Are Babies Conscious?

blinkbat

only the fully-conscious Four Seasons Orlando baby.

marojejian

gift link: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/05/science/consciousness-bra... Interesting. This increased my credence that newborns are conscious / sentient (which had been somewhat low).

bigwheels

https://archive.today/uWrVU

popalchemist

This is a bizarre question to ask and frame as an unknown. Anyone who has held or had to watch after a baby can tell you that, although there is plenty of "autopilot" software running the show, there are moments of complete lucidity. 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.

jtumbot

Off topic to the title/question but I find the babies wearing those ultrasound devices on their head to be incredibly cute although dystopian.

ViktorRay

Humans have a flawed view of this stuff. 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.

feverzsj

But, is brain the source of consciousness?

rahimnathwani

Related: https://x.com/Austen/status/2106408006216814862

metalman

this is one of several seemingly inocuious (nyt) questions that then gives certain people licence to posit and discuss monsterous sociopathic aberations all cutsey like it's JUST intelectual and these things NEED to be determined, but of course there is NO need, or at least nothing that can be spoken out along with the subject itself. such as a bunch of wackjobs who have SOLD the comodified and productivised undefined concept of consiousness, but they have no actual product and are going for ever wierder and harder excursions into the darkest wastelands of philosophy, science, useing intelectual academic gidderish and are nudging up on the occult. maybe rent a particle accelerator and put the koolaid in that first.