Moments Of Awakening

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Consciousness is the great mystery. In search of answers, scientists have plumbed every edge case they can think of - sleep, comas, lucid dreams, LSD trips, meditative ecstasies, seizures, neurosurgeries, that one pastor in 18th century England who claimed a carriage accident turned him into a p-zombie. Still, new stuff occasionally turns up.

I assume this tweet is a troll (source: the guy has a frog avatar)¹:

…with the intended gag being that lots of clueless people would reply “I don’t know what you’re talking about, does that make me an NPC?!?!”. If so, it didn’t exactly work - instead, lots of clueless people replied “my first memory is from 3-6, does that make me the Chosen One?”

But when 354 people talk about the moment they first gained consciousness, you get some pretty interesting things.

My favorite comments were from people whose said that their first memory was at the commonly-agreed-up normal age range of 3-6, but that the memory itself was of suddenly becoming conscious or suddenly realizing they were conscious.

My own story is an intermediate case: my first memory is waking up the morning of my first day of kindergarten, seeing the sunlight stream in through the windows, and thinking something like “Seems like this is the beginning of a new phase of my life, I wonder what it will be like to be a schoolchild”.

…except that even though I have that tagged as “first memory”, I also have a vague half-memory of taking some sort of test to be allowed to enter kindergarten early, and that must have been before starting kindergarten². So maybe there’s a recall bias, in that memories of life transitions are more easily brought to mind?

Other people say that their first memory was sparked by something that forced them to think about their mind in more detail than usual:

My wife has something like this: she says she remembers going to the hospital for a very serious case of asthma or croup or something at age four. On the way to the ER, her mother was visibly in a state of total panic, and she (wife-at-age-four) remembers thinking it was weird her mother was pretending/signaling to care about her so hard; there was nobody else in the car but the two of them, and she (wife) was going to die in a few minutes, so who was her mother trying to impress? She (wife) comments “I might have been kind of a psychopath as a four-year-old.”

There was a large contingent of people who said they remembered the womb, remembered being born, or remembered very early infancy. Scientists tend to dismiss this as people seeing baby pictures, or hearing stories from their parents, and mistaking these for authentic memories.

My five year old cousin also insisted on this once; I think I overupdated on him being five years old (and so maybe having some extra proximity to infancy), but it seems to be a common claim. Here are some more credible very early memory stories:

Other people agree with the OP that they developed “consciousness” (whatever that means to them) very late:

And still other people are pretty explicit that they’re using “consciousness” to mean “some sort of tendency towards pondering philosophical questions”, which isn’t that useful for our purposes. Still, many of them feel like there was a particular moment when they started pondering these questions, which they remember vividly.

Another similar category is people having a sudden realization that they were in control of their destiny and could exert effort to produce results. The two tweets in this category were both in middle school and both involved computer games:

This reminds me of one of Qiaochu’s tweets a few years ago:

Still, I find the earlier tweets - the ones about becoming conscious - more interesting.

You could tell two stories about “first memories”:

1. Intelligence and memory gradually grow from infancy to adulthood, and eventually reach a point where people can form and preserve reflective memories. There logically has to be some first memory, so if you ask someone for their earliest memory, they can usually think of it.

2. There’s some moment when the developing brain suddenly shifts from a preconscious to a conscious mode of thought.

The second sounds crazy. But is it? The same thing happens all the time during lucid dreams. And if you think that eg cows aren’t conscious, and that a six-month-old is dumber than a cow, then babies must go from unconscious to conscious at some point. Is consciousness really vague enough that you can do it entirely gradually, with no first moment of “huh, that’s funny”? And what about enlightened Buddhist monks? They claim that their consciousness switches from one mode to another at a specific moment that they vividly remember forever after (and which isn’t linked to any behavioral changes that casual observers can notice!)

All the examples in this post are Twitter randos trying to recall 20+ year old events - the least reliable possible data source this side of a peer-reviewed social science paper. And it’s hard to imagine a rigorous way of getting this data, short of following three-year-olds around and asking them “Are you conscious? Are you conscious?” every few minutes. Still, all the stories of people remembering a “snap” into consciousness are tantalizing.

This post is just an excuse to ask you commenters for your stories, so speak up, even though you’re contaminated by having heard the hypothesis beforehand.

1. Though many of his other tweets are about Sufism; Sufis are known both for deep counterintuitive insights into consciousness and for trolling people, so who even knows?

2. My mother says she doesn’t remember there ever being such a placement test. But she also said she “doesn’t remember” giving birth to me, so I’m not sure how much I trust her here.