
When Does Your Baby Become Conscious? - Mitt
http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2013/04/when-does-your-baby-become-consc.html
======
ignostic
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
> 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
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.

------
shawndumas
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.

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

------
humanrebar
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
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
"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.

------
hopeless
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
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.

------
morgante
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.

