Question: when you are born, at what age do you first gain consciousness? and what do babies feel? for example, when a baby cries for food, do they feel hungry and think to ask for food, or is it more an instinctive thing, if that makes sense?
Keywords: age, babies, baby, brain, conscious, consciousness, feel, human, instinctive, sense
Complex stuff. People are struggling to define what consciousness is. Most people would say it is “self-awareness” – that you know you exist. But it’s not a complete answer and it depends who you talk to.
Young babies act on instinct. The stuff they do – we’re genetically made up to do that. There is no gene for “crying for milk” but there are genes that act together to make a baby freak out if it gets hungry, and the response is to cry. It then realises that works and goes from there.
Babies then rapidly start to work things out. I know this because my son is 22 months old, and I’ve watched it. I’m staggered how quickly he’s picking stuff up.
The most relevant thing to your question is that in the last 2 weeks he has started apologising for the first time. So at the weekend he was holding a ball, and I had to put him in the car so I had to take the ball off him. He wouldn’t let go so I tugged a little and he decided to let go suddenly. The ball hit me in the face in a rather comic way. I said “ow” and he reached out, stroked my face and said “srree dada”. Pretty amazing – what that means is that he can tell that I hurt myself and that that was a bad thing. He was imagining what I was feeling, not what he was feeling. I would count that as fully conscious, when you can do that. When you can “empathise”.
Things will, I think, only get more sophisticated from here on in. So in the first year and a half, instinct fades and a baby will work things out in a more planned way. Consciousness? Difficult to know. My boy’s definitely “conscious”. It’s a gradual transition from instinct that I’d say happens in the first 18 months, if I had to say, and that’s because I’d say consciousness is a realisation of what you are in the world.
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Self-awareness (consciousness) is the understanding that we exist as a separate individual which can choose its thoughts, rather than just experiencing things in the moment. It allows us to consider our behaviour against our morals and change it if we want to, instead of just reacting instinctively.
Self-awareness is something that develops throughout our life and has also been observed in some animal species. I don’t know how you would decide when a person reaches full self-awareness or if it’s even possible to do so.
A newborn baby, and even the foetus, has an awareness of its surroundings. After birth, there is still a lot of brain development happening so the first flicker of self-awareness must occur at some stage and increase over time. I don’t think that anyone can say for sure when this occurs, or if it’s the same for all people.
Early on in life, babies are acting on instinct. They will feel hunger so they will become upset and cry. If they feel pain, loneliness or fear then it is also instinct to cry, and it is instinctive for the parent to respond to that cry and comfort the baby. As a baby gets older it learns that crying is a good way to attract attention, and may cry just so you will hold it. This behaviour shows an awareness of self (ability to cry) and consequences (affect on another person), which keeps developing over time.
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