perceiving compared to those of an animal). Killing a baby is basically killing an infinitude of possible worlds.
- pgsandstrom 13y ago
  Legal protection is not and should not be related to intelligens. How about mentally retarded people? I have also heard people defend the eating of animals with that we are so much more intelligent. Funny thing is, we would not be accepting of a superintelligent alien consuming humans. We simply protect things that are sufficiently alike us. The line we draw for this protection is arbitrary and has changed throughout history.
- mbrock 13y ago
  It seems fundamentally erroneous to attribute rationality to what's so obviously driven by instinctual processes and deep emotions. A baby is not a potential, it is a holy being, Christ, an intrinsic value, whatever you want to call it. Most of us don't see dogs like this (unless it's our dog).
- ignostic 13y ago
  This doesn't make sense. As we engineer stem cells from skin cells, it becomes theoretically possible to turn every cell in your body into life. When you shower, you're killing millions of potential humans. We must treat things as they are, and not as they might become.
vidarh 13y ago
> Given the difference in our view of killing a mosquito vs. a human, it's intelligence that seems to matter to us. I'd argue you're making the wrong inference. It is emotions that matters to us most. Intelligence is part of that: Something that can appeal to us would be harder to kill than something that doesn't. But also: Something that is cute and fluffy is harder to kill than something that stings us. And: Something that appears similar to us is harder to kill. Religion, politics and other factors all impact the emotions of the issue. We mould morality to fit our emotions more than the other way around.
DanBC 13y ago
> If viability is what matters, does the proper age to curb abortions change as technology gets better? Important to say here that even though technology has increased and pregnancy is much safer now than it used to be, but it's still the case that most children born before 24 weeks will die. The details are very distressing, and I don't particularly want to go into them here, but people suggesting that technology means we can keep these very ill children alive for any meaningful use of the word "alive" is wrong and cruel and heartless. The Dutch went the other way - if viability is what is important should we limit killing of children to just those that are unborn? This would affect about 15 babies a year in the netherlands, about 1,000 worldwide. (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/4093965.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/4093965.stm) > If an adult dog is smarter than a newborn, why the disparity in legal protection? People might say that they dog will stay at its limited intelligence while the newborn will develop. Another example could be any of the more intelligent apes compared to a human with very severe mental disability. (I'm deliberately choosing to use the words of anti-abortionists, because even when the discussion is framed so emotively I am still firmly pro-choice; pro-abortion.)
belorn 13y ago
I doubt this kind of research will ever have an impact on the pro right/choice debate. If babies were to be find to be in a mental state similar to an unconscious adult, what would that actually mean? Most people treat unconscious adult as they would with an conscious one.
skrebbel 13y ago
> If an adult dog is smarter than a newborn, why the disparity in legal protection? Because, like it or not, us humans rule the world, so we get to make the rules. And we chose to protect our kind better than others.
- waps 13y ago
  Then why do we abort so many more babies than dogs ? While foetuses obviously don't have optical processing (you know, no eyes and all), the brain actually "boots up" on the 18th day after conception. So just before/just after a woman will start to suspect she's pregnant, there's an brain actively processing information in her womb. If we took that as the standard, you know, that'd be more conservative than any religious grouping even asks for. (the reason for this is that a human foetus "is not human". Our DNA is only human in that it contains a set of instructions that will transform an ape foetus into a human foetus. But the ape foetus isn't grown from scratch either, it's grown from some four legged animal. Basically the first recognizable animal you start out as is a bilobite (which is extinct, it's essentially a hollow ball of cells), grow into a trilobite (a 2-part ball of cells), grow into something that looks a lot like a tadpole, grow into ... and a tadpole requires a functioning brain, and so a human foetus at that development stage has a functioning brain) The point is we don't protect life at all. We protect ways to make the life of the decision makers (which are nearly all adult humans) easier/more enjoyable. Kids, dogs and abortion are merely parts of that, as is freely killing dogs, intelligent or otherwise. Really the reason we don't kill kids is because humans would rebel. You can try to explain the problem, like stating that a kid, even a small one represents a massive investment of time, money, sweat, and (I'm sure any mother will be glad to remind you) inconvenience and pain, and I'm sure that's a rather good explanation. But in the end it comes down to adult, mostly male, humans vetoing it. We support abortion because it's a way to vastly limit that investment and get rid of both "the product" and the investment (and, frankly, because without abortion anything remotely resembling today's nightlife would be completely out of the question). So really "us humans" don't rule the world. Too bad, not really. A small number of adult, mostly but not all male humans rule the world.
  - robbiep 13y ago

otikik 13y ago

I've always thought we get conscious around the 28 years old mark.

hopeless 13y ago

I thought the most fascinating thing (mostly because I hadn't considered it, despite having 2 kids) was that babies aren't conscious at birth or even, optimistically, before 2-5months. That's kinda neat.

cristianpascu 13y ago
Consciousness and self-consciousness are two different things, I think. A baby in the womb of their mother will hear and learn to recognize mother's voice. That's a good sign of consciousness. The physicalist view on consciousness tends to put everything we do on the basis of 'mechanic' impuse-reaction phenomena in our brain. But, so far, in no way explains very much of what living organisms do, I mean those that show conscious interaction with the environment, animals and humans alike.

humanrebar 13y ago

From a pro-life perspective, articles like this underscore the current (and perhaps eternal) lack of settled science that establishes a bright line between a proto-person and a full-fledged human individual. In Western society, it is more illegal and more socially unacceptable to kill a pet (dogs, cats, horses) than it is to have an abortion. From a dispassionate micro-economic perspective, that must mean that at some point a developing human becomes worth more than a puppy. Can we make a rule that clearly draws that line? Reading new research in human development just shows me how blurry that line still is. In the face of uncertainty, I consider it wise to draw the line early in pregnancy to avoid killing out of ignorance.

celticninja 13y ago
That is a terrible analogy. Comparing an abortion to killing a live animal is bullshit. Compare human abortion with the termination of animal pregnancies if you will but not a full formed live animal and a fetus. Aditionally we could say the reverse, an old animal is worth more than an old human, because if an old animal is dying we will euthanise it to save it pain and misery, you canot legally euthanise an adult who is living in pain and misery. So by your own terms at some point an old dog becomes more important than an old human.
- humanrebar 13y ago
  "Aditionally we could say the reverse, an old animal is worth more than an old human, because if an old animal is dying we will euthanise it to save it pain and misery, you canot legally euthanise an adult who is living in pain and misery." That's a good point... one that I've considered. But it's a little off topic considering it has its own moral swamps to get caught in. I'll just say euthanasia is a related but different thing that should be discussed separately. "That is a terrible analogy... Comparing an abortion to killing a live animal is bullshit." I disagree and I'd appreciate a good reason for that opinion. In fact, I disagree that it's even an analogy. In my defense of my ahem point (when to define killing living things as legal), it is empirically true that even an embryo is a human life. 1) If an amoeba is alive, certainly an embryo is. 2) What species would a human embryo be other than human? Now, in the West, we can kill some categories of animals with legal and social impunity: pests, livestock, terminally ill pets, etc. Killing other types of animals is clearly socially unacceptable and is often illegal as well: healthy kittens, harmless creatures, endangered animals, etc. Right now, abortions fall almost entirely in the justified killing category legally and slightly less so socially. I think they are not as justified as the current laws and attitudes reflect, especially considering how arbitrary "exiting the birth canal" is with regard to the development of human life.

shawndumas 13y ago

Note: The following is not original to me... Construction -- a car on an assembly line. When is a car first there? At what point in the assembly line would we first say, “There’s a car”? Some of us would no doubt go with appearance, saying that there is a car as soon as the body is fairly complete. I suppose that most of us would look for something functional. We would say that there is a car only after a motor is in place. And a few might say, “It’s not a car until it rolls out onto the street”. There would be many differing opinions. Development -- a Polaroid picture that is unique and valuable; let’s say a picture of a hitherto unknown species darting out from the jungle. You’ve snapped the shot and the camera is noisily pushing out the developing photo. The animal has now disappeared, and so you are never going to get that picture again. You pull the tab out and as you are waiting for it to develop, I grab it away from you and rip it open, thus destroying it. When you get really angry at me, I just say blithely, “You’re crazy. That was just a gray smudge. I cannot fathom why anyone would care about gray smudges.” Wouldn’t you think that I was the insane one? Your photo was already there. We just couldn’t see it yet.

morgante 13y ago

While his research is very interesting, I'm not sure Sid Kouider actually can say much about consciousness. He came to speak at my school and his philosophy basically boils down to "working memory = consciousness." However, this definition of consciousness is highly disputed. Specifically, it fails to account for any of consciousness's phenomenological aspects. One might feasibly construct a computer to simulate working memory, but it seems unlikely that such a mechanism would be truly "conscious." Ultimately, Koudier is attempting to answer with science what philosophy hasn't even yet established a framework for.