In one of the articles about the neurobiology of infant consciousness a few years ago the question was posed: “When your child becomes conscious?”. A prerequisite, of course, was that children are not born with consciousness, but instead develop it at some point. According to the article, this is the age of five months. However, it is difficult to imagine that there is such a feeling to be a newborn.
Obviously, babies are their own bodies, the environment, the presence of the parents and so on — although in a non-reflexive, focused on the present form. And if there was a certain sense of herself as a child, then the children would not become conscious. They would be consciousness initially realized its origin.
The problem is, and it’s a little scary that “consciousness” is often used in the literature as something that implies something more than just the quality of the experience. Dijksterhuis and Nordgren, for example, insisted that “it is important to understand that attention is the key to distinguish between unconscious thought and conscious thought. Conscious thought is conceptualized with attention.” From this it follows that if thought is not peculiar attention, unconscious. But is it lack of attention, to assert that thought process lacks qualitative experience? Would not such a process, slipping out of focus, yet somehow felt?
Now you breathe: the air passes through your nostrils, using your diaphragm and so on. Have you noticed this moment before, before I drew your attention? Or you simply didn’t constantly feel it? Drawing your attention to that feeling if I did them consciously or just made you a little better understand that these feelings were conscious?
Jonathan Schuler established a clear distinction between the conscious and metacognative processes. While both the type entail a quality experience, metacognitive processes also involve what he called “re-representation”, re-submission, resubmission, even rethinking. “Periodic emphasis on explicit evaluation of the content of experience. The resulting’s metaconscious includes an explicit resubmission of consciousness in which one interpretirovat, describes, or otherwise characterizes the state of your mind.”
When, therefore, attention plays an important role, it is about the resubmission; that is, conscious knowledge of the experience of the underlying self-analysis. Subjects are unable to report — even to themselves — experiences that are not subject to resubmission. However, nothing prevents the conscious experience to occur without pararectale. Have dreams, for example, there is no berepresentative, despite the fact that they are perceived in the mind. This gap between the connectivity and the content of consciousness has led to the emergence of so-called “unaccountable paradigms” in modern neuroscience of consciousness.
Obviously, the assumption that consciousness is limited rethought mental contents in focus, wrongly associates’s metaconscious with your own consciousness. But this misconception is extremely common.
Since the study of the neural correlates of consciousness (NCC) in General, relies on subjective reports of experiences, that passes through the NCC, may just be neural correlates of metalicana. Thus, potentially a conscious mental activity — in the sense of the activity that correlate with quality of experience — can avoid recognition as such.
Studies have shown that achieving progress in addressing the “hard problem of consciousness”, we, in fact, bypass them: mechanisms of metalsnake absolutely not connected with the problem of how qualitative experience arises from a physical perception.
Perhaps consciousness never appears in children, babies, toddlers or adults — because it can always be inherent in them. As far as scientists understand, there is only metacognitively configuration previously existing consciousness. If so, consciousness may be fundamental in nature — an essential aspect of every mental process and not a property created or somehow caused by specific physical structures in the brain. Statements based on subjective experiences, which reduce the presence of consciousness to the physiology of the brain, may not have anything to do with consciousness, but much — mechanisms metalitalia.
According to the materials of Scientific American
Mind: born or acquired?
Ilya Hel