An article on the neurobiology of infant consciousness a few years ago posed the question, "When does your child become conscious?" The premise, of course, was that children are not born with consciousness, but instead develop it at some point. According to the article, this is five months old. However, it is difficult to imagine that there is no such feeling - to be a newborn.
Obviously, newborns experience their own bodies, their environment, the presence of their parents, and so on - albeit in a non-reflective, present-centered form. And if there was a certain feeling of being like a child, then children would not become conscious. They would be conscious initially, would be aware of their beginning.
The problem is, and it’s a little scary, that “consciousness” is often used in literature as meaning something more than just the quality of experience. Dijksterhuis and Nordgren, for example, insisted that “it is very important to understand that attention is the key to distinguishing between unconscious thought and conscious thought. Conscious thought is comprehended with attention. It follows from this that if thought is not peculiar to attention, it is unconscious. But is lack of attention enough to argue that the thought process lacks quality experience? Wouldn't such a process, which escapes the focus of attention, be felt somehow?
Now you are breathing: air passes through your nostrils, through your diaphragm, and so on. Did you notice this a moment earlier, before I called your attention? Or did you just not know that you constantly feel it? By drawing your attention to these sensations, did I make them conscious, or did I just make you understand a little more qualitatively that these sensations were conscious?
Jonathan Scooler made a clear distinction between conscious and metaconscious processes. While both types of them entail quality experiences, metaconscious processes also entail what he called "re-representation," re-representation, re-representation, even rethinking. “Periodic attention is paid to explicitly assessing the content of the experience. The resulting metacognition involves an explicit re-representation of consciousness in which one interprets, describes, or otherwise characterizes his state of mind."
So when attention is important, it is about overrepresentation; that is, the conscious knowledge of experience underlying introspection. Subjects cannot communicate - even to themselves - experiences that are not overrepresented. Yet nothing prevents conscious experience from appearing without overrepresentation. Dreams, for example, have no re-presentation, despite the fact that they are perceived in consciousness. This gap between connectivity and the content of consciousness has led to the emergence of so-called "unaccountable paradigms" in modern neurobiology of consciousness.
Obviously, the assumption that consciousness is limited to a rethought mental content in the focus of attention mistakenly links metacognition with one's own consciousness. But this misconception is extremely common.
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Since the study of neural correlates of consciousness (NCC) generally relies on subjective reporting of experiences, what passes through the NCC may simply be neural correlates of metacognition. Thus, potentially conscious thought activity - in the sense of activity correlated with qualitative experience - can evade recognition as such.
Research has shown that by making progress in solving the "hard problem of consciousness", we, in fact, bypass it: the mechanisms of metacognition are completely unrelated to the problem of how qualitative experience arises from physical perception.
Perhaps consciousness never appears - in children, babies, toddlers, or adults - because it can always be inherent in them. As far as scientists have figured out, only a metaconscious configuration of pre-existing consciousness emerges. If so, consciousness may be fundamental in nature - an integral aspect of every mental process, and not a property created or in some way generated by specific physical structures in the brain. Statements based on subjective experiences that reduce the presence of consciousness to the physiology of the brain may have nothing to do with consciousness, but much with the mechanisms of metacognition.
Adapted from Scientific American
Ilya Khel