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The Development of Consciousness
A key part of understanding something ( anything really ) is knowing how things got to be the way they are, this is especially important with consciousness as it can be rather subjective yet I think we all have roughly the same different conscious experiences at different points in our lives, so knowing how they change can help our understanding; come along as we take a chronological look at consciousness through life and see what we find.
Definitions: Consciousness is a semantic minefield but I've found that simply replacing it with the word awareness and being specific about what one is being aware of can help carry the conversation forward, I go into more detail here:Conscious Artificial Intelligence: Part 1. Foundations
The unborn
In the womb just after gestation things start out in nothingness as far as we know, the biological hardware and systems that allow for awareness of anything are still being built, so consciousness needs to wait for now.
awareness
While we start from almost nothing we quickly catch up as we build up and enable many of the systems responsible for processing the environment through sensory development in utero with processing starting from around the 8 week mark to birth:
The unborn gradually acquires receptors along with the systems and abilities needed to process the environment yet it is not the conscious experience we are used to, on one hand the fetus sleeps a lot, about 95% of the time and is heavily sedated, on the other hand the womb is a mostly muted place.
Even if we can process the environment this environment is very basic and we are not all there yet, a crude comparison would be waking up in the middle of the night for a few seconds in a dark room without any memories and quickly falling back into a dreamless sleep…
