When Does Your Baby Become Conscious?

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.<p>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.<p>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?<p>Science can and should inform our views, but we also need applied reason and logic to sort through matters of morality.

Note: The following is not original to me...<p>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.<p>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.

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

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.<p>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.<p>In the face of uncertainty, I consider it wise to draw the line early in pregnancy to avoid killing out of ignorance.

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

While his research is very interesting, I'm not sure Sid Kouider actually can say much about consciousness.<p>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.<p>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."<p>Ultimately, Koudier is attempting to answer with science what philosophy hasn't even yet established a framework for.