Baby's First Self: Musings on the Origin of Consciousness

"Consciousness is not just experience-it is experience that can take itself as an object. The critical turn occurs when "happening" becomes "happening to me," and later becomes "me noticing myself noticing." William James formalized this as the I/Me split-the knower and the known. This dipole may be consciousness's core dynamic: self-as-observer and self-as-observed, never perfectly still, generating inner life through constant motion."

"the mind is phenomenologically coterminous with consciousness; that is, so far as anything that you can observe or can get anyone else to observe about your mind or his mind, anything that can be sensed and perceived, will be of the same extent as the state of mind called consciosness; and the various ingredients, the contents of consciousness, which cover a wonderful bunch of alleged or real entities, are what one ordinarily means when he talks about his "mental life.""

"Around 15 to 18 months, children recognize their reflection and touch makeup on their own face rather than the mirror's surface (Keromnes et al., 2019). This isn't consciousness's birth-infants are conscious long before-marking when the system can map an image to its own body and treat it as self. The mind reaches a critical mass, a tipping point: "fissile material" accumulates through sensory integration, motor prediction, body maps, and social mirroring until the system sustains a recursive loop."

Consciousness arises when experience can take itself as an object, producing an I/Me split between knower and known. The fundamental dynamic is a dipole of self-as-observer and self-as-observed, whose continuous motion generates inner life. Phenomenological mind and consciousness are coterminous so that observable mental contents constitute mental life. Around 15 to 18 months, children begin recognizing their reflection and mapping images onto their bodies, marking self-recognition. A critical mass of sensory integration, motor prediction, body maps, and social mirroring produces a recursive loop. That recursive mirroring creates cascades of mental events, enabling theory of mind and layered self-perspectives.

Read at Psychology Today