Birth

[kedaman]

do you remember how it was? Can you imagine if you had conscience enough you won't need to remember to know that you were actually aware all the time, even before you was born?

In case not, how do you think your conscience was born?

[tumblingdown]

keda, sometimes you talk so much b*llocks!





td.

[kedaman]

Originally posted by tumblingdown
keda, sometimes you talk so much b*llocks!





td.

only somtimes?

[Kzin]

Originally posted by kedaman
do you remember how it was? Can you imagine if you had conscience enough you won't need to remember to know that you were actually aware all the time, even before you was born?

In case not, how do you think your conscience was born?

Hi Ked - this is where the science comes in (if you remember our conversation on that). The hippocampal region of the brain does not start to move things into long-term memory until you are about three so basically you won't remember any event that was not continually reinforced until about then.

[Kzin]

Originally posted by honeybee
What is a conscience? Or, what do you call a conscience?

.

he means consciousness - you often have to run a sort of 'virtual kedaman' program in your head to work out what he really wanted to ask

[Matthew Gates]

Does anyone remember when the doctor spanked you?

No wonder why we're such a horny human race, we get our first sexual-bondage experience when we're not even a few hours old yet, I mean..for us guys, it'd be better if we'd had a female doctor spankin' us, than you'd get your first sexual pleasure out of that .

[HarryW]

Is it just me that doesn't know what he's on about?

Anyway...

Honeybee - the fact that a newborn baby tries to suckle doesn't mean it's thinking about it conciously. It could be a subconcious, instinctive process.

When something goes BANG behind you and you jump and look around, you probably haven't actually thought it through and considered whether you should jump or not, it's an instinctive reaction.

[simonm]

I think (some) people are slightly confusing being consious and rational.

I think we're consious when we're born, indeed, for a few months before we're born. We just aren't rational.

We do have memories going back to when we were born but because our thoughts were not rational (relatively speaking) we cannot make sense of them when we think back. Only vague images, sounds, smells etc. are obtainable to us now. The way we perceived the world and experienced things is not comprehensible to us now. Therefore it seems like we don't have memories until after we reached 3 years old (or whatever).

[kedaman]

Grr, i should have known this. Ok I didn't know what the difference was so I used both terms.
So Conscience tells you what is wrong and what is right and
Consciousness is you. Consciousness is the feeling that you are aware of your environment, i'm correct?

I want a word for myself, excluding my physical appearance, what do you call it?

Ok if you say that when you dream, you are conscious, because you are aware of the environment in your dream, then what do you call that?

[Beacon]

here we go again

Is this one going to turn religious or is someone going to take it out of complete context when somone adds some fruit for thought!

[Sastraxi]

Well sometime it'll go down the gutter.

[chenko]

Originally posted by Matthew Gates
Does anyone remember when the doctor spanked you?

No wonder why we're such a horny human race, we get our first sexual-bondage experience when we're not even a few hours old yet, I mean..for us guys, it'd be better if we'd had a female doctor spankin' us, than you'd get your first sexual pleasure out of that .

I met the doctor who *ahem* when i was born about a year back

[HarryW]

Simon, my previous post was nothing to do with being rational, it was a speculation that the actions Honeybee described were not proof of conciousness. Whether babies are concious or not from the moment they are born (or before that) I really don't know.

I take it your post was mostly your own opinion? Just wondering if you got this from some infant cognitive psychology book or something.

What decisions does a baby make that aren't rational anyway? Bearing in mind the very limited amount of knowledge of the world around them, the way it works and so on, I think it would be understandable if they made some odd decisions but that doesn't mean they're being irrational, they're just ignorant. I mean 'ignorant' in the nicest way possible, I'm not trying to be derogatory.

[chenko]

[simonm]

What decisions does a baby make that aren't rational anyway? Bearing in mind the very limited amount of knowledge of the world around them, the way it works and so on, I think it would be understandable if they made some odd decisions but that doesn't mean they're being irrational, they're just ignorant. I mean 'ignorant' in the nicest way possible, I'm not trying to be derogatory.

Well, I meant "irrational" in the nicest possible way too.

When I say babies aren't rational, I do not mean to say that they don't know how to act in their own best interests. What I mean, when I say that they don't have a rational consiousness, is the way they think about the world.
We, as adults, have a way of rationalising (or reasoning) the world around us. The very language we use shapes the way we think about the world. When a baby is pre-language, pre-reasoning and pre-rational, their thoughts are alien to us. It is Not the motives behind their actions that elude us but the structure of their thought.

And, yes, I do have an interest in the nature and function of the brain (which includes an interest itit's development) and I have read many books on such matters. What I express in these posts is a curious mixture of both my own opinions and things I have read.

[Mark Sreeves]

Here's my ill thought out theory:

Our culture is language based.

Maybe you can only remember things that happen to you after you have the vocabulary to record/recall it; hence aged 2-3 onwards.


Does this sound feasible?

[Gary.Lowe]

I don't think it's consiousness but more self awareness

That's why they call the stage of a child's life as the terrible two's as this is the stage of a childs life when is recognises 'Me', 'I'

[HarryW]

Honeybee, I agree with some of what you say, about repeated processes becoming subconcious (like walking, for instance), but I don't really agree with other bits of it.

I was not proposing that the processes we done unconciously, merely subconciously. Ie. beneath conciousness.

Simon, I don't quite follow you. Please explain what you think a rational way to think of the world is, and why a baby's thoughts of the world, while different to adults', cannot be rational.

[Arbiter]

Well, I was dead when I was born (if you follow) and had to be put in a cool little incubator thing.

Scared the bejeesus out of my parents.

[HarryW]

I guess if you were in Starcraft you'd be a dragoon then

[Gary.Lowe]

What Simon is saying is that as a child have no self awareness so have no rational thinking behind waht you do i.e. walking off the end of a twelve storey building.

[simonm]

Simon, I don't quite follow you. Please explain what you think a rational way to think of the world is, and why a baby's thoughts of the world, while different to adults', cannot be rational.

I think I'm expressing myself badly here.

I am not saying there is any definitive notion of what is rational and what isn't. I am talking about relative notions of rationality.
I am not saying that a babies thoughts are not rational (to itself anyway). I am saying that the baby is irrational in terms of the adult's perspective.

Orignally posted by Mark Sreeves
Our culture is language based.

Maybe you can only remember things that happen to you after you have the vocabulary to record/recall it; hence aged 2-3 onwards.

This is more what I'm getting at although I don't think it is purely a matter of language. We cannot access our memories of babyhood, not because we didn't have language then, but rather because our rationale that we had is incomprehensible to us now. The memories were laid down in a manner that education and life experience has drummed out of us. When we learned and developed our new rationale, we lost our old one.

We have not just gained through life experience, we have lost something as well.

[simonm]

What Simon is saying is that as a child have no self awareness so have no rational thinking behind waht you do i.e. walking off the end of a twelve storey building.

I am not saying this (nor disputing it).

I am saying the rationale we have as a baby is incomprehensible to us as adults (and therefore we cannot recall early memories).

[simonm]

Do you mean that since a baby has a rationality different than the adults' sense of rationality, when the baby grows up to be an adult, it loses all memories of childhood because the rationality was different then?

No, I'm not saying we lose our baby memories. I am saying that they no longer make sense to us.

We don't lose our baby memories, indeed, they are the foundations of our personality. To lose them would reset our personality.

[HarryW]

Err... so do you still think I am confusing conscious with rational? I am still undecided as to whether an infant is concious at birth, but I still think I was thinking of consciousness in the right way.

My understanding of the term 'rational' is something like this: a rational decision is a decision made that is predicted to give the optimal set of results, based upon any and all information availalbe at the time the decision was made.

In fact no decision we make is truly 100% rational, because we (being human) involve emotion in our decision making, which is pretty much devoid of rationality (you know how hard it is to control you emotions).

I suppose you could say that a baby makes many of its decisions for emotional rather than rational reasons. Perhaps you are right and infants are not in fact rational (usually).

[simonm]

Err... so do you still think I am confusing conscious with rational?

OK, I see what the confusion is here:

I wasn't talking about you, my post just happened to occur immediately after one of yours so I can see how you might have thought I was talking about you.

The word I should be using (I've decided) is RATIONALE and not RATIONAL. If a paradigm is a framework of beliefs, a rationale is a framework of paradigms.

Does that help make it clear what I'm talking about !?!

[simonm]

About your argument of a child walking off a 12-storey building, it's because the child does not know what will happen if it walks off the edge. It does not know what is death, what is pain. But an adult knows it, and so the reaction of the adult would be different from that of a child.

OK, there really is a lot of confusion happenning to day. That was not my argument, rather it was Gary Lowe's (mistaken) interpretation of my previous posts and I have since posted to refute that interpretation.

[HarryW]

Honeybee, I agree with you when you say it is about the accumulation of knowedge.

Simon, that's about as clear as any post with the phrase "framework of paradigms" can be.

[kedaman]

Simon
what did you mean by the phrase "If a paradigm is a framework of beliefs, a rationale is a framework of paradigms."?

[Guv]

Kzin: Your following remark is fascinating to me.

The hippocampal region of the brain does not start to move things into long-term memory until you are about three so basically you won't remember any event that was not continually reinforced until about then.

I often see off the wall opinions expressed as facts, but I trust you on this one. The jargon sounds good, and the concept is certainly consistent with my own experience.

Some thots relating to various posts to this thread.

• Experiments have shown that extremely young infants have an instinct to avoid falling from high places. If paying attention, they will shy away from a dangerous fall. There have been experiments with infants who have just become able to crawl. When placed on an elevated fiber glass platform with opaque and transparent areas, they avoid the transparent areas.
  
• Other experiments have shown that fairly complex knowledge or behavioral instincts are built in at birth. For example, extremely young infants have depth perception and some knowledge of what a solid object is. An infant who has never been struck will flinch and try to avoid a solid object moving toward his face. For a long time researchers did not realize that a young infant lying on his back is not fully conscious. This led them to believe that good visual perception occurred much later that tactile senses. Later experiments (with the infant head supported so he could be tested in a sitting position) have shown that the visual system trains you to know where your hands are, instead of your tactile senses training your binocular vision, which was the original belief.
  
• If fairly complex behavior is built in or instinctive (see previous paragraphs), then suckling, crying for food, et cetera are also likely to be instinctive rather than rational or learned behavior.
  
• Except for conditions due to our technological society, babies do a pretty good job of acting in their own self interest. Note that much of their behavior is instinctive and the result of over a million years of evolution in a stone age or more primitive environment. That environment did not prepare them for some of the dangers of the present time. There is little difference between the basic mind of prehistoric man and modern man. I am sure that if we could use time travel to bring new born infants from 20,000 years ago to modern times, they would not be noticeably different from modern infants.
  
• There is a lot of instinctive behavior that does involve the brain, and more that does not require conscious rational brain activity. I believe (not absolutely certain) that pulling your hand from a hot object is handled by ganglia, and does not require brain activity. I believe that the brain becomes aware of the problem after the motor nerves have been triggered to pull the hand back. Even if wrong about this, I am certain that this reaction is not handled by conscious rational brain activity.
  
• The remark about an unconscious person not reacting to stimuli is not quite correct. If merely unconscious, but not incapacitated, a person will react to being stuck with a needle and other stimuli.
  
• I have never heard of experiments designed to determine when consciousness (awareness of self) first occurs. When a child is able to speak, he certainly seems to have consciousness. Prior to the ability to talk, it seems difficult to design an experiment to determine consciousness. This might merely be ignorance on my part. On numerous occasions, I have been surprised by the ingenuity of clinical psychologists when designing various experiments. They seem to have a science, while the therapist types are still partially voodoo workers.

It seems reasonable to believe that consciousness is a fairly high order process, and is unlikely to be present at birth. Since I assume that Kzin is providing good data, it seems very reasonable to assume that consciousness does not exist prior to the age of 6 to 18 months, and might not exist much earlier than the ability to talk.

[simonm]

Simon
what did you mean by the phrase "If a paradigm is a framework of beliefs, a rationale is a framework of paradigms."?

I was drawing an analogy to help explain my definition of "rationale". i.e. A rationale is to a paradigm what a paradigm is to a belief. No if you don't know what a paradigm is then it's not a very helpful analogy.

Guv,
I have never heard of experiments designed to determine when consciousness (awareness of self) first occurs.

Ah! Noe I understand your definition of consiousness. I would have equated consiousness with awareness and self-consiosness with self-awareness.

[Behemoth]

Originally posted by Arbiter
Well, I was dead when I was born (if you follow) and had to be put in a cool little incubator thing.

Scared the bejeesus out of my parents.

whoah! I never knew that...

[Kzin]

Originally posted by Guv
Kzin: Your following remark is fascinating to me.I often see off the wall opinions expressed as facts, but I trust you on this one. The jargon sounds good, and the concept is certainly consistent with my own experience.
[list][*]

The phenomenon is called infantile amnesia and the mechanism was first proposed by Lynn Nadel and Jake Jacobs. It was written up in the journal Nature fairly recently.

I'm not au fait with the developmental literature on consciousness and the issue is rather blurred by the fact that just because something is driven 'instinctively' does not mean that we are not self-aware. Spinal reflex are fine for "knee-jerks" and amphibians but I'm pretty sure almost everything else that we describe as 'instinctive' is at least brainstem mediated.

I'll have a look at the functional imaging literature sometime (MRI but not PET I'd guess for that age group) to see when frontal lobe activity starts - but until I get around to that I'll just spin some anecdotal stuff and say that certainly my older daughter looked and behaved conscious at birth (the midwife said that it was 'intimidating') and had relatively sophisticated internal spacial representations when she was six months old (thus completely defeating the health visitor's dumb "sensory" checks). Within physical limits they seemed very self aware at that stage - just waiting to be able to physically do thing I've noticed this is not the case with all babies - and the 'passive/non-sentient' ones are easier to manage. My two year old is certainly consciousness and articulate in an 'adult' sense (you should hear the complaints I've just been getting about upgrading 'her' computer) but from my experience with the older one I think that she will still only remember memories continually re-inforced until she is over three.