The joke goes that humans arrive at birth without an instruction manual. The modern version is that the instruction manual can be googled. But we pretend that the newly birthed infant is already a person. I would argue that they are a "blank," a template ready for creation. At this point they only root for milk, suck, poop, make noise, and turn red.
Here's a fancier hint on what happens in the baby's brain both before and after birth. Some laws take brain activity as the ultimate definition of human "being" but others use the heartbeat, which develops earlier than the brain. This means a bit of tissue the size of a bean is considered to be an individual human being rather than a potential.
The legal age of reason is normally somewhere around 8. " Age of reason means the age at which a person is legally capable of committing a crime or tort as s/he can distinguish right from wrong. ... Normally, seven years is usually the age below which a child is conclusively presumed not to have committed a crime or tort." A brain is considered to be fully mature at age 23 to 26. The normal allotment of time for a "standard" education in the US is 18. The draft, voting, alcohol consumption, driving, and marriage are often decided in relation to this. College "Bachelor's" degrees are usually awarded at about 21. "Master's" degrees take another year or two. "Doctoral" degrees normally take 4 to 8 years. The "real" action for a professional is the post-doc, which is a lifetime of work.
This is only one way of looking at the development of the brain, a time-line for the passing of specific benchmarks established by the awarding institution. The variation is very wide: different fields or institutions require wildly different ideas about what should be learned and who should teach it. When looked at structurally by highly sensitive instruments, brain development is a different story.
Before birth a fetus -- AFTER the neurological capacities for detection are grown cell-by-cell -- sounds and even the red light that can get through human tissue (hold your hand up to the lamp) are detected, but not assimilated, meaning sorted and given meaning. No one knows what a fetus can smell, but sexual pathways may be active (thumb-sucking, erections); temperature change causes reaction. Chemicals coming through the connection to the mother have strong effects, potentially very dangerous (alcohol and drugs) but probably there is nothing like a consciousness to be affected. Consciousness is the result of patterning and meaningfulness after birth.
The developing of the newborn's consciousness is normally the task of the mother and appears during the repetitious acts of sucking, listening, learning to focus eyes on a face, and the mother's voice. These early first meanings are deeply embedded in the structure of the brain, molecularly recorded in cells and influencing all that is felt and thought from that time on.
Thoughts from Scientific American in 2016:
Narrative theorists of the self adopt a similar interpretation. They argue that the mistake is to think that because we use ‘I’ to tell a story about experience, there must be a real ‘I’, distinct from and underlying the narrative we use to interpret and communicate the stream of experience.
For the first time ever, scientists are in a position to watch the sense of self disintegrate and reintegrate – reliably, repeatedly and safely, in the neuroimaging scanner.
The notion of cognitive binding refers to the integration of representational parts into representational wholes by the brain. (Possibly as the creation of categories to use when thinking about input.)
The predictive processing theory of cognition . . . views the brain as a prediction machine that models the causal structure of the world to anticipate future inputs. Any discrepancies between an expectation and an input take the form of an error signal that demands a response from the organism – either by updating the internal model, or acting to reduce the unpredicted input. (Allowing categories to be altered, added or subtracted by new evidence.)
The signal that reaches the ears is usually fuzzy and incomplete; a sound engineer looking at a computer display of the auditory data hitting our eardrums would see a mess that could take months of signal processing to decode. However, our brain can use its prior knowledge to produce coherent representations of words, sentences and tunes. We can hear our friends across a crowded room because we’re capable of filtering and cleaning up the signal – because we have a lexicon of explanations ready to anticipate the streams of data with which we are confronted. What we ultimately experience, then, is the model that we’ve learned is the best fit for the information to hand, that best predicts and accounts for our perceptions before they happen. (What Porges talks about as a function of the middle ear when describing his polyvagal theory.)
One startling consequence of predictive coding is that perception becomes little more than a kind of controlled hallucination. We do not experience the external world directly, but via our mind’s best guess as to what is going on out there. (The current consensus is that there is NO objective reality, but only what we perceive which is controlled by what we already know. This contradicts past conviction.)
The salience network allows us to feel the significance of bodily states triggered by worldly encounters. As we’ve discussed, organisms are constantly bombarded by information, only a fraction of which is ultimately relevant to their goals and interests. The salience network is what allows us to discern what matters and has meaning in its context. Meanwhile the default mode network underlies episodes of autobiographical thought such as memory, imagination, planning and decision-making.
The virtue of psychedelics (as distinct from narcotics) is that it somehow erases the arbitrary boundaries of categories of experience so far, but does not destroy the ability to create new ones.
The self . . . is constructed from birth over many decades. Particularly at lower levels, the cognitive processes that the self-model binds together – perception, interoception, basic regulatory mechanisms – are not especially flexible. That’s why chaotic developmental environments are so damaging. Not only are they stressful in obvious ways, but in its formative years the mind has no stable patterns of experience on which to model a self.
It's not the hallucination part that is troublesome, so much as the need for staying in control without becoming over-controlled.
It's not the hallucination part that is troublesome, so much as the need for staying in control without becoming over-controlled.
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