Are Babies Conscious?
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
It is slightly interesting question. There is unlikely to be too many good outcomes from answers. But it might be something to think about...
You are equivocating here.
It could be a function of both parts. You are equivocating the brain as 1 organ and the brain as 2 organs. If its 2 organs thats doesnt mean a function of the brain has to come from one part or the other.
Interesting. This increased my credence that newborns are conscious / sentient (which had been somewhat low).
People incorrectly think LLMs are conscious because they output language. Yet we question consciousness and intelligence and so on in dogs, cats and now babies.
It’s a ridiculous human bias. Nobody thinks an image generator is conscious. Nobody thinks a human image generated by an image generator is real. But LLMs generate text and so people mistakenly assume they are conscious. LLMs can deep fake personas and act like characters and people think that’s what they actually are. It’s all a deep fake. When you talk to an LLM you are “talking” to a deep fake of a person in the same manner as an image generator deep faking a human image.
An now a paper of record is questioning whether babies are conscious. Why? Just because they don’t use language or have access to memories we question this!? Ultimately that’s what it boils down to regardless of what this article says.
Plenty of arguments on HN that LLMs are conscious. They are, of course, wrong, but plenty of people seem to believe it-Lord know why.
You can’t say LLMs are missing the thing that causes consciousness, because we don’t know what that is.
Only 50 years ago the nazis dehumanized mentally and bodily disabled people.
Other cultures to this day lock humans away with mental illness because they don't understand it.
The complexity of LLMs reached already dimensions that are not that far away from the complexity of human brains and we are only at the beginning of this journey potentially.
World models are getting developed and we havent even tried to build systems similiar to what our brains architecture with a default mode network would look like. We only throw massive amount of resources onto LLMs.
The complete disconnect between journalism and literally the most fundamental of basic human experiences is astounding.
If babies were not conscious then killing them would be no problem. It is their capacity for consciousness (however nascent) that makes them human, and therefore, sacred.
Probably something to do with the way we tend not to retain memories from before about 2 y/o.
And yes, obviously absurd, one would think. Yet something that it’s important for modern medicine to have evidence of.
What hasn't yet been processed is the horror and barbarity of having done so. To this day, when it's mentioned, we can't take in what it means.
When the practice was discontinued (around 1984 IIRC), the NYT reported on the change much as if a style guide for medical reports had just been revised. (Sorry I don't have the link handy.)
Edit: I found https://web.archive.org/web/20090410072646/https://www.nytim... from 1987, but that one is an op-ed that actually does express some feeling (despite its obligatory "They did so for the purest of reasons" at the start). The report I was remembering, or perhaps misremembering, was devoid of that.
Not all conclusions must be checked. If that were the case we could never act.
Every decision relies upon nearly-infinite unstated assumptions or presumptions that do not have as their basis definite knowledge.
Specifically, with the idea of babies being conscious or not conscious, if they are not conscious, then the alternative is that they are a sort of vegetative being. Which then raises the question, why not kill them?
Surely you object to that and not just on a logical level but on a deeply felt level. You know it to be wrong. Which brings me to my next point:
There ARE other ways of knowing besides logic - the greeks referred to gnosis, Dianoia, Sophia, Mathesis, Aletheia, Oida, and so on... scientific knowledge would be just one of many.)
Furthermore, in philosophy it is long acknowledged that there are truths that are beyond our capacity to know in any kind of definite or ultimate sense -- some even say that ALL knowing can NOT be definite (Münchhausen Trilemma / Agrippa's Trilemma)...
I would posit that the domain of science is not the place one can make an arugment about meaning - such as assigning something sacred value -- so it is the wrong argument to force empiricism or logical proof as the approach for this question.
You need only have a child (or even a pet, for some people) of your own to understand that such experiences of meaning are known directly, not through formal proofs. They are felt before they make it to the cognitive consciousness, where logic occurs.
I feel like I am explaining being human to robots in this thread, so I will stop here. (If you are on the spectrum or there is any other explanation for why you would not understand this already, please say so. It would relieve me of a great discord.)
Say what? No. Killing them would be a problem because they're human. With that comes the capability to become conscious, whether or not they are at the time they are babies.
> It is their capacity for consciousness (however nascent) that makes them human, and therefore, sacred.
No, it's their DNA that makes them human.
> The genetic differences between Neanderthals and all modern humans (amounting to about 30,000) are far less than the differences between two random human beings alive today – around 3 million [1].
Clearly Neanderthals aren't more human compared to you than a randomly selected person.
1. https://www.theguardian.com/science/2023/jan/12/svante-paabo...
Anyway, personally I have a higher view of what a human being is and why it's deserving of protection than just a string of information.
The sun will become a red star in 5 billion years. We have voids in our universe which are not crossable.
From my pure nihilistic view, it doesn't matter, never has, never will. From an idealistic view: we are humans, i value the uniqueness of mine and the complexity and uniqueness of everyone else being part of my experience.
What is your "higher view"? whats your pedestal?
Once you have a neural network as sophisticated as a baby’s will it be immoral to turn it off?
https://theconversation.com/babies-can-learn-language-sounds...
https://www.monoglotanxiety.com/blog/sciene-of-language-newb...
https://www.aaas.org/news/babies-brains-are-primed-their-nat...
I could go on for each of your claims but this should suffice to make a curious person want to revisit their assumptions. Each one touches not only on speech but memory.
You moved the goalpost in your second comment, so I am not going to consider you worth engaging beyond that - you're clearly a bad faith arguer.
By most cognitive measures, an adult mouse is probably more conscious than a newborn.
Its hard to describe or explain this to you because you will only realize this when you look back after you thought more.
Babies are not sacred. You and me are not sacred. Humans are not sacred.
Our biological programming / priming gives us this 'feeling'.
And consiousness alone is not the thing which makes us not kill most humans, after all we still kill babies and humans daily.
Alone the word sacred is weird in this context. A lot more of questioning the level of consciousness.
Btw. the lucidity you mentioned, might be a conscious experience in development. it might be the same as what you do, it might be not. You point it out because for you its the quality of a human
It is well documented that the majority of the world feels similarly on this topic.
The term for this universal belief is "sanctity of life" and it has been written about extensively for centuries.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanctity_of_life
The wiki article points out that it is CENTRAL to all of the Abrahamic religions.
>In religion and ethics, the sanctity of life, sometimes described as the inviolability of life,[1][2] is a principle of implied protection regarding aspects of sentient life that are said to be holy, sacred, or otherwise of such value that they are not to be violated. This can be applied to humans, animals or (in the practice of Ahimsa) even micro-organisms. Sanctity of life sits at the centre of debate over abortion and euthanasia.
It is key in eastern religions too, but the wiki doesn't cover that. Nevertheless this is enough to establish that it has clearly been a dominant thought in the history of the world.
Furthermore, even if you are not a BELIEVER of said religions, the fact remains that those religions have clearly shaped world culture. Nevertheless it is possible to explain the origins of such beliefs from an evolutionary perspective -- https://humanorigins.si.edu/about/broader-social-impacts-com...
So as for whether I have not thought deeply - you're projecting and wrong.
Furthermore if you hold a belief counter to it, the facts are that you are in the extreme minority both in human and pre-human history.
It's pretty crazy to say babies are not sacred. Life in general is regarded sacred - particularly human life; thus, babies are the most direct symbol of it.
One has to wonder what kind of rock you lived under to not know this was a universally held belief.
I can infer from this you do not have a child. Probably also not a wife.
You are asserting a nihilistic and antisocial view as if it were empirical and self-evident; the opposite is the case; I've presented evidence of this belief being commonplace for thousands of years. Unless you intend to re-write history why don't you just come out and admit that you are a nihilist and misanthropic.
Its not about a believe its about thinking beyond.
Religious believes are not that deep. They provide a basic answer without depth to questions we have.
'Sacred' is just a very basic answer to a complex topic. Its like 'where is my goal post? Oh its over there by 'Sacred''.
You need to be above religion to be mental free btw. and you also make a basic mistake: Just because i have certain views on one level, doesn't mean that I live them like this.
You are the outlier with your misanthropic belief.
It doesn't matter if religion also sees this as sacred because religion and religous people stoped thinking and moved their goal post to "the bible says and god".
Alone having your goal post at this point is a strong indicator that the thinking is flawed.
Nature is not inhernatly good and evoluitionary behaviours are also not. You have to separate yourself from this base and think through it holisticly.
You just don't break through through your indoctrinational thinking.
And while religious people see humans as 'sacred', religous people have very little issues of being on the wrong side, constantly.
You remember the pope of the christians? Ratzinger? The figure of moral and ethik of religion for a while? You know what he said regarding the abuse of children? I will tell you: They thought this wouldn't create a lasting impact and felt its more critical to keep the facade for the church than speaking up about the abuse.
How many religious people want humans dead?
I'm not hiding behind anything. I'm not a person who hurts people i'm a person who helps. At least in 2 situation were no one else was helping.
That's why the EMTs and paramedics all cluster around car accident victims, asking whether they are conscious, so they can kill them already
"911, what is your emergency? ... Oh, your grandmother is unconscious? We'll send out our firing squad right away!"
The intro to the article feels like the author asked a LLM to summarize journal papers about consciousness. It seems there is not a consensus around what it is.
Can anyone in this field provide a directional overview of what we think consciousness is in 2026?