I think that my first vague half-memory is at the age of something like two, just being in the attic and mom was nearby, I think? First strong memory at the age of 3-4 being in back seat of the car and being taken to the kindergarten, possibly for the first day.
I don't recall having some sort of a wow experience like "damn, I'm a conscious human being" now ever, which kind of makes me question if I'm conscious even now.
I'm also in the same boat. But also, I think that we can only experience consciousness with our whole being, and there's not much "compute" and bandwidth left even amongst fully grown adults - to verify if even the baseline "adult" consciousness that we're experiencing is the baseline "real and complete adult state of consciousness" that everyone is definitely experiencing. And so we're left to ponder some subset of the thing we want to understand and control fully.
I mean, the "consciousness" that you and I experience, as adults, are almost certainly reduced or different compared to what, say, Scott experiences daily. Neither you nor I (nor most people) can write like Scott can, but Scott bangs out riveting and beautiful pieces of writing effortlessly at least once a week and wonders why everyone else can't.
Similarly, a hedge fund trader might wonder what people actually mean when they say they're 'weak' with numbers. Like, how weak? Surely tax calculations happen in a flash, and everyone can manage basic statistics, algebra and calculus...right? (Hint: nope!)
More relevant to new parents like Scott, I think early life experiences disproportionally shape what we consider " ordinary consciousness" later in life, and I posit that the age of "awakening consciousness" depend on how early we are able to reliably access accurate and productive feedback loops about the world we perceive.
My first strong memory is in Upper Kinder Garten: The gruff P.E. teacher would stand at the school gate checking for latecomers like me and ordering us to stand in the sun for 10 minutes. I remember silently sensing that protesting this or telling the guy to suck it up because my family could only manage to drop me off 10-15 minutes after 7:30 AM would only end badly, so I endured, for a whole year, silently.
In third grade I was aware of feeling hurt when my math teacher bullied me for a whole year, publicly giving me the epithet "mush for brains". I brought this up to my parents, they asked her about it, she dismissed it as "Oh, he has potential but is just lazy and doesn't try hard enough. That's why I call him "mush for brains" in class- so that he snaps out of it" My parents thought that it was really nice that the math teacher was paying "extra attention" to me and actually thanked her. So I endured, silently.
By fifth grade I was getting bullied by my more outspoken, gregarious classmates but the bigger priority for my overworked parents (and everyone in India) are school grades, which I was sucking at.
I had managed to learn that my own opinions on my lived experiences had zero value to anybody - not parents, not teachers, not relatives or indeed anyone else. I got the "maybe you have slight dyslexia, but so does everyone else and all you have to do is Snap Out Of It" thing pretty much everyday for decades, and I endured silently.
Anyway this "silently suffering and accepting that my life will suck and no one cares" thing became permanently ingrained in my psyche, and it is now literally how I experience consciousness. This kind of damage is actively bad in adulthood if one wants to progress a white collar career - because *everyone else* has experienced life very differently and simply does not get why *anyone" would resign themselves to suffering and depression.
I once got called "unprofessional" at work when I was silently suffering a burnout. My boss' point of view was that everyone else was *also* burning out, but they were giving her weekly reminders and asking for raises and promotions, lots of people were letting her know they planned to leave the company - but here I was, occasionally drowning but valiantly coming back to the surface, without ever complaining.
She thought it was very weird and simply kicked me out of the project - thereby exacerbating the burnout of the rest of the team, who all left the company promptly. To me, my boss' way of thinking was so strange and illogical that I had a crippling existential crisis just trying to figure out what the hell just happened. After copious amounts of reading online about psychology, mental health and psychiatry, my existential crisis abated but I'm still depressed.
So uh, anyway, pay attention to your kids' opinions, when they express them as little kids. It has tremendous upside later on.
I’m not downplaying your depression or how it came to be. My childhood was crappy, too, and I live with major physical disabilities, plus a lot of ADHD. This is no play for sympathy. I have no use for that. I just want to note from experience that you are in a mental prison of your own making. You can unmake it. Or you acknowledge it’s a comfortable, safe mental and emotional space you don’t wish to leave. Unmaking the prison is hard. A lot of work went into it. You know its safe contours. The outside world is a scary place. Leaving it behind is worth it.
> Similarly, a hedge fund trader might wonder what people actually mean when they say they're 'weak' with numbers. Like, how weak? Surely tax calculations happen in a flash, and everyone can manage basic statistics, algebra and calculus...right? (Hint: nope!)
I don’t know what being “bad at math” is like, either, unless you mean being slow, or not having enough short-term memory to use it as a mental chalkboard. Managing statistics, algebra and calculus doesn’t guarantee that anything come to you in a flash; nothing comes in a flash to me. Perhaps a lot of people give up understanding these subjects if they don’t get them fast enough?
There are probably social pressures to do this, as evidenced by the fact that a lot of people won’t tolerate pauses in conversation to think.
"I don't recall having some sort of a wow experience like "damn, I'm a conscious human being" now ever, which kind of makes me question if I'm conscious even now."
I've never had it as a single, sudden experience. But I do feel like I've become gradually more conscious as I've lived, and as a result I can't really regard conscious as a binary thing. Present me? Definitely pretty conscious. 20 year old me? Still pretty conscious, but a little less so. 15 year old me? Still definitely conscious, but a bit less so yet. 12 years old? Pretty definitely still yes. Sometime between my earliest memory and 12 the "yes" shades more into "maybe."
But of course, if I'm more conscious now than I was then, there's no reason to believe I couldn't be even more conscious still at some future point.
My earliest memories are from around the age of 2/3. Ones of my birthday, another's of a vacation, none of them involve any sort of awakening, and they just seemed like ordinary moments in time for me then.
Welll... my earliest memories are from slightly before 2, but they're quite disconnected, and I think the dialog was dubbed in later. One is standing up in a crib and watching my mother sleep with my younger sister. That's almost the entire memory right there. (I don't remember how I felt about that.) The other is watching a toilet flush and wondering about the water. (Wondering what??)
It's my belief that such memories are present in everybody, and I've got lots more that I've never had access to. It's my guess that the reason is that the indexing system changes when we learn language, and the older memories aren't in the new index.
Best I have too. Fuzzy impressions of discrete moments. A soft plastic toy plane (a Caravelle), my scooter by the gate. Both approximately age 3, based on location. First memory of something significant is hearing The Beatles Michelle on the radio and seeing the pattern of sunlight and window frame on the carpet. Feels like the first memory of self.
When I was around eight years old, I asked my dad what happens after you die. He told me nothing happens and your consciousness just 'stops,' you have no more experiences. I remember thinking seriously about this and what it meant, and that it kind of blew my mind even though it scared me, and I'm pretty sure that was the first time I recognized my own consciousness.
It is not my earliest memory by any margin, but I did have a similar experience - one night when I was trying to go to sleep, I just randomly realized that I am going to die one day. And everyone else too. It shocked me enough that I couldn't fall asleep for quite a bit. Not sure how old I was at that point, maybe 10.
I used to get these somewhat regularly until I was like 15 or so. Not sure when they started. But I’d suddenly think about how the universe is vast and I’d die someday and it would just keep going as if I never existed. Eventually I guess I got used to it lol.
After speaking with friends, I think this is a standard developmental milestone for kids/teens. I had it a bit earlier than you, at around 12, and I think it was around then that I started seriously questioning the faith I inherited (Christianity). It just seemed like such a made up thing, and well if that was made up then so were the rest of the reliigions, and so probably our deaths were probably just the end of consciousness with no show afterwards. And I carried that existential dread for a really long time.
What scared me was that such made-up things can exist and have such authority.
The next step, though it didn’t occur to me back then, is what that tells you about humans; in particularly, what is likely to happen if you mindlessly speak your mind and try to reason with everyone.
I went through a bit of a phase some time in high school, where I'd been atheist(ish) for several years already and been taking "your mind just stops when you die" as a given. After which I read just enough of quantum mechanics to get silly ideas, but not enough to critique them. In particular, I'd taken the "observation collapses the wavefunction and actualizes one possibility out of a large ensemble" thing a little too seriously, and sort of blurred the Copenhagen and MWI stuff together a bit and reasoned as follows:
1. Each conscious individual makes their own observations, collapsing parts of the universal wavefunction, ending up in some version of reality or other based on those observations.
2. Most of the universe is unobserved (to any particular individual) at any particular time.
3. This means that functionally any future event that isn't being immediately ruled out by current, direct observation exists as a (usually infinitesimal) portion of your own universal wavefunction. That is, anything not explicitly ruled out by the laws of physics or your own current observation could happen with small probability, being actualized when you observe it.
4. The permanent cessation of your own consciousness is something you definitionally cannot observe, so outcomes that result in such can never be actualized (in your version of reality), even if they would otherwise be overwhelmingly likely.
5. Thus your consciousness ought to be immortal, or very nearly so. (So should everyone else's, but only in their own reality, which would be separate from your own.)[1]
The obvious conclusion from 5 is that as one grew older or happened into life-threatening situations, would should expect a set of increasingly bizarre and improbable coincidence should conspire to keep you (at least minimally) alive, even in situations where you really, really ought to be dead many times over. Fortunately younger me--silly ideas or no--was far, far too sensible ever to test this.[2]
Having become older and wiser since, I no longer place much credence in the above reasoning. I don't know how first-person consciousness works. I don't know how quantum mechanics *actually* decides on its outcomes. Just because it's cute and sorta holds together doesn't mean its true.
[1] This is probably the point I should note that I'm aware that I'm far from the only person to duplicate this line of reasoning. I just wasn't aware of any of them at the time.
[2]I hope nobody would need me to spell out why this would be a bad, bad, BAD idea to test even you were 100% sure it were true. But ask if you do, and I will. If anything, this sort of reasoning made me *more* risk averse around life-threatening situations, not less.
See point 1. Each individual will experience their own reality. Another person dying is a thing *I* can observe from *my* first-person perspective. But not something *they* can observe from *their* first-person perspective.
Of course, this makes the whole notion of an "individual" rather complicated and confusing, as it requires (ala Many Worlds Interpretation) for individual experiences to be constantly branching and multiplying. I don't think I though about this too hard when I was younger, it was just "each person will experience this from their own perspective."
I should add that the whole "blurring together Many Worlds and Copenhagen" is pretty necessary for the thing to really hold together.
By the Copenhagen interpretation (as I understand it), observations are fundamentally causal. They cause wavefunction collapse, which means they ultimately cause all observed outcomes. It makes no sense to talk about a wavefunction collapsing into an unobservable state.
The MWI has it rather the other way around: the universal wavefunction splits into multiple Everett branches--meaning multiple observers--which causes the different observational outcomes. If you're running a Stern-Gerlach experiment, the split will cause one branch with an experimenter that measures spin up and one branch with a (now distinct) experimenter that measures spin-down. If instead you're running Quantum Russian Roulette[1], the split will cause one branch with an experimenter that measures the non-lethal outcome, and another with an experimenter unable to measure anything. So what? That's really not any sort of apparent contradiction as far as MWI goes.
Now, the third-person view of MWI does actually match up quite well to what I envisioned back in high school. Each individual consciousness will have *some* thread that passes down all the right Everett branches to continue essentially without limit, but that thread will get narrower and narrower[2] as it continues. And it does sort of leave unanswered question about how my own, particular first-person experience maps to a particular branch. Which allows room in which one *could* shove the "I'll always map to an observable outcome" postulate back in, but it would clearly be ad hoc and motivated at that point.
[1] which I was tempted to just call Austrian Roulette in honor of Erwin Schrödinger, but I worried it would be unclear.
[2] And thus more and more isolated: it's actually a pretty bleak prospect when you consider it fully.
I came to the same conclusion reading the sequences. With follow-ups:
1. Don't tell anyone you like being in your world.
2. Immortality is inevitable. The only possible eventual outcomes are, either a sufficiently pleasant world where I want to continue existing, or a hell where I want to end my existence but can't.
#2 is my reason to avoid risk.
And a distant third follow-up: God-like post-singularity already exists. Even if immortality is initially achieved through human means alone, eventually whatever becomes of immortal human or computer intelligence WILL become a God-like post-singularity intelligence with ability to do quantum stuff forwards and backwards in time.
My main self-critique here is that consciousness as I perceive it ends routinely when I go to sleep. I often fail to form or retrieve memories while sleeping. So, an unconscious memoryless existence is a proven possibility. From there, to non-existence, is a trivial step.
Yeah as a kid once I realized that dreamless sleep with no memory connected to it is basically a mini-death, it seemed to me that the question of what happens when you die was completely trivial. Why would anything happen? Every night I close my eyes and shut off my consciousness. The only difference is that it when you die, it doesn't turn back on. If you think about that too long, you go into the spiral. But the spiral is just a conscious brain processing nonexistence, while in a process of existing, so it all feels quite scary and impossible.
Oh, the sequences had the opposite effect on me. I'd thought this all out long before the encountering the sequences (and somewhat before they even existed). I never exactly *trashed* the idea, but had sort of compartmentalized it as "even if this is true, there's really not much I can do with it" and stopped thinking about it much.
Anyhow, the sequences prompted me to re-examine the line of reasoning and conclude it to be much less sound that I originally thought. Among other things is mixes together the Copenhagen and Many Worlds interpretations in ways that don't really make sense, and just generally requires extrapolating far too much from very incomplete pictures of reality to be trustworthy at all. Right now in my mind it lives more in the "I can't prove reality doesn't work like this, but there's no specific evidence it does" bucket than the "serious hypothesis" bucket.
"So, an unconscious memoryless existence is a proven possibility. From there, to non-existence, is a trivial step."
This doesn't seem to trivially follow to me at all. Sleeping and then waking up still constitutes a chain of observations. Like all chains of observations, it's not fully complete--much more incomplete than usual--but it's still the same sort of thing that happens when I transition from one waking moment to another. From a first-person viewpoint, falling asleep and never waking up seems different in kind, not just in degree.
After some near death experiences in my relatively long life, I have come to a similar conclusion. I am defacto always existing in the timeline in which I survived the event. Makes me sad for people in all the branches where I did in fact die and my wife and family had to deal with my death.
I don't particularly see why. You can still make observations consistent with states of the world in which you fell asleep, as long as you wake up again. Even while awake, there are innumerable parts of the universe you are *not* currently observing. Nor are you observing even the stuff in your visual range all the time--human perception isn't infinitely fine-grained.
Having said all that, it does point rather strikingly to another flaw in my original logic: even with collapse postulates, there's no *requirement* that a wavefunction eventually collapse. It could just go unobserved and remain indefinitely in superposition. When you go to sleep, the wavefunction presumably evolves for hours without your external observation collapsing it. If it can do so for hours, why not forever? When phrased that way, the whole construction starts to look very question-begging: observing anything (including with it the necessary prerequisite of being alive) provides evidence that you're alive. So what? It's not obvious that should tell you anything about the probability of the converse happening.
This doesn't count as consciousness, and I don't even think it's a memory -- more of a lingering visceral association. But anyway, per my mom, I was fed Gerber baby food until I was about 6 months old. To this day, when I see the picture of the baby on the label of Gerber baby food, I instantly taste applesauce and banana.
For a baby shower, we did a blind baby food taste test and competed to label the flavors. Surprisingly fun, but to adult palates, a number of those flavors are surprisingly nasty. The apple-sauce adjacent ones were all tasty, but when it got into flavors like chicken-and-gravy... ugh.
I typically claim my first memory as age 2, or just under. I was watching Rugrats and knew that they were babies, and since I was also a baby, my world should look like theirs. So I tried in vain to find the animation border lines of my surroundings, particularly the entertainment center in which the TV was lodged. I remember being like a quarter inch from the corner trying to find a line that didn’t exist.
I had a similar experience. I took notice of the thick border lines that delineated cartoon characters from their surroundings and noticed that I didn’t have any borders. This was a scary realization because what’s stopping my contents from spilling out and blending with the universe? Or maybe that’s exactly what’s happening at any given moment and only cartoon characters have actual discrete selves?
My first memory is helpfully timestamped. I'm standing on a platform watching a man, possibly my uncle, getting on a train, possibly going home after visiting us. I think something like "There's a person leaving, so there must be somebody still here, seeing. Who is that? I am Aaron. I am 2." and then I guess I decided that was enough to uniquely identify me.
My first memory is also helpfully timestamped: it was of an unusual weather event which can be confirmed to have happened when I was just shy of two-and-a-half years old.
I must be part of the boring crowd as I cannot remember a specific haha moment. I have vague memories about the "texture" of my thinking and my environment but in truth it all felt like slowly *growing* up
My earliest memory was around 3 and is the vague vision of a red toy but there isn't any reflective thought attached to it
I do remember crying a bit and talking with my dad after after I projected myself to the moment I was going to die. Is sudden consciousness ("realizing") of my own finitude of any value ?
I have fairly clear and consistent memories from the age of about four on. But I also have some `long tail' of fuzzy/hazy memories going back much further, certainly to age one and possibly even to zero (meaning, maybe, 10 months or so).
...but I also think that when I was four, I had more memories of when I was younger. My five year old currently has pretty clear memories of when he was 2 and 3. And when I went on sabbatical with my family, and came back after a year to our old house, my then-two-year old went directly to his toy chest, which he would last have seen when he was one. So at age 2 he certainly had clear memories from when he was 1 .
My theory is that your brain goes through multiple incompatible software architectures as it develops from a half-formed newborn brain, to a semi-usable toddler brain, to nearly-functional child brain, and the brain at age 6 is still able to read the old file format it used for writing memories at age 4, but it no longer has the code to support the format it used for writing memories at age 2.
This is a really good metaphor. To extend it somewhat, maybe the reason we don’t always see notable changes in behavior after an enlightenment is that the change gave the recently enlightened a new architecture that in turn enabled a nicer UI but doesn’t add any significant new functionality.
I have a similar sort of programming-informed analogy about how memory and learning works. I think memories are stored in a highly compressed and lossy fashion, but *how* lossy is a function of several things, primarily time. Something you learned recently and reinforced repeatedly will have a large portion of its data still intact. The longer you go without accessing it, the more it fills up with holes, but the bits and pieces that carry the most information will persist the longest.
When your brain does access a memory, it runs some sort of algorithm to fill in the holes. If there are very few holes, this process is quick, reliable and seamless. The more holes there are, the more your brain has to extrapolate--much of which involves borrowing from other things it knows--to fill in the holes.
Meanwhile, memory retrieval is similarly idiosyncratic: it runs on some sort of associative addressing where similar things[1] tend to get accessed together. If you intentionally try to remember [thing], failing doesn't necessarily mean that [thing] still has 0% of its memory footprint left. It just means that the associative keys that you (somewhat subconsciously) tried to pass your memory retrieval system don't happen to match the pieces of [thing] that are still reasonably present and complete. So you might fail to remember [thing] deliberately today, and then be coincidentally reminded of it by something else tomorrow, when you stumble upon one of the keys that *is* still present in your brain's representation of [thing].
Together these paint a picture of why childhood memories are so hard to access. First, they're so old that most of them are naturally very, very degraded[2]. Second, your experience of childhood is very different from your experience of adulthood, which means both that your brain has fewer useful memories to borrow from in filling in the holes, and fewer potentially matches with whatever fragments of those older memories remain. Things like going to a place or holding an object that you haven't seen since you were very young can bring up previously-forgotten memories because you suddenly have new keys that might better associate with those memories, and fresh, pertinent data to help fill in the holes.
[1] For some often difficult-to-pin-down value of "similar"
[2] The exceptions being ones that you've remembered over and over again through the years.
I think a better analogy at least for my memory is that the brain is doing compaction/compression on old memories such that most memories become fuzzy over time and also as you recall memories you are corrupting them so that they become more vivid (relative to the memories you forget) but less accurate.
But it’s not just a matter of time passed. Eighty year olds remember more about their teenage years than 8 year olds remember about their toddler years.
My earliest timestamped memories are of a daycare I stopped attending at 2, mostly the toys, and the car ride home.
Later, I remember being 5 or so thinking about how I had forgotten so much of when I was younger, and cataloguing the memories I did have. Recalling these early memories at that age is probably the only reason I still have them.
I definitely have a “crib” memory in which I woke up, stared into a space a little, cried, and then was picked up. I am confident of it because I remember remembering it at many, earlier points of my life. Obviously I don’t know old I was, but I was young enough to be sleeping in a crib.
I also remember a lot of things from age 3 that I could not have known unless I remembered them because they are not in pictures, like the yellow color of my kitchen chairs, the long, skinny legs of an aunt who died when I was four..
My first conscious memory is sitting at a basketball game with my parents, aunt and uncle and reacting to the loud end of warm up buzzer. I remember thinking about things and being "conscious" in that sense but I don't remember what was on my mind. I'm guessing I was 6 or so. I can vividly remember the small school benches we had back then, the gym itself and some of the signs.
There’s no way to distinguish between “What is the earliest you were able to have persistent memories?” and “How old were you when you first gained consciousness?”
Some candidates for earliest memories are; when I was getting a vaccinations, I apparently didn’t want to stop moving, so I had to be held down while crying and being injected with needles by strangers. Stuff like that really burns into your brain, and made me scared of doctors, needles and blood until I deliberately overcome the fear 18 years later.
I vividly remember climbing out of my crib, either for the first time, or at a time that was especially inconvenient for my parents. I remember because my dad told me not to do this in a stern way, which may have been one of the first times he talked to me like that. This happens at 18-36 months according to Google, so it might have been then.
I definitely remember my grandmother who died when I was 4. She had late stage dementia, and didn’t speak English, so I remember being scared of her.
I remember as a small kid thinking about how some of my experiences I won't remember, which won't be that different from them never having happened. I can't remember the specifics of some of the times I thought about that tho. Either way, if you don't remember a dream that doesn't mean you weren't conscious during it. Same with childhood
Not really sure what came first - both are from Kindergarden.
One is being really adamant about not wanting to wear a bobble hat, because other children had mocked it -> Recognizing that I have my own preferences that matter and that I can achieve.
The other is noticing how the concept of "left" and "right" works - when being taught to lift our left or right hands and sitting in a circle, I noticed that I had to lift the hand opposite of the person across me (which saved me time thinking about what to do myself, and to which I in part attribute sometimes mixing up right and left to this day ;-P) -> using my intellect to understand how the world works.
There was a recent editorial in Nature about this (on recent research). My earliest memory is of eating my first ice cream sandwich at 2.5. I think toddlers are certainly conscious and it's more that this memories just aren't very durable due to the fact there's massive reorganization taking place in this time period. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-00855-0
Yeah, I don't know if this is my idea or if I've absorbed it from elsewhere, but it seems plausible to me that we lose many early memories due to the acquisition of language resulting in a new "filing system."
The earliest thing I can still remember is very carefully pounding flat the texture of our stucco wall (ie the bumps and waves in the wire support, not the individual stucco bits) with my wooden mallet. That was at about 3 years old.
> Someone was drawing water and my teacher placed my hand under the spout. As a cool stream gushed over one hand she spelled into the other the word water, first slowly, then rapidly. I stood still, my whole attention fixed upon the motions of her fingers. Suddenly I felt a misty consciousness as of something forgotten—a thrill of returning thought, and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me. I knew then that “w-a-t-e-r” meant the wonderful cool something that was flowing over my hand. The living word awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, joy, set it free! There were barriers still, it is true, but barriers that could in time be swept away.
"Before my teacher came to me, I did not know that I am. I lived in a world that was a no-world. I cannot hope to describe adequately that unconscious, yet conscious time of nothingness. I did not know that I knew aught, or that I lived or acted or desired. I had neither will nor intellect. I was carried along to objects and acts by a certain blind natural impetus.... After repeatedly smelling rain and feeling the discomfort of wetness, I acted like those about me: I ran to shut the window. But that was not thought in any sense. It was the same kind of association that makes animals take shelter from the rain. From the same instinct of aping others, I folded the clothes that came from the laundry, and put mine away, fed the turkeys, sewed bead-eyes on my doll's face, and did many other things of which I have the tactual remembrance. "
And yet in "The Story of My Life," she talks about playing pranks on adults, trying to communicate with her mouth, and being friends with a servant girl when she was a child. She seemed to have theory of mind well before she had a "mind" of her own.
No memory of awakening to consciousness but I do remember being very embarrassed for pooping my pants, around 2 or 3, which I suppose implies some conception of the self
My first memories were of the tile floor at our old home, where I was crawling I would have been 2-3 I think. I can recall, between 4-10, having some awareness of different types/flavors of thought, being curious, having mystical/spiritual types of experiences, being angry, being excited, etc, and relating or even speculating internally about what different things might connect to those ideas/experiences, as well as being upset if I was shown to be wrong about those connections.
In middle school I got to full self-awareness/self-consciousness, when I observed that a kid I was friends with was annoying and realized I didn't want to be like him, which might have been the first time I considered myself, my mind, as something properly differentiable from others and that I could somewhat shape. Before that though I had a very heightened awareness of experiencing ideas due to a traumatic experience I had where every time I remembered it I tried to suppress that memory, which happened when I was like 9 or something. So in that sense I was phenomenally self aware pretty early, but wasn't socially self aware until puberty.
I have some very vague memories of going camping in an RV with my grandparents; mostly just remembering the feeling that being in an RV was cool. This event happened when I was 3.
Other candidates: I have two memories of the townhouse complex I lived in before my parents bought their (still current) house, which happened when I was 3: one of being in the shared outdoor pool, and one of an older boy teaching me to play rounders in the street.
Finally, I have a memory of looking out a car window, on a nighttime drive in the rain, trying to read the signs as they went by. I've long assumed this was when I was first learning to read, which according to my mom happened around age 3, although I think there's some other evidence it might have been a little later.
My first *existential* memories are in SK, seeing the year on the calendar in our classroom: "1990/1991" and realizing I didn't know what that meant, and later realizing that named years implied a whole world and structure to it that I hadn't been aware of (TBC the letter part I don't have a specific memory, that feeling has attached to the earlier memory)--I would have been 5.
And finally, realizing I was going to die, around age 6--waking up in the night terrified at the realization that one day I would stop being, and going to my parents' bedroom. They (wilfully? I think I remember wondering this even at the time, but I don't know how much to trust that) misunderstood me as worrying about *other* people dying and reassured me that my grandparents were still young and had many years left--not what I was worried about, mom!
Such an interesting post! I don't recall my first memory but I do remember one particular night lying under the stars looking out at the vast night sky between the age of 5-7 and having some sort of freak out/mini panic attack? I then remember having a world-ending dream maybe soon after that.
As I awoke one morning after uneasy dreams, I found myself transformed into a young boy. It was probably around 5-6 when I realized I am not the "previous" boy, the 4-5 yo baby boy.
I think around 12 I realized more fully what time is. I remember thinking that the school year thing will replay until I'm 19 (eastern Europe high school ends at 19), but then there's an abyss. What happens after 19? You pop into adulthood? Who knows!
Around 20 I remember thinking that life is so absolutely terrible at -2^32-1 quality points--either that's the hard stop or it will loop around and be awesome--that it really doesn't matter what a fool I make of myself so I can go ahead and do whatever I feel like, so I become a software engineer.
Just after 30 I realized that I am in control of every action and thought I make and they there are infinite degrees of freedom within the constraints of my life.
So there wasn't anyone moment like what the tweets describe, more like slowly upping resolution.
- The one Scott likes to mention: "I can actually think about my problems and solve them". I know this to be true in theory and I do it, even on a daily basis, but it still feels tenuous, like when you just learned how to ride a bike perhaps.
- Theory of mind of bad or stupid behaviour: I have difficulties conceptualizing what is going on in the mind of somebody who does something evil or stupid. This includes myself! When asked "what where you thinking" I often really don't know. Similarly, often it becomes impossible to explain a misconception once I have learned the correct model. At least that last one is very common, as I can tell from students.
Perhaps related to these I only "realized" a few years ago that people and institutions are often not that competent and benevolent. Of course I knew this on an abstract level but somehow it took me til over 30 to become aware of it. Before the world was somehow still the magical adult world where everyone is a very serious person acting for very serious reasons. I still have to remind that the world is run by people just like me (or often less competent than me) and that I can "just" do things.
Totally agree with this perspective (as I posted above). At least for me there have been a lot more than two stages and I expect there are more still to come.
My first memory is at age 4--holding my younger brother when he came home from the hospital.
No origin-of-consciousness moments, but I remember being either 16 or 17 and thinking, This is the first time I've been able to look back one year and recognize my decisions as being adult-type decisions--the same kind I would make now. Before that, each birthday had me looking back one year at someone who seemed like a child.
I have quite a lot of early memories (Kindergarten and earlier). However, one memory that stands out on this topic:
Somewhere around grade 4-6, I was thinking about consciousness and reflecting on how I saw the "little kids" (anyone a couple years younger than me) as kind of stupid and insignificant. And then I thought, "Uh oh! Maybe in a couple years I'll start to think that people *my* age are like that! That would be very unfair and incorrect. Maybe that's why adults don't treat us kids with respect. I better remember carefully and not forget: I was fully conscious and very intelligent right now."
Sometimes I see old photographs of myself and they reawaken a memory. A birthday party decoration. A friend whose name I've long forgotten. But my first memory is, fittingly, waking up from a dream. An alarm clock was going, which in my dream had somehow become the sound of fire. Then I woke up and was relieved I wasn't currently burning alive.
The memory must be from somewhere around 3-4, because that's when we were living in the room I remember waking up in. However, there's no proof here that I wasn't a p zombie at that point! Perhaps my brain merely processed some stimuli, stored some memories, but there was no me back then to experience any qualia! And only now, as I am re-remembering this memory for the n-th time, am I, for the first time, actually having a conscious experience to go along with the memory.
There is a qualia corollary of the cogito: I know I am conscious right now, but there is no strict evidence I was conscious at any state prior to the current moment. Maybe I wasn't, in a sense, "there" for any of my memories.
I don't have any moment of sudden awakening, just glimpses that are helpfully timestamped. I remember my great grandpa asking how old I was, me saying, "two" and him giving me a two dollar bill. I remember on my third birthday waking up early and running around the house yelling "I'm three!".
One thing I've wondered about though is how much of that I actually remember now, vs remember remembering it. I'd be curious how often or how far back in time we remember things that we've never remembered before. Maybe everything we remembered from long ago is possible because we've occasionally thought about it, like space repetition or something. Wonder if there'd be a way to test this.
I wonder if we could do something like spaced repetition to a child to get them to keep on remembering things from early in life. My theory is that we could get back to the point where they can keep a memory at least 1 day old.
Science project time!
(In reality we somewhat rewrite our memories each time we access them so the true memory wouldn't be quite accurate, but it would still seem real.)
> Children who had been 2–13 years of age at the time of a medical emergency (an injury serious enough to require hospital ER treatment) were re-interviewed about their injury and treatment five years after injury, and three years after a previous interview. The children showed excellent recall of the central components of their injury experience, although their recall of hospital treatment was more incomplete. Thus, both the nature of the event being recalled (the injury versus the hospital treatment) and the centrality of information (central versus peripheral) were important. The recall of 2-year-olds, although not as good as that of children just a year older, did not fit with predictions of infantile amnesia since they recalled a considerable amount about their injury.
I just left the same comment before I read this one. And I did try it once, but I didn't have enough contact with the child to make the memory stick. As Marcel mentions, you need the kid to understand language well enough that you can regularly bug them: "Do you remember that time when...."
I definitely fall on the gradually-gained-consciousness side... My first "memory" is some haze of walking into my front porch to see my mom decorating my brithday cake (I was 3; it's pretty much a screenshot of a memory). My second "memory" is having a nightmare of a dragon silhouette in front of the moon and running to my parents' bed to sleep with them (I was 3-4; it lacks details asides from the specific nightmare imagery). While there were other assortments of ideas/feelings/imagery that may count as "memories", my first true *memory* was when we moved (I was 5-6), which was when I started remembering entire scenes and events in a reasonable degree of detail.
I recall laying in bed at my grandmother's house and becoming conscious of my control of my hands. Realizing that my will is somehow transmitted to the meat hooks of my body, and I can make them do anything I want. This happened at a time well after I had been able to walk and hold things, maybe around 4-5.
I also remember noticing my conscious control of my hands for the first time. I've no idea when I first noticed, though. Even in my teens or twenties, I remember occasionally really thinking about it and being kind of... I dunno, amazed? (I tried just now and I got maybe 10% of the amazed experience. It does still seem kind of weird if I really focus on it)
"But she also said she 'doesn’t remember' giving birth to me, so I’m not sure how much I trust her here." I have a vivid memory at four years of age, sitting on my grandfather's shoulders at the auction where he bid on and bought our first house because my father had to work that day. My late father always told me that was bullshit, he was there and I never sat on anybody's shoulders. I have never been clear whose memory is most authoritative.
Hmm, that makes me think we maybe are like AI when young. Someone here said people hallucinate things like pink elephants when we're drunk but LLMs hallucinate things like "perfectly detailed reports of court cases". Perhaps your "sitting on the shoulders" memory is like the AIs court case...
My earliest memories are from 4 or 5, but they are just of things happening (playing in a pile of mud with a friend, scratching my elbow on a barbed wire fence, etc) and not associated with any actual insight or introspection.
My first memory is of me lying scrunched up in the doorframe of the kitchen, drinking from a baby bottle. Don't actually know what age.
I think I was pretending that the bottle was a flute and I was playing it (my mom used to play the recorder for us). It might have also been the first time I was aware that drinking milk from the bottle was a specific experience (temperature, flavor, texture of the mouthpiece, when you bite into it *like this* more milk comes out than when you bite *like that*).
Another very clear memory is my 5th birthday, where I compared my gift to that of my twin brother.
Sometime later that year I also did a test to go to school early. I distinctly remember being shown pictures and asked to name what it was, with the correct grammatical article. My only mistake was "das Tunnel" instead of "der Tunnel". That latter factoid is possibly an implanted memory, but I remember the person showing me the cards with pictures. I was also asked at that time how high I could count, and answering that the question made no sense, because numbers just go on forever.
Which brings me back to an earlier memory of being on the escalator at a mall, bored out of my mind. My mom told me to count numbers. I kept running out of numbers, so she basically ended up teaching me the number system. From around that time I also recall looking at the sliding doors at the supermarket and trying to figure out how they worked. Similar memory of studying the laser at the garage door of my grandparents. Also how elevators work.
IMO it's not a coincidence that all these memories are about figuring out how the world works, and running into stuff that's not self-evident, but requires a *mental model* to understand.
There is a case to be made for thinking of consciousness as a meta-awareness or self-awareness. At least, I remember a few chapters on this in the Blackwell companion to consciousness when I took a course on this some 20 years ago.
If we take this approach, which I am partial to, then first memory doesn't really mean much. But first moment when one thinks "I am a person in the world" or "this is what being me is like right now" or "I wonder if I will remember this later" do. And those might just happen, for most people, a bit later: 10-12 sounds about right judging by my 12-year old and her friends. Maybe that is what that reddit guy meant.
Are there individual differences? Probably. Are people who never have this meta-consciousness as human as those that do? I'm not entirely sure.
I basically agree with this but your last sentence gave me pause. I think we have to take as axiomatic that, at a bare minimum, any person with conscience experience—whether they claim that fact or we infer it—is fully “human”, with all the moral weight that entails. Do you agree? If not, I’d be very interested to know why.
12 sounds very late. I clearly remember my 8 year old self having complex enough thoughts and agency that I can't imagine not being conscious then. Heck, one of my oldest musings was "what would it be like for an instant to experience being simultaneously all of the living beings in the world?". That sounds like the idea of someone who has qualia and sense of self.
Isn't it likely that one simply forgets their first conscious moment? Maybe it happens a few times before it sticks. You forget a lot of things that happen after you get consciousness, too, anyway
btw, I can pinpoint my earliest memory to the date: my family singing happy birthday on my 3rd birthday
My first memory was of eating grapes in the kitchen. Two years old. I told my mom this recently and she didn't believe me. I responded by describing the floor plan of that house (that we moved out of when I was 2) in sufficient detail that she concluded it was a real memory. For what it's worth.
I date this memory to when I was five years old, because I remember it being in the living room of our house in Illinois, and we moved from that house the month before I turned six:
I looked at our couch — which at that age would have been as tall as I was — and suddenly conceived of an enormous version of the same couch, with a Giant sitting on it holding a book, and reading that book to his giant son sitting next to him. And I thought: what if my life were just the story that the Giant was reading to his son? And so I experimented by narrating the next few minutes to myself ("Brandon walked from the living room into the hallway" or whatever), in the third person, as though my story were being told by that Giant from the book.
Quiet to-myself narration (hopefully my lips didn’t move!) was a regular habit for many years after that, probably indulged in for at least a few minutes of every day. Which meant that things like emotions, travails, and conflicts were often processed by immediately re-telling them to myself as though they formed some kind of coherent plot.
I suddenly wonder if, in elementary school, there were days when I was performing my life more for my own interior narrator, than for all the kids who had to share the classroom with me?
I think there's two separate things going on here. My first "yeah, that's definitely mine and not something someone else implanted later" memories look like they're from around 2-3. I remember figuring out how to open the fridge by bracing my feet against the side and pushing, and my kids both figured that out around 2-3. I also remember being a little disgusted when my aunts would talk baby talk to me. "Hey, I'm trying to talk correctly, don't set a bad example, I need to learn!", and that was probably around the same time or slightly earlier.
Those are distinct from and way earlier than learning the thing about being able to change reality around you. Won't go into the details on mine but that was around 9 or 10; I was a passive participant in life before that point, and active after.
I know many adults who don't appear to have ever hit that second stage yet. I've always thought of it as entering logic phase, in the classical model (typically 8-12) but it sounds like it's not guaranteed.
I have plenty of memories from early childhood, but I can neither place them in a sequence (so, cannot say which one is first). I do have clear "reflective" memories, where I thought of myself in the abstract. I realised I had a different way of thinking, observing, noticing the world than others. This was at a pretty early age, maybe even at 5 or 6, but for sure by the age of 12-13, I had a clear identity of how I was, indeed, different from others in my age group.
The QC tweet also reminds me of a moment when I realised how I could change myself through conscious effort in a pre-decided direction.
Nevertheless, while there are various moments which are "memories", I would say that a narrative of "series of improvements in agency/consciousness" represents my experience better than pin-pointing some stand-alone origin.
On that first part, bingo. My memory is generally poor as it is (a trauma response) but generally all my memories are linked to life chapters and while I can sequence the chapters, not the paragraphs within them. Sometimes I can sequence them if I try hard enough via context (i.e. I must have been age X because I remember house Y) but other than my entire life is basically vague memories of "4-9", 10, 11-13, 14-18, 19-24, 25-29, 30-32, 33-50, 50-now. And by vague I mean vague, as in at most two dozen memories where I barely know the details, like a barely remembered dream and maybe one or two strong full memories. I'm always amazed when people tell me stories of last month, much less, their young in exacting detail.
On his mother, that also doesn't surprise me. I have no memory of my own kids at all beyond intellectually knowing I had some. Literally couldn't tell you a single childhood story involving my kids.
@Solhando already mentioned this but there's no way to discern how much observership bias is involved. The earliest memory I've been able to muster as an adult, whenever this topic has come up, is seeing some dangly toy contraption illuminated in the moonlight as I lay in my crib, at ?? months. I can even recall the conflicting emotions of fear and awe in that moment, and can ascribe significance to them now, relative to the Emergence of the Prime Observer. But maybe when I was eight, I had eight additional memories (including that one devastating equipment malfunction by Tannhäuser) from earlier times that have been lost to time. And since we know memory formation is energetically sigmoid-y, feels reasonable to assume there were at least some minimalist episodic memories that had been encoded prior that hadn't found any additional connectivity since
My earliest memory is being in an hospital at age 2 or so. The child in the bed beside me always hammered his feet against some metal thing standing beside his bed and I couldn't sleep due to that.
I cried loud for the nurse in the hope she helps and when she arrived got scolded instead, because of course the other child immediately stopped hammering against the metal thing with his feet, and then I was totally unable to explain what actually happened because I simply had not enough words available to me.
Now, that memory is actually older than my feeling of becoming conscious, which happened at 3 or 4 in kindergarten. I just remember one day was special. I went outside. And suddenly knew I was there, things were TOTALLY different from one second to next. Up to that moment I kinda felt like a passive, dreaming passenger in my body but I suddenly felt having agency (without knowing the word at that time of course) and decided at that moment I must be some kind of superhero.
See “Beast Machine” theory of consciousness by Anil Seth and the work of Mark Solms (The Hidden Spring) who claim precisely this — that consciousness does play a critical role in the survivability of organisms. It’s not derived from intelligence but provides a mechanism for intelligence to be applied towards e.g. free energy minimization
Interesting, but I assume this means something like "being able to reflect on the self and its place in the world enables you to enact longer term strategies"? Because if that's the case, it still means that "qualia" ought to be some inextricable side effect of doing that.
My four year old learned about death last year and at night when we're getting snuggly will say "I don't want to die" or "I hope I never die <in place or at time>". Seems kinda conscious-y!
OTOH my 7 year old never has expressed anything of the sort. I've sat him down before and asked him if he ever wonders why we're here and what the meaning of anything is and he goes "huh? no! what?"
I did ask 7yo "if you didn't have breakfast this morning how would you feel?" conditional hypothetical question and he passed though. Very curious.
I don’t have a memory of suddenly becoming conscious. (My first memory is of taking my first steps.) But I do have an awakening memory of sorts. It was 1975; I was eight years old. I was walking alone in the woods and reflecting on how argumentative adults were. (My parents were NOT particularly argumentative; I was thinking about adults in general.) Religion, for example: countless people convinced of the correctness of their beliefs, yet at most only a fraction of them could actually be correct. And I reflected further about how adults seem more committed to winning arguments than to actually being correct. I realized in that moment that I was in dire epistemic peril (though the word wasn’t in my vocabulary). If I wanted to actually be correct about anything, and not just seem to be correct to impress others, I would have to be very careful not to make that mistake. In retrospect, this was my awakening as an aspiring rationalist.
Around age 5-6, looking out the rear window of the car after being picked up from kindergarten. I vividly remember the brown wood paneling on the kindergarten facade, and telling whoever picked me up that some boy toppled my building blocks tower, while at the same time feeling weird for talking about something so unimportant. (This was the only normal kindergarten I ever went to, and I was there only for a few months; this is my only memory of it, and no one else remembers this specific situation.) All of my "earlier" memories are obvious confabulations based on parents' anecdotes or photographs.
Hum... playing in the creek behind grandma's house as a pre schooler (would have been in K if they had it) is the oldest memory that I have any confidence in. All the rest could have been primed by pictures or stories. But no else was around down at the creek and maybe it was a bit scary? After that, maybe full consciousness around college graduation? Before that life just occurred and I flowed along with the current. Talked to my high school science teacher (all four years) at the 50th reunion last year, and he said he was afraid that life was just going to run me over. Guess I got lucky and life currents washed me up on a nice beach.
Shitting myself, realising how warm was it to use it as a chair and getting reprimanded by a kindergarden teacher.
Bringing down the TV and its placard on myself (the old TV)
Getting my ass whooped cause I almost got killed by a bus cause I was crossing the street.
Getting lost somewhere in the field while visiting some cousins.
I cant really recall anything too introspective, Maybe when I got an F because I forgoth homework when I was 7, or when I red my first word when I was 6.
Ludi, I love your shitting comment just because you are the first person I've ever heard express that in a way I can empathize as I had a similar vivid memory once with vomit and people think I'm nuts lol.
I was in my late teens and during a night of heavy drinking (nothing new then) I decided to make my drink of the night Alize. I have no memory of that night other than I remember I woke up in my own bed vomiting all over myself while still completely drunk and thought "I'm still drunk, it's cold out, and this vomit is extremely warm and comforting like a form fitting second blanket, I'm going back to sleep, I'll clean up in the morning".
Still can't even so much as smell Alize without nausea but that feeling of warmth and the detached dissociated analysis of its positive qualities has always stuck with me.
I have a few memories of mundane early-childhood experiences, but I can't date or order most of them—except that one happens to be of a phone conversation with my aunt about my then-upcoming third birthday, which allows it to be dated.
I also started having attacks of solipsism at a fairly early age, but again, not sure exactly when.
I guess an obvious question to my mind is, why does any of this matter/what makes anyone think that there's a real distinction to be drawn here?
The context in which I'm most used to arguing about this is in debates about whether nonhuman mammals and birds are conscious/have subjective experience/have something it's like to be/are moral patients, which of course has implications for ethical vegetarianism/veganism. I'm on the pro-animal-consciousness side, and have long been perplexed by a theory on the other side that consciousness is generated by some kind of self-reflected metacognitive process that requires the conscious mind to be aware that it's conscious, which most nonhuman animals can't be. This implies that young children also aren't conscious, even if their adult selves have memories of this stage, and at least one locally prominent intellectual bites the bullet on this and holds that three-year-olds aren't moral patients. I think my early attacks of solipsism are potentially relevant to this debate, but I never really managed to get anywhere with it.
Leaving aside that particular question, though, the whole thing seems like it's mostly just vibes and trolling. I figure we should mostly go with a minimalist account of the distinction (i.e., a maximalist account of which people are conscious) unless there's specific reason to think otherwise.
I have lots of very early childhood memories, some of them pre-verbal. Looking at my diaper pins and realizing that the yellow plastic part looked like a duck. Looking out the window at night at our neighbors' houses, and their lights turning on and off as they went about their business seemed definitely coordinated. Placing a glass on the ground and it suddenly, spontaneously broke. Sticking my fingers in a socket and getting a shock. Nudging my mom's ironing board, looking up, and the tip of the iron suddenly appearing over the edge of the board. Wondering for awhile what was "inside" people and then finding the answer when I cut my finger on something sharp. I still have that scar. These are all before I could talk.
I'm not sure I have a memory like "Now I am awake!!" but once I remember pooping while in a bathtub and then ... sometime later I was outside of the bathtub and my mom was cleaning soggy poo out of the bathtub. I remember wondering at the time if the two events were related, and then concluding they probably were. That I was continuous, and events are connected.
I vividly remember some time in my early teenage years (I forget exactly when) beating the video game Portal, unlocking the developer commentary, and then playing through with that commentary and realizing that art is made by people who make choices about what goes into the art.
Not quite what you asked about, but it's the closest I have to something like that, so I figured I'd share.
Never heard about anything like this, seems interesting. In my earliest memories I was already as conscious as I've ever gotten, so the transition, however gradual, must have happened before that and went sadly unremembered.
I have a pet theory that people like those who posted the tweets in this article must have some obscure interest in making themselves seem precocious, by a posteriori meaning-loading moments that were probably much less dramatic and metacognitive at the time they happened.
Sure, there must be a moment where your first meta reflection thought erupts, but everyone I've ever asked about their first memory (n ≈ 30 I guess?) has replied with a somewhat blurry event, either completely banal like waking up in the morning before going to school, or traumatic/shocking to some extent.
Don't toddlers start manipulative behaviors quite early, like lying to get more sweets or faking pain for cuddles and.. sweets I guess? For them to engage in this kind of behavior, wouldn't they have had to wrestle with primitive meta-images of the self, and planning along steps to reach a certain outcome knowing how others would react to the behavior they present? Maybe that's one of the first inklings of "consciousness", except if we assume toddler behaviors arise completely free from conscious thought and pondering, "naturally" or through unconscious mimicry of behaviors they discern from their parents and other toddlers?
That's why I mostly don't buy the "I remember gaining consciousness when I was in a wheat field at age 5 and realized the universe was infinitely larger than myself and thus my importance in this world was staggeringly reduced from instinct-puppetry to deep-thought-agency" kinda thing. To me it's more likely that it's just the earliest one they can remember to this day, which says pretty much nothing about what the child's meta-cognition was like around that time (6 months prior to the consciousness event or whatever).
Does Skinner's model of a child randomly trying behaviours and then responding to reward and punishment not explain how kids can manipulate their parents? I don't think this requires any deep insight or even consciousness to pull off.
It's also pretty well established that memories mutate over time, being slightly altered each time they are remembered, just as stories grow in the telling. It might not even be a conscious process, but I can imagine people who tell about their first memory regularly eventually developing a more interesting version of it.
My own first memory is of being in the kitchen in winter with my mother, I would have been 4, most likely. I have a handful of other memories from around that time, none of any significance. My brother's first memory is of saying 'Mama where are X, Y, and Z?' (me and our sisters, all older than him); to which my mother responds 'They're at school.' He claims this happened when he was less than a year old. Obviously this is nonsense, but he has been claiming this with conviction since the age of 6 or so (now 31).
I don't know that toddler's have to have complex ToM to manipulate folks, but I agree that the twitter posts here are pretentious and trying to make themselves seem precocious. My memories are also hazy.
- I was in the hospital for appendicitis. They were wheeling me into the OR on a stretcher but I was scared so I grabbed a door frame to try to stop them from wheeling me in.
- I was at a relative’s lake house. I slipped off the pier into the water and went under. There was a large crab underwater there waving its claws at me. My mother jumped up from where she was sitting and leapt into the water to save me.
Both of these are based on things that actually happened to me (I actually had appendicitis, I actually fell in a lake) but I’m 100% certain neither is actually a real memory. (The second memory includes an event I couldn’t have seen from my perspective underwater... Also, I don’t think freshwater crabs exist?)
My first real memory (or at least, the memory I have tagged as “first!”) is waking up from a nap and walking down the hall and seeing my father sitting in the living room playing solitaire. (With actual cards. I’m old.) There’s nothing special about this memory and I don’t know why it stuck. (Maybe it’s really an amalgam of lots of “waking up after nap time” memories.)
Hm, I mean I have memories that are definitely real (from age >13) and corroborated by many people where I "see" myself (and the whole situation) from above. That it's embellished in your mind does not necessarily mean it is completely fake?
Freshwater crabs definitely do exist some places, when I was a kid I caught one in the foothills of the andes mountains ~60plus miles and +3500ft of elevation from the ocean.
My first memory involves me breaking a mercury thermometer in my bedridden great grandma's room. I remember a lot of adults being very concerned and trying to remove all the cool shiny liquid that I really wanted to play with. It's not a significant life event. I just remember it because it was intense and after a while it was also what I'd think of as my first memory, so I kept bringing it up in my mind. I think that's all there is to it. To me it seems like the most plausible scenario is that consciousness is gradual and memories of people gaining it are just moments they had some profound realisations that they then go on remembering because it felt profound.
I seem to have gone through this a couple times, like a flashlight with loose batteries.
I remember being in a stroller and my sister taking an ice cream cone from me and my dad telling her that she could have it because she’d dropped hers. That is what I believe is the earliest one but it didn’t just become continuous after that.
I remember leaning my head against windows a lot because they were cool and I would watch wind blow through the trees. And I’d just imagine things.
Then another one in preschool where I was wearing a pith helmet and looking at a leaf with a magnifying glass and holding a purse, which I remember insisting was a satchel because it was okay for boys to have a satchel. Not sure where I learned the word satchel from.
I don’t recall the specific moment they became continuous though.
I do think, at a high level for humans and with some hand waving in what this means, that consciousness is a software event. Or rather, awareness of consciousness is a software event. I think it’s probably what caused the creative explosion in early hominids.
I have significantly earlier memories than this (which I can be sure are of less than age 3.5 because they are of a house I moved out of at that age) but I do remember a distinct experience of attempting deliberately to remember something. I would have been about four, and I was looking at the orange sofa in our kitchen during the evening. (Great memory past self, real classic /s)
I don't recall any notable moment of first self awareness, in this or any other memory.
My first memory that stuck was when I was under 3 years old, getting lost on a ferry from England to Norway, and knocking on cabin doors asking where my mum was. Could have been a big moment in my emergent consciousness, but it could have just been that the story was repeated so often that it became my only stable "memory" for a while.
My first "existential moment" was about a year later, asking where my grandad was (who'd died over a decade before I was born), understanding what it means to be dead, then being inconsolable.
I think I developed a kind of meta-consciousness, realising that I had some semblance of free will to control my behaviour/choice architecture at some stage when I was 11 or so. I recognised the difference between immediate preferences and meta-preferences, threw my Pokemon cards in the bin, and committed to resist short-term temptation and live my life more productively. Didn't become super productive, mind, but felt like a big moment.
The ambiguity of the word "consciousness" is, I think, bigger, and more problematic to this discussion than people suspect. I understand consciousness as something like "first-person experience" (here I go replacing one unclear term with another). So when someone says "I only gained consciousness when I was 12", I understand it to mean "after I was 12, being me felt like something, but when I was 11, it wasn't like anything to be me, there wasn't any perceiver of experiences of whom you could say that it was me". Is that really what is meant? That you could interact with this person when they're 11, have a conversation with them if they're verbal at this age (as is likely), with no experience on the other end? WTF. I have no way of checking that I'm not the only human being having experiences and it's not all my hallucination, but I have that assumption as a matter of politeness.
I cannot relate to the stories of ever gaining "first-person experience" — I have it and I don't remember not being aware of myself, to suddenly notice myself later; gaps in my memory feel like failures to recall experience rather than lack of experience. I have lots of childhood memories — though, for one thing, many of them (but not all) are childhood trauma (i. e. a relative bullying me), and for another thing, my memory is unusually good in certain aspects. 12 is shockingly late for first memories for me, by that time I already had a pretty complex personality; I'd say my earliest memories are probably from 2 or 3 years old.
My mom told me that she has very early memories, from before she was verbal at all. She described an exact situation, involving her mother, in great detail, and part of the recollection is definitely that she wasn't verbal (I think it was part of the situation, like she felt or knew something she couldn't get across because she couldn't talk yet.) It could be a false memory, of course, but I'm not quite certain. Her mother doesn't remember the situation, but it was an ordinary one, not something she'd be likely to remember.
Also, my mom told me that, before I learned to talk, I was crying and she didn't know what was wrong, so she said (without really meaning it, just something that came in the moment) something like "Where does it hurt? Can you at least show me and then I'll know" and I pointed to the tummy and she was surprised by the implication that I understood her question and gave her some meaningful response. This could be some coincidence or misunderstanding, though. And *theoretically* it doesn't mean I wasn't a p zombie (because p zombie behavior should not be different in any way), but practically it does show a certain level of being involved in the situation somehow.
It's very fun to read about all these experience that are very alien to me - I never had anything quite like this. Or at least, I have no memories of anything of the sort ever happening to me.
I do have some early memories, but I'm suspicious of most them, since there's a big overlap between the stories my parents told me about my childhood and what I "remember".
Most of it is very vague anyway, and usually involves interactions with people. Nothing before the age of 4 for sure.
The first vivid memory I have no doubts about is much later, I was 8. And it's probably so vivid and memorable because it was a very embarrassing incident I was teased about for the rest of my school years.
It's not my first memory, but I vividly remember the moment when I found out that two different people can have the same name. I had a friend named Chris Hanley when I was a child in Passaic, NJ and then around age 6 moved to a different town and met a different Chris Hanley was like "What the fuck is going on??!!!"
I have a few memories I know are from ages 2-3, because we lived in a different country for a year. I couldn't say for sure what the "first" one was, but I remember the following clearly, because I learned Theory of Mind:
I went to my mom with a cup, asking for apple juice. She started to pour it into my cup, and when there was enough for my liking I pulled my cup away. Predictably (to you, not to me), the apple juice coming from the bottle spilled on the floor. My mom explained to me that when I had enough, I had to let her know before pulling the cup away. Clearly this was a new category of thing (other minds) to worry about.
I think that I gradually gained reflective self-consciousness, and that early memories have less of it--they feel less "interior" perhaps. I think a Theory of Other Minds needed me to have a sufficient amount of interiority to contemplate self-other distinctions. But this may not be strictly necessary for memory.
My first memory is going to the hospital because I drank a bunch of cherry tylenol (which I liked the flavour of). I don't remember the drinking of it, or the trip to the hospital. I just remember the white walls, the bed in the corner, drinking charcoal (that bit really stands out to me), and getting a popsicle afterward. Unfortunately I don't recall any metacognition related to the event. Though strangely for the longest time I thought this happened around the age of 5, and thus wasn't my first memory (my believed-first memory was me asking my mom if we had fruit roll-ups and she said we did, and pointed to the hiiiiighest cupboard in the kitchen, far out of my reach). But I recently asked my mom about it, and she said I was only 2 when it happened. So perhaps I was judging firstness just based on how distant the memory felt, and unsurprisingly the hospital memory was very vivid relative to distance.
Very tangential to consciousness, but a somewhat interesting look at first memories.
I have a fair number of memories from when I was young, probably 2-4 years of age, I don't recall any of them being standout in terms of "I'm conscious now", maybe the one in which I was in my parents bedroom and found a pair of scissors. I decided to give my favorite stuffed animal a quick haircut because that seemed like a thing that needed to be done. Fortunately I didn't entirely ruin it, the same stuffed animal is now in my own kids bedroom, but I can at least recall having a thought process even if it was half baked.
I do have a vivid memory of the time my mind switched into a more adult mode of thought. That probably was closer to 10-12, I don't recall the exact age, but I was on a trampoline with a friend and we were playing 'pokemon', which basically meant jumping up and down while throwing our hands out and imagining blasting things with fire or whatever. At some point, the thought passed through my head "this is kinda pointless", and the thought was like glass shattering inside my head. I now saw what I was doing specifically as play, and could get bored of it in a way I didn't before that.
My earliest memory related to some form of consciousness is somewhere around age 2 (corroborated by my parents because it involves a kindergarten teacher talking to them about my precocious behaviours). I remember being put to bed for nap time in day-care and lying there not understanding why I had to nap and why the other children around me could just go to sleep on command. I kept my eyes closed pretending to sleep until I couldn't anymore out of boredom. It was a clear moment of realizing there was an "I" that didn't conform to the external world around me. I also vaguely remember not wanting to sleep in case I didn't wake up again, and that there were too many interesting things to do to sleep. I do worry this is interpretation in retelling it though. The only thing that feels clear is the memory of turning my head and seeing children around me sleeping and feeling intensely alienated by the experience, eventually leading me to get up and ask my teacher if I could read books.
In contrast, around age 8 I clearly remember wanting to die and having to convince myself not to find ways to kill myself, like drinking bleach. I felt deep despair throughout most of my childhood, and it culminated at a point where I had an internal dialogue about whether or not life was worth living if you experienced it the way I did. In the end I decided that if I couldn't cope with the world, I could use my life to try and ease the suffering of others by being a kind, supportive person. That was a real turning point for me in terms of living consciously and taking control of my agency. It's also the first anecdote I tell a therapist when I start work with them, because it feels monumental to me. Luckily I am no longer so depressed as an adult, and still always doing my best to be kind.
I think this all speaks to psychologist Robert Keagan's development theory (laid out in his book "In Over Our Heads") where he describes different stages of self-conception that people progress through (which I learned about through its lens that these developmental stages continue in adulthood, and not all adults reach all levels of "consciousness" in this context). The Second stage, where people move from being purely impulsive to conceptualizing the self as a consistent entity that exists over time, seems to correspond to that early 4-6 moment of consciousness people describe. The Third stage, understanding that you exist in systems with others, matches that 12-18 stage.
The later stages 4 & 5, which are maybe formal definitions of what Twitter today would call "agency," are even more interesting (ie I can make choices to co-author the systems I'm in). As is his argument that the "cultural curriculum" that teaches us how to be adults does a poor job helping people reach the later stages.
For years I thought my first memory was getting in trouble for something silly at about age 5 and I've generally considered my memory of early childhood to be quite poor.
However, I've always had the distinct memory of the bizarre pain and invasiveness of a doctor extracting a tube from my ear, which I had assumed happened sometime in elementary school (it just "felt" like that age in my memory). A couple of years ago while looking at my medical records I discovered this procedure happened when I was barely 2.
Honestly it was comforting because my relative lack of childhood memories has given me some anxiety that the haze of the distant past would continue to grow thicker until I'd forgotten my childhood entirely. Now I think it's possible those memories are still stored in my brain and I'm just not nostalgic enough about that time period to readily bring them forth, but with practice and technique I probably could produce more of them.
That said, I have no idea what any of this means for consciousness, and I'm suspicious enough about memory to not draw many conclusions about this age 2 memory. For instance, it seems entirely plausible to me that the raw sensation stayed in my memory and the thoughts of, "this is a unique pain that feels very invasive and I don't like it at all" were added later as I remembered the raw feeling. Or maybe that's not how any of this works.
My first memories are from kindergarten, but I'm unsure if I was conscious at that time or, as the original Tweeter said, I had merely recalled and connected to the memory later.
I'm reasonably certain I had consciousness during primary school as I was playing the "cutting stuff seen from car window with inaginary blade" game while traveling with my parents which necessitates visual qualia at least.
I've only realised how weird consciousness is in college and only there did I notice that people differ surprisingly in their reports of inner experiences. All my dormmates were selected for academic achievment yet some got what I referred to from the slightest hint, like "blueness of blue", and to some we couldn't explain what we've meant at all, and even after hours all we've got were confused looks.
I have to admit, at the time, I felt quite nice to be of the type "who gets it", and only later when I've come to agree with Keith Frankish's school of thought that consciousness is merely quasi-phenomenal, did I change my mind to envy those who were born without this particular mental flaw.
Not sure if this is the same thing but did not gain self awareness until I was 31 years old. Was operating under some sort of autopilot and then in an instant realized what and who I was and where I was in the world
Yes went to see my doctor for the umpteenth time about depression. Broke down crying, he stared at me and went to another room and came back with yet another anti depressant and just handed it to me. Left, went and sat down in my car and was overwhelmed with a feeling of being completely alone and that I was dying, describe it as waking up and you're treading water in the middle of the Pacific. Up until that point it was like I had never even been exposed to the concept of having agency in my own life and that I urgently needed to do something
I remember visiting my grandmother's house at age 4 or 5, talking to my uncle (or aunt?). I was showing off counting to 100 (my latest trick). My uncle told me to keep going beyond 100. This was new territory for me. So I counted: "101, 102, ... 109, 200!" My uncle corrected me that 110 follows 109. This was a revelation to 4-yo me, as I started to understand that "one hundred" was a different type of quantity than "eighty" or "ninety".
I have other memories from around this time (e.g. first day of kindergarten) that are also sharp and involve an internal realization. I have vague memories of when I was younger, but they are more like impressions. They have faded as I've aged and might be corrupted by watching old family videos.
Enough kids aged 2-7 make spontaneous remarks about "when they were big" and how they died that it spurred some research (see: Division of Perceptual Studies, University of Virginia). Happened around me more than once, too, but the parents did their best to shut such things down, so no record thereof. In Czech society, no one wants his kids to be "weird" or even "crazy", and such things would be considered weird and crazy.
If you absolutely rule out reincarnation as a concept, you can stop reading here; for everyone else, I propose the hypothesis that the veil of early childhood amnesia could be a protective mechanism against reliving bad things that you can do nothing about anymore.
Interestingly, the collection of cases that abovementioned Division of Perceptual Studies has been maintaining seems to indicate that violent deaths are overrepresented in the database.
My first episodic memory is of being 2 or 3, of a night I was super pissed off that my mom made me wear a diaper to bed despite my being potty trained. The discomfort of the diaper and my level of righteous rage at the matter are still very vivid in my mind so many years later.
But my first memories, period, are from before that, about ideas and introspection rather than events specifically. The first *thought* I remember having was that there was hard reality, and there was a separate world of dreams and imagination; and I recall several instances of trying to distinguish the two, as in: "Is this a dream right now, or reality?" For instance, I distinctly remember the first time I thought, "Oh, cartoons are fake. But this 3-D meaty world of high-def people and objects is real."
I've always assumed this was a very strange thing about me, about having memories that early and about them being so philosophical in nature. I am interested to read these comments to see if anyone has a similar story.
My earliest memories are of dreams. First involves crawling under a porch with a neighborhood friend and getting cut on a sharp edge — I had never bled in real life, and the blood itself generated the pain in my dream.
Second was a nightmare that has been seared in my memory ever since — Santa Claus came over (entering through the back door, not the chimney). My dad comes down to see was the commotion is, Santa rips off his hat to reveal that he’s the Big Bad Wolf. I yell “punch him, Dad!” But it’s too late and the Wolf bites off his head and I wake up.
Sometimes I think it’s not optimal to have such a strong autobiographical memory, and I wonder if negative emotion is connected somehow.
My earliest ‘memory’ is a brief snapshot crawling on the kitchen floor, but I suspect this is confabulated. My first verifiable memory is also the first day of kindergarten, my twin sister and I were crying.
While I can’t point to a specific memory of gaining consciousness, I do have a specific memory at age 17 of having an experience of greater introspection and understanding about my thoughts and emotions. Having grown up somewhat emotionally dysregulated and been through years of on and off counseling to get better control, I suddenly felt like I could experience my thoughts and emotions as they came, like a river, and being able to inspect and interrogate each one. Dramatically improved my ability to just be chill about things.
I also had an experience about three years back after reading a lot of David Chapman, as if something was building inside me emotionally and was about to burst. I told a friend that I felt something was off and not to be alarmed if I started acting weird, and half an hour later had a sudden moment of feeling that my emotional state was like the wheel of a car, which I could steer in any direction I chose. I grabbed hold of it and swung it all the way to the happy end, and spent several hours just smiling, thanking people, asking to hug them, and reflecting on the fact I was having an unusual mental experience while simultaneously enjoying it. Faded slowly after a couple hours. My friends were weirded out. Fell off the meditation train some time after and never replicated it, never took psychedelics either.
Also, reading some of the other comments, when I was maybe 5 or 6 I was watching an educational show on the computer and learned that in billions of years the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies would collide and be destroyed, and it freaked me the fuck out. I told my parents, they were very confused and were about to take me and my sisters out for dinner, I instead insisted on staying home and crying.
Not sure I was particularly concerned about the galaxy so much as the certainty that everything would be destroyed inevitably, even though I wouldn't be there to see it, BUT OH MY GOD I WON'T BE THERE TO SEE IT I'M GOING TO DIE.
I also went to bed a lot of nights crossing my fingers that nuclear war wouldn't start and kill me while I slept. I grew up in Spain, we're on nobody's nuke list. I think I was just a weird and anxious kid.
Not exactly consciousness, but I find myself going through much of life without "agency". There was one time, in my late 20s, while reading many articles on LessWrong about agency, that I felt for the first time an existential fear of death. Generally, the idea of ceasing to exist doesn't bother me. But in this moment, I felt it viscerally, and wondered how I could have possibly not felt it before.
Eventually, it faded and now I'm back to "normal". I know I can talk about and reflect on this happening, and reflect on myself in general, but it's not the same. It's almost as if there are some higher-level connection in my brain that just aren't happening.
On the other hand, my earliest memory is from when I was around 4.
I have very few episodic memories that I can intentionally recall, although I'm sure lots are in there somewhere. I definitely feel like I was ~always conscious in the self-aware sense. I would tell my friends about I wanted to die just to satisfy my curiosity about the experience of dying when I was four.
You could tell two stories about “first memories”:
Intelligence and memory gradually grow from infancy to adulthood, and at some point they reach a point where people can form reflective memories. There logically has to be some first memory, so if you ask someone for their earlier memory, they can usually think of it.
There’s some moment when the developing brain suddenly shifts from a preconscious to a conscious mode of thought.
"""
You're overlooking the most-likely story: Concepts gradually coalesce in the brain, as they do in a neural network being trained, becoming stronger attractors which provide more and more predictive power, and as they do, memories formed using those concepts become clearer and more stable. "There logically has to be some first memory" is the sandpile fallacy. Years later, there may be an oldest-surviving-and-recallable memory, but at the moment that memory was formed, earlier memories were no doubt still available.
I don't have any particular memory of consciousness switching on like this.
I have fairly distinct memories of preschool, which I think I was 4. I have other memories around that time, but I cannot fit them into a chronology so I can't be sure they are earlier. School memories are easy to date because you know what grade you were in.
As a child I felt what may have been an unusual degree of control over myself. I usually did things my own way and I think other kids thought I was a bit weird for that. I did get along with people well enough anyway, so it wasn't in a weirdly autistic way. Nor do I think it was in a cool way where I displayed unusual levels of self-confidence externally. More just that from a young age I did not have a high regard for other people's opinions. But I don't recall an epiphany where I realized I was in control of myself.
Mine might be fake on priors because it's implausibly young, but I really do think I remember it, in the category of "thinking about your own mind for some reason." I was at my 2nd birthday party, and the adults were talking about the "loot bags" (local name for "goody bag," the little bags of garbage toys kids get to take home from birthday parties). The bags themselves were blue, and at first I thought they said "blue bags" because that was a word I knew and then I realized that was wrong and "loot" must be a word. This is a memory that took place fully inside my mind, so it's unverifiable but also it definitely isn't from someone telling me the story later.
I don't know if this is true but I once heard that memory and language are related in such a way that kids who talk very young are more likely to have very early memories, and I was reportedly a bilingually chatty toddler.
This reminds me of an early memory of mine. I was surely conscious before this, but when I was (dunno) five or six I was reading a comic book—the protagonist was in a prison cell but was thin enough that he could slip between the bars, and said as much to somebody else: “See? I can just slip between the bars!”
What makes this stick for me was that I had seen the word many times and in my head pronounced it “bet ween”, and in this occasion I realized that it was the word “between”, which I already knew.
As an adult I have always marveled at how many things I must have experienced without understanding them, and without even knowing or caring that I didn’t.
I was conscious for a few minutes when I was 2. I disabled it out of spite. As a philosophical zombie, I have no problem with suffering or vivisection. I do not know what morality or socially awkward means. For fun, I enjoy reaching for police officers' guns, stealing tanks from military bases and holding my breath. When faced with a problem, I simply overclock my brain and force up the solution by ceaselessly thinking about the problem for several days. I reward my conscious servant-thralls with utility and hedons, which I hoard in my surgically-implanted marsupial pouch.
I feel as though I have no /real/ memories until as late as high school even though I know a lot about my experiences before then (I can recall the names of each of my teachers and which students I had as classmates, I know what years we did particular lessons and projects, etc.) None of these come in the form of a first person experience but as a knowing of the facts of a situation as if I read about it. One relevant example is that, after graduating high school, I encountered my elementary school bully who had moved away and recognized him immediately before we spoke to each other despite not being able to sit and imagine what his face or any of my classmates looked like at that time. No conscious memory of it, but clearly /some/ kind of memory there. Even for fairly recent memories where I can get very specific about the event, I need to close my eyes and focus on it to "remember" experiences vs. accurately answering questions about them.
But I feel pretty conscious! I am able to reflect on my internal state, internal dialogue, and so on, and remember the thoughts I was having and ways I was speaking to myself very closely in the scope of the same day or two. I am, however, fairly alexithymic and frequently need to follow paths like "I am breathing heavily and clenching my hands, therefore I am probably upset" to assess my emotional state. This likely explains it, but my internal dialogue feels unmediated and able to reply to itself and reflect on how it's operating.
I vividly remember* a moment when I was 9 years old in my school, standing in the large playground, and I realized that it was entirely in my control to ruin my life. Like, I *could* at any point throw myself off the stairs, I could go to the police guy I had seen and punch him, I could try to hurt someone. And of course I would not do these things, but not doing this was a *choice*.
This moment struck me as significant even at the time. Significant enough that I promised myself I wouldn't forget it, and "anchored" that day as the day I recognized my own free will, and built realization into the narrative of my own self-conception.
I'm fairly confident this wasn't actually the earliest conscious memory. But that realization of its importance anchored it, and made me recall it every few years afterwards, maintaining it when most of my other memories of the time have faded.
* the memory itself is, by now, fairly vague at best. I know the visual appearance of the playground from that perspective, and the visual look of some of the specific thoughts on things I could do. But much of the content is second-hand from later (early teenager) reminiscing about it.
I definitely had the "light bulb" moment, at age 3 or 4. "Wow, I'm conscious now!". At least, I remembered this as my awakening moment throughout all my childhood.
I've got a study idea! Follow a cohort of children for 10 years, giving each an MRI every year. Later, ask them each when they became conscious, and check if anything in the brain developed morphologically for all of them across that year.
My first memory, (defined as I can vividly imagine the details of the scene and feelings I had) takes place at 22 after waking up from a severe head injury. I could still tell you all the same events of my life, recognize everyone, and know all the same facts, but my visual memory was gone. It was as if all my video memory was erased, but the Wikipedia database of my life was fine.
The interesting part of it is that I didn’t realize anything was wrong after waking up. I did not think anything changed. It was many years later when I thought back at my memories that I realized the memories post concussion were in the form of a video and the ones before it were just knowledge. I also think my visual imagination lessened, since when I read Scott’s early piece on visual imagination the first time, pre concussion, im pretty sure I could imagine vividly, and now I cannot.
None of this helps knowing when I was conscious, which was presumably well before the concussion, but it’s interesting in its own right.
I no longer equate consciousness with thinking, per se. What I mean is that for years I've been just "trying to figure it all out" with "it" being this cat's cradle called my life, which was itself meshed with numerous other cat's cradles.
One evening not so long ago, while sitting on our front porch with some in-laws I had a mystical experience where, for the very first time, I realized I was awake. I've since come to understand that being awake is something that must be practiced and that there is no distinction between practice and being awake -- when practice is practiced as practice. I catch myself all of the time being "asleep while driving." Being awake or being conscious, for me, is being aware of what is happening right now and it has nothing to do with rational or non rational thoughts. Thoughts are just what the mind does on its own quite naturally.
The earliest memory I can date is seeing Monsters, Inc. in theaters when I was almost three years old. I know it was in theaters because we didn’t have a TV and don’t get a DVD player at home until years later (and never owned Monsters. Inc. on DVD). There’s a scene in the first act where the orange and yellow furred monster returns to base contaminated by a pink sock stuck to his shoulder. This prompts a squadron of semi-humanoid monsters in faceless hazmat suits to descend from out of frame and subsume the orange and yellow furred monster. My memory of the scene is aesthetically tuned up to 11, more of a sensory dreamscape than something I was conscious of watching on a screen. In retrospect, there’s a good chance I didn’t fully understand what a movie was when I went to see it.
It’s hard to place first memories, but I had the good luck of going to a school with many campuses, all renting space from different buildings. There was one for the 2yo program, and a different one for the 3-4yo program. I have several memories from the latter but I think also one from the former. We must have had BBQ the night before and my mom sent some leftover baked beans in my lunch. My earliest memory is, “Alright! Beans!”
I have a range of early memories some of which are probably fake.
I remember being in the crib and my babysitter was heating food in the microwave and I was mad at her. But I think it's fake and based on some story.
I like to test for dreams by whether I remember the walls and the spatial layouts. Even if I do, I can usually see that it doesn't make sense in dreams. I vaguely remember the iconic spatial layout of my early childhood house, but I don't remember the walls. So it makes me think I don't remember living in that house.
I switched kindergarten after one year and I remember both kindergartens, but the later memory is better. Still, one room is suspiciously dream like, even though I would pass through it often, because it was leading to the dining hall and exercise room. It's also in that room that I have a memory of being stricken by a ray of sunlight lighting up the dust in the air.
Very convenient for the world dreaming conspiracy that you can't make an alumni visit to your kindergarten to confirm the spatial layout.
My earliest memory is from when I was between 1 and 2 years old. I was getting a cast removed (I had had surgery to correct a congenital deformity). I panicked when they were about to cut the cast off and had to be restrained.
My second-earliest memory, I must have been 2. Standing up in my crib. My parents doing some kind of bit where a stuffed doll would peek around the corner of the doorway and talk to me in a funny voice. This sent me into some kind of euphoria, and I was laughing uncontrollably.
I have no memory of any moment or event that felt like "gaining consciousness".
On the subject of "kindergarten test" -- could it have been early childhood screening? I know we have that in Minnesota, and you have to do it before going to kindergarten. (The friends who sent their son early say that there was some additional testing, too, but that seems less likely to be universal.) I have access to a 6-year-old who did the screening at 3; he appears to still have some memory of it.
My earliest memory was from daycare; I must have been about 3. I specifically remember being bored (I think I was new to daycare, and older than most of the group), and also a little bit of the indoor play structure that I was being bored on. Me being bored on that particular structure probably wasn't an isolated experience, so it's not immediately obvious to me whether this is purely episodic memory, or a mixture of episodic and procedural. Irritatingly, I have no memory of my mom's favorite story from that daycare, which is when (again, at age 3!) I managed to walk away from it to go exploring.
The next memory that I can date was when I was 5; specifically, I remember arguing with the speech therapist about whether she'd promised that I'd get a "5." or a "5+" as a grade.
Is "episodic memory" a close equivalent of "consciousness"? I find the idea of consciousness-as-inner-monologue compelling, and it's true that for memories before ~middle school I don't *remember* either having or not having an inner monologue; most of my early memories are of things outside of me (possibly including my own behavior), rather than of my mental state. This is still largely true: I can attest to currently having an inner monologue, and have more than zero recollection of my past mental states, but when I think back to e.g. things I did over a decade ago, I tend to remember where I went and whom or what I saw in rather more detail than how I felt about it. (Notable exceptions are "that intensely embarrassing thing I did in middle school" and "crushes", which are not necessarily distinct categories.)
From the preface to my book, Beethoven's Anvil: Music in Mind and Culture:
I have been told that, one morning when I was very young, I listened to a certain record over and over, thereby driving a visiting uncle to distraction. While I do not remember that incident, I do remember the song itself. As I play the tune to my inner ear the voice sounds like Burl Ives—it might even have been him, through I’ve never attempted to verify this—and the guitar sounds crisp.
The melody is simple and quite repetitive; the words are simple as well. I don’t remember them all and what I do remember doesn’t feel quite like a connected sequence. Here they are, as I remember them:
Fiddle-de-dee, Fiddle-de-dee
The fly he married the bumblebee
The fly said he will you marry me
And live with me sweet bumblebee
Fiddle-de-dee, Fiddle-de-dee
The fly he married the bumblebee
That fragment of a song may well be my oldest memory—I’ve got a few ancient ones, none of them clearly placed in time, not with respect to one another, much less absolutely. It is my mind’s tether to history, my umbilical to the world.
My super-high-IQ best friend has a credible memory from when she was 16 months old (along with a lot of other specific memories from her toddlerhood): she remembers her family sitting together in their living room and watching the Neil Armstrong moon landing. (She was born in 68.) She didn’t understand what was happening, but she remembers the unusual tension, silence, and rapt attention of her family members as they watched.
I feel like there's an important distinction between your first memory, and the first time you remember thinking about an experience as (or just after) it happened. My first memory is just a thing, but it contains no information about the experience of living through it.
Anyway, I'm not sure which is first, but one of the earliest is around the age of 9, having seen a trailer for Jurassic Park the last time I was at the movies. I was down the street from where I lived and I was looking at a hedge and thinking about how long it would be until the movie came out. That's one of the first discrete times I can remember standing outside of my own experience and assessing it in some way.
Tough one. Most of my earliest memories aren't self-reflective. They are mundane; e.g. watching a TV show everyone liked in my aunt's living room as a toddler (reruns of the original Star Trek) or seeing a movie with my dad and eating a movie-themed cookie he bought for me (Star Wars, Vader cookie). I guess the 1970s were a Golden Age for popular SciFi? But then there is the story about how I accepted Jesus as my savior at age four...
I'm not sure if I remember it or if it was told to me so many times that I think I remember it? In any case, the process at an evangelical church is strictly volitional, and you are asked certain questions to make sure you have reflected on what salvation means, so I have to assume I was self-aware enough to answer such questions in a convincing way.
I was always told the "age of reason" is around seven, but if "reason" means being able to consciously reflect about the state of one's soul, then I guess I had some sort of 'reason' at age four?
Also, it's not directly related to your question, but since you brought up PNSE, Sasha Chapin's recent account of his "mind exploding" will be of interest to many: https://substack.com/home/post/p-164025908
I think there may be a fundamental difference between your first-day-of-kindergarten memory and your taking-the-test-to-get-in memory: the latter may only still exist in some capacity as a memory because subsequent events force you to recall it ("I started kindergarten early, I must have had to take a test to get in early... oh yeah, I remember something about taking that test"). Whereas, the former may be your first memory that *stands on its own two feet as a memory* which fully made its way into the linear narrative of your life rather than existing as a footnote under more recent memories that sit in the linear narrative.
I'm not articulating myself well; am I making sense here? They're not my memories, so I have no way of knowing of course.
That's fascinating. The theme of my earliest memory is also consciousness, but I never took it to be causative- I didn't think of it at the time as the first moment I was conscious, but I don't have any evidence to suggest otherwise. Why should self-awareness connect to memory like that?
For the pile: I was ~5 walking down the street with my mom and asking her how I was in control of my arms. It didn't make sense to me that I could just want my arm to move and it would comply. Still doesn't.
I guess it's not memory in general- my mom wouldn't have understood me if I hadn't formed memories before that point. It's less unintuitive that episodic memory depends on awareness of experience, but that's not quite an answer.
I’m actually so confused and dumbfounded by this. Are people maybe meaning the word “conscious” to mean something more specific than having an experience where you feel some kind of sensation? It sounds like people are maybe using the word to mean more “being aware of one’s self” or “having greater awareness of one’s self as a being existing in the world” which is an interesting mental feature but not what I thought conscious means. Like sometimes I have dreams where I’m not a character but just a nonexistent observer, I’d still say I’m conscious during those dreams but lacking a self. I have two earliest memories because I’m unsure if one of them was real or just a dream but neither had any kind of “snapping” sensation or transition from one state of mind to another. I definitely feel like my mental features and understanding of the world and my place in it changes dramatically as I got older but I think I was conscious before I was even born. There’s videos of me as a baby where I’m laughing and looking at things and clearly having reactions, it would be extremely shocking to me if there wasn’t any internal experience and I was a just a p-zombie. I worry that if we conflate consciousness (mentally expediting something) with more narrow self awareness that we could morally disregard beings that still experience pain and joy and maybe even have interest/preferences.
I definitely have a memory I would consider "this is when I became conscious". Nothing particularly interesting was happening, other than the fact I was 'becoming conscious' - I was actually in the middle of awkwardly running through the living room. Must have been either 2 or 3 at the time. It's like my brain suddenly noticed it could think about thinking itself and started the recursive loop, and qualia manifested. Not that I had any way of describing that at the time, it was just a very surprising moment, "huh, hold on, what's this? I'm me?". I don't even remember if I stopped moving to consider the change or slowed down or anything like that. It didn't feel much like a 'first memory' in the sense that it was pretty clear what I had been doing before then, etc (since forgotten, but there was a sense of continuity of action), but I suppose it could qualify!
(Editing to add: This memory is from ages ago now, so I only share the bits I know I actually remember, as the rest has been distorted by time, as memories go. Hence things like "I don't even remember if I stopped moving to consider the change or slowed down or anything like that", which you would think would need to be part of the memory - I can tell you that the now-distorted memory includes me continuing to run unchanged, but I have no reason to believe that is correct; it's not the anchor point of the memory, so I mistrust it.)
Because my father's career was in the international oil industry, I have the advantage that we moved frequently and that time-stamps memories by location. My first four years were in Venezuela and we did not live there again so all memories from there must be from between 0 and 4. Stripping out all memories that could be contaminated by family stories or family pictures, I have four categories of memories probably in a rising hierarchy of complexity and from earliest to latest.
Event vignettes - memories of things happening and the experience of that thing. Exploring a just-built empty house with some friends; falling from a bulldozer and gashing my head (and the whole subsequent emergency room visit); splash pool, trips into the Andes, riding in a car with rusted out floor boards and watching the road go by beneath my feet, etc.
Conversations - Snatches of dialogue from events.
Self-reflection - Hearing something said and reflecting on the implications of what was sais. For example, Billy Frank Snorgrass intimating that the Easter Bunny was not real was discombobulating. It was one thing that he might not be real at all but an entirely different thing that everyone should be lying about him being real.
Awareness of agency - My father was sawing a large sheet of plywood in the garage and needed someone to hold up the far edge to keep it from bending. He called me in to do so. I came over and held it up over my head (because I was short). My mother saw this and decided it was dangerous and came out and took my place, holding it just above her knees. However, when my dad finished the cut, the sheet fell down at his side and she lost her grip at her end and it fell and scraped her shins. I can remember my wishing that she had not taken my place and believing that had I continued, the accident could have been avoided.
I am guessing that the vignettes and conversation memories might be as early as 2-3 and the reflection and agency memories more like 3-4 but cannot be certain.
My earliest memory is of being at home in a hallway with stairs going up alongside the hallway. This wasn't my home growing up.
When I told my parents this they said the home I was born in had that configuration, but I couldn't possibly be remembering it because we moved out of there when I was 18 months old. Notably I had not been in any other home with that design. (Grew up in Melbourne; lots of space; most homes are single storey.)
I can't tell you if or when I first developed consciousness. I can tell you that for as long as I remember, my consciousness and self-awareness have felt the same as they do now. I am quite sure I am currently conscious - but then that's what any P-zombie would insist.
I have a lot of clear memories from not too long after my third birthday because my mom was pregnant and I had a lot of questions about that and I have memories of her big belly and meeting my brother in December. So I'm pretty confident that I have quite a few memories while being two because they had to be from the previous summer.
-I suddenly didn't want to eat apple sauce or orange juice because I imagined it might be made from old people skin, specifically my elderly neighbors. I knew it wasn't and that it would sound dumb to try to explain it to my mom so I just wouldn't tell her why.
-I understood pretty quickly that people weren't IN the TV, but I couldn't get that actors weren't actually experiencing the stuff that was happening to them, like death and car accidents.
-I saw a TV show where a plane crashed and later when I was playing in my sandbox I saw a jet fly over I wanted to get my mom out of the house so she wouldn't be in the house when the jet crashed into it, but I couldn't explain it through my tears.
-I remember needing to be carried immediately after becoming exhausted on a walk and kind of noticing gravity for the first time and hating it. And asking about it and feeling bad about having to deal with gravity for the rest of my life.
-I remember being amazed that my dad could distinguish a $1 bill from a $5 dollar bill.
-I remember being terrified of the neighbor's dog--a friendly bulldog I now understand--because I could see its teeth.
I have quite a few more memories from that time, but harder to fit them to a short little narrative. Just like being in a car or noticing a missing brick.
This is a favorite topic of mine. I like to say that the Hard Problem of Consciousness is so hard that not only do we not know what a solution should look like, we can’t nail down a definition of ‘consciousness’ that a majority of interested people will agree describes their own experience! The tweets above speak to a consequence of this fact.
I believe a useful heuristic in this area is modes of thinking as processes. There are at least three modes of thinking that *can* come online in childhood; though we need to agree that consciousness as "being a subject that experiences qualia" actually predates that, and probably comes online sometime in early infancy, while memory in a form an adult would recognize comes online later. The contents of your consciousness could contain any or all of which at any given time. They are:
1. Recognizing oneself as an agent in the world, capable of physical autonomy.
2. Recognizing oneself as enacting agency in regard to your own thoughts.
3. Recognizing that thought can take processes 1 and/or 2 as objects and operate on them as one would any other object, such as a chair or feeling hungry.
Since Scott asked for it, my experience went like this: I was conscious as “an experiencer of qualia” since shortly after birth, though memory retrieval was limited to no more than a few seconds into the past; this grew as time went on and eventually expanded to the maximum of whatever my earliest memory is, which was different at 5 than it is now. I came to instantiate processes 1 and 2 not in a flash, but gradually between ages 3-4. There was a moment in kindergarten--so age 5--where I was in the playground and realized that my memory now(then) went as far back as I cared to remember, though very early memories were weird and kind of garbled. The very next thought was that I should make a marker in memory so that I will have a non-garbled milestone/marker to recall back to, should that ever prove helpful (mind you I didn’t use these words, it was more abstract/vibey than that). So, I looked around the playground and fixated on a gazebo. I thought, yep, that’ll do. And to this day I can still picture the gazebo as clear as day, even though I have no memory whatsoever of the day, or even hour, before or after that.
I'm 27. I remember trying to pinpoint my earliest definite memory when I was in middle school. I have many vague memories from kindergarten as well as with my next-door neighbor best friend who was a girl that I interacted with a lot ages 3-9. They just have no temporal ordering.
Then there is an even more vague memory of a memory that I couldn't depend on. It's about sunlight rushing in my room through a window in the morning. I have a strong sense that it was just before meeting said neighbor as she moved in. I mean, I could ask when exactly they moved since it feels like spring. That would make me around 2.5 years old.
My 2c. I have quite a few memories from when I was ~2yo. Birthday, my mother pregnant with my sister, house where we lived... The earliest ones usually revolve around food and frustration for not being able to communicate what I wanted.
I never had such a snap into consciousness. At best some important updates to world models with the biggest happening around I was 21: "Time flows in only one direction", "Shit Happens but also other stuff", "agency is a thing and you have it"...
I never thought about it this way, but my (probably) earliest memory is actually all about consciousness. I had to have a tonsillectomy at age 2 or 3 and my mother explained to me what was going to happen:
I was going to be put into a deep sleep and then my tonsils were going to be removed, but I would not feel or know anything and afterwards I would wake up and remember nothing.
I pondered this and got slightly scared. I think what disturbed me most was the whole being made to sleep thing. I just could not imagine by what magic somebody else could possibly do this to me (which in retrospect is odd since - being a toddler - this must have happened to me many times). So I told my mother, if I was going to have to sleep anyway, I might as well go to sleep now. And that's what I did.
Next thing I know, I am holding a new toy in my hands (about this I am not sure; it makes most sense that the toy was a reward for the surgery, but it seems I may have already had it during the conversation before the surgery - this would not be atypical for my mother, she never had the ability to delay gratification when it came to rewarding or punishing us). I asked my mother when the surgery would be and she told me it had already happened. No pain, nothing!
I cannot remember the weeks of healing afterwards which were quite tough according to my mother. In retrospect, I am quite grateful for this. My own son had to have his tonsils reduced last year and it was devastatingly heart-wrenching and brutal. I will never forget how I held him afterwards, still half sedated and he just cried and cried, only stopping to cough up mucus and blood. Whenever he slipped out of consciousness a nurse came and pressed his throat to induce more coughing because "the mucus has to come out". I wanted to murder her.
I also recall an approximately-kindergarten-level placement/aptitude test. It was in a gymnasium that seemed very big and unfamiliar, so perhaps it was near the beginning of my school year. There were tables set up in a circuit and I had to go to each one in turn and do some kind of test/challenge/interview. I remember being asked "how high can you count?" and I remember feeling confused and intrigued by the question, because it had never before occurred to me that there was a limit to counting, and I said something like "gee, I dunno, I guess you can count as high as you want?" and I remember the interviewer laughing and saying "I'll just put down 100." I remember that feeling wrong/unjust/confusing because I knew there were numbers bigger than 100 that could be counted to.
(I don't know if this has anything to do with "consciousness" and I'm not particularly convinced that "conscious" is a ever a very useful concept.)
This post aligns so well with my first memory. I clearly remember in kindergarten we got to watch "The Hoober-Bloob Highway" as a class. According to wikipedia, "The plot revolves around a newborn child, referred to as "Bub", as he tries to decide what he wants out of his life, or even if he wants to go at all, before being sent down the Hoober-Bloob Highway to be born."; note that that understates the fantastical Seussian nature of the video.
But that was probably just priming me for what I really remember. I'm not on the spectrum or OCD (at least, never been diagnosed as such) but I definitely have some stim-like behaviors, in particular finger flicking in a very symmetrical way. The kid sitting on the floor next to me noticed, and asked a question about it, which I remember as "something something something magic fingers?". As soon as he said "magic fingers" I became very aware that "I" was inhabiting a body that was doing something with my fingers.
I always thought it was cool that I would so clearly remember that as my earliest memory, just because of how the memory and the movie felt magical at the same time someone said the word "magic", all converging together. But reading this post, and the other comments, I think that was the spark of consciousness.
I find a lot of the stuff here very odd. Based on my own experience, that of others I’ve talked to, my recent attendance at an infant consciousness conference, my impression is something like:
These first memories are more likely to be around 3 than later (my mother’s is from age 1 or earlier, mine I have a lot of difficulty dating, but looks like around the 0-4 range).
There doesn’t have to be anything that special about it - some sort of experience of discomfort is common, but I’ve never heard of someone with an experience where one is suddenly in some way aware of their consciousness. I believe it happens but this post might make too much of such cases.
I have had experiences more like this a bit later (again hard to date, but sometime in kindergarten I think), which I still have periodically but try to avoid because they are distressing. Something like “I am the only being in the universe, I am everything” was my early read of it. Quite a bit more dramatic and vivid than awareness of my own consciousness, more like “pulling back” and viewing everything around me less like a movie or book. I don’t know how common this experience is and it’s hard to explain so it’s hard to ask about, but I remember I had it by kindergarten because I confided in a classmate that I was the only person in the universe, and we got into an argument because he insisted that, no, he was the only person in the universe.
If I recall, a plurality of attendees at the infant consciousness conference (they were polled) said that consciousness most likely starts early in the third trimester (I am more generous and think second trimester is plausible) - I’ve definitely run into rationalists who think babies aren’t conscious, but the view seems rare outside of that.
I don’t remember the details, but there was a good deal of talk at the conference about the idea that babies have conscious perception but not cognitive representation of certain stimuli. They seem to be unable to use color in reasoning tasks by default, but they can be trained to so it is thought (by Ned Block at least) that they consciously perceive colors but don’t cognitively represent them by default (don’t weep for the babies, adults have the same problem in their peripheral vision). Once conference goer speculated, partially due to experiments on rats, that we retain many memories from a very young age, but can’t access them easily because we call up memories with cognitive categories that differ radically from those we used as infants.
Sadly nothing else really comes to mind - my background is more on the philosophy end, whereas much of the conference focused on cognitive science, which I often had a hard time following (I also only attended the second day of it). The NYU Conferences I've attended in the past have often been recorded, but I can't find a recording of this one (yet), but if it's helpful this is the page for it:
Two memories from when I was two years old. My maternal grandfather died when I was two years, five months. My only memory of him is standing in my aunt's kitchen, but it's a very clear memory. The second is trying to drink Clorox. I was sitting on the drain board while my mother washed dishes. There was an empty gallon bottle of Clorox on the drain board. It reminded me of the jug Snuffy Smith drank from in the cartoons. So I decided to drink like Snuffy Smith, and picked up the bottle and tried to take a swig. Got a drop in my mouth and had to go to the hospital.
The difference between the memories is the first is a real image I observed. The second is a thought process, but I see that memory as if I was watching it happen from across the room.
I have a very, very early memory from infancy. Our family was moving into our first home. I was less than a year old. I remember brightness (visually but no distinct image - like lying in the bright sunshine with your eyes closed) and my mother was saying this is going to be your new home and a wide feeling of overall satisfaction and happiness. I never spoke about this with anyone or had it implanted as a story that I am confusing as a memory. In my early thirties when my first child was born I told my mom about this memory and sort of thought I dreamt it or made it up, but she distinctly remember exactly what I said. So I guess it is an actual memory. I don’t know if that equates to consciousness per se. I do have many, many vivid memories from my early childhood while we lived in that house before moving to another town when I started kindergarten at about age 6. I’ve never thought about the notion of gradual consciousness but hearing the concept it makes sense to me. Separately, after college I was in the U.S. Navy’s Nuclear Power Program. The first year of the program, particularly the first 6 months or are ultra intense study of math and science. I was always a good natural student (meaning solid grades with no effort). I never studied as hard or learned as much as I did in Nuclear Power School. I’ve always felt it changed my brain substantially and in retrospect probably did make me more conscious, but certainly a better human on several dimensions (as a result of broader awareness and possibility). So I guess this is to say at least in my experience there seems to be some connection to brain usage, learning, memory and consciousness.
All of this seems to conflate consciousness with memory. Can we not be conscious in the moment and then not recall it? I listen to & read a fair amount (as a lay person) of content on consciousness and it seems to me that the relationship between consciousness and memory is under-served. Maybe I need to go deeper into the literature.
This is weird, because almost everyone else I've talked to up until now said they could remember things back to 2 or 3 years old. I thought I was defective for not remembering anything earlier than 4 years old.
(I haven't discussed this much with others in the past 30 years, so perhaps if I asked them now, they'd say their earliest memories are from some later age.)
My memories from around 4 no longer exactly exist. I have a few memories, but only of my thought processes. All sense impressions are reconstructions, usually from a 3rd-person POV. For instance, I know that when I was in preschool, a teacher told us that a new kid would arrive the next day from another country, and we should be nice to him. So the next day, over my mother's objections, I brought a bunch of random things along with me, as props to use to teach him English.
They were not useful. Either he wasn't interested, or already knew English. But all that's left of my sensory memory is a vague notion of how large and bright the classroom was, which might be completely false; and that one of the things I brought was a bright red plastic disposable cup.
When I was 5 or 6, my parents took me to see a doctor to discuss growth hormone injections, because I was shorter than the other kids. The doctor told me that the injections would make me grow quickly now, but I might stop growing sooner and end up shorter. (This is false; they would probably have made me taller. Stupid doctor.)
I decided being taller throughout most of my life was more-important than being taller now, so I told the doctor I would have no injections and just wait for my growth. And then the doctor told my parents how wise I was to leave it in the hands of God. And I got quite... angry? Angry isn't the word; I didn't express that emotion. But I realized that this adult doctor, despite being an expert, was in some way an idiot: if he thought it was wise to leave health outcomes in the hands of God, he shouldn't have become a doctor. And my parents were nodding in agreement. They were all being stupid, and ascribing a stupid reason to my decision when I thought I'd been clear about my reasons. It wasn't a first moment of consciousness; it was a moment of having the veil ripped away, and the terrifying realization that though adults knew a lot of stuff, they could still be stupid, and I couldn't trust them.
This is not a reconstruction from anything anyone told me; I never told my parents what I'd thought. But I have no sensory memories at all of the event except for thinking that perhaps I was sitting on a table or some other non-chair-like surface when this happened.
I used to have clear memories back to age 3 but when I broke my internal monologue a few years ago I also broke my clear episodic memory and now all my episodic memories are encoded as what I would previously have called memory-of-memory - recalling them is effortful and I expect they are somewhat fabricated, I can only get glimpses of full sense memories like I used to. Information recall is not affected, as far as I can tell.
On the other hand my awareness of the world around me currently has markedly improved and so has my general equinamity, so I don't miss my continuity of consciousness that much. I used to be quite obsessed with remembering everything or I wouldn't be me any more / my experiences would somehow be wasted, it was probably healthy to let that go.
Just meditating, like most people who manage to mess around with this kind of brain configuration setting.
In this particular case, a kind of homebrew mantra meditation where I'd overwrite my thoughts with a single word like 'peace', but that just happened to be what worked for me to get past the defences.
I'm not convinced I wholeheartedly recommend it, I'm happier and more relaxed but a lot less driven and agentic, and I had to work on undoing some of it to actually be able to get anything done again.
My first memory that’s “about” consciousness is from when I was 5 or 6. I was at school and suddenly thought something like: hey, I can see my own thoughts, but not anyone else’s. What if I’m the only one who’s actually real?
(As far as I can tell, this was just a passing thought, and I didn’t actually become a solipsist first-grader. But for whatever reason it was memorable to me that I had that thought!)
I definitely have memories from before that, but that’s the first thought that you’d have to be conscious to have that I remember having.
I can no longer remember my first memories, or suspect those memories might be reimagined and can't confirm (the oldest event I feel I remember is hating the taste of banana-flavored diarrhea medicine and can to this day bring the impression of that taste to my mind, which would have been at age of 2 years and 10 months, but this is a point I've been told about by my parents and have discussed before, so I'm not sure if it's a false memory) , but I have clear evidence of having formed other memories at that age of 2 years 10 months.
See, my mother kept a "childhood diary" and in it she reports that, at the age of 3 years and 10 months, upon viewing annual "penkkarit" celebration of highschool students, I asked my mother if she remembered "seeing the same celebration a year ago, just when we had come off a cruise ship" (coincidentally, that cruise probably was where I got the diarrhea). Which is a true event, never discussed since and not documented in any photographs, so clearly it was a true recollection of the event.
No evidence of older episodic memories are reported, while they appear to have been frequent since, so it does sound like there was a pretty sharp cutoff of the ability to form long-term episodic memories at 2y10m. As for consciousness, I have no recollection of ever having "gained consciousness", but I do have a general impression that in my oldest memories I was an non-deliberative ("instinctive") passive observer, while I do remembering reasoning through my actions at age of 6-7 at the latest.
Interestingly, I /think/ I have lost or severely reduced internal narrative: I appear to retain an internal voice ("for example, when typing this, I "hear" the words I'm about to write in my mind) which can be also used for deliberation, but I don't think thoughts of form "I feel...", "what should I...", "I'm going to...", etc, ever seem to appear, and I DO recall a moment when it occurred to me "wait a moment, isn't it the case that I used to have such thoughts appearing in the stream-of-consciousness? seems odd, because I no longer seem to". I confess I might be imagining things because it's really really difficult to communicate "what is it like to be a human", but it feels like my form of consciousness has changed without me even noticing it at the time. It just feels like my memories from my later childhood posses a more vivid and experiencing self ("*I* feel pain" vs "there is an impression of pain").
Ooh, interesting! I haven't run into many other people reporting my exact 'lost internal monologue' thing before (I also have the ability to switch one on again for composition etc but lost the automatic one).
To me, though, I think I experience things more vividly than before - just more wordlessly, rather than processing experiences all into words before they crystalise.
Yes, i have always maintained a very vivid memory of crawling away from a set of tiles falling off a kitchen wall at 3 1/2 in company of my screaming mom and my grandma: run for your life!. Except i found out some 40 years afterwards that It wasn't exactly so, but a 10 months baby being put away by my mom quietly after she heard that cracking in the wall, with plenty of time to do so and much less indiana Jones' vives. So: biographical memory IS certainly VERY unreliable to start with, so this discussion is kinda amusing bullshit.
Not in the "oldest memory" category but more in the "sudden realization" one.
In middle school, my room was the typical middle schoolers mayhem. It seemed "natural" for me and would only sort things if forced by my parent.
In particular, I had a stack of "stuff" that was always lying around somewhere. If it was on my bed, I would have to move it to my desk to go to bed. And then later I would have to move it from my desk to my bed to use my desk. Every time, and regardless of the comments coming from my parents, I would just do that because it seemed the most obvious thing to do in the moment.
One evening, quite late, I suddenly realized : if I took some time to sort out everything, I would not have to do the "move stack around" thing, and it would actually save time in the long term. I actually went up and cleaned my room, until my mother showed up, angry, accusing me of being up to play video game even though I had school the day after.
It's hard to explain how much the way I think completly changed that night. Suddendly, doing some effort now to make things easier later became an option. Before that, the only option I ever had was to do what was the easiest thing in the moment. Not out of laziness, but because I could not even begin considering alternatives.
I don't know how to disaggregate "memories" from "memories of memories." There may even be some "memories of familiy stories that I internalized as memories." As an Army brat, I can date some of my memories based on where my family lived at the time.
In Tucson (1970-1972?) when I was 3-5 years old, I remember having a dream that the house burned down. I don't remember much from San Antonio, though I do remember the Dumbo ride at Disneyland from around that time. I do have many more specific memories of Heidelberg - second half of kindergarten to third grade (mid-seventies). I remember trips or a trip to the Boxburg playground/park. I remember fireworks over the Neckar River (which I had incorrectly remembered as the Rhine). I remember that I would walk to school with Nelson and John -- and that they were faster runners than I was, so they would run ahead of me and leave me behind. I remember overhearing a debate in the sandbox about whether Santa was real or not, asking my mother the truth and then when I learned the truth hoping that I learned it before my older sister (alas I had not). I remember a sleepover at school where we watched movies in sleeping bags. I remember the cheerleaders practicing "two bits, four bits, six bits, a dollar, all for Heidelberg, stand up and holler." I remember standing in line for my first confession - one of my friends was stressing out that he did not have any sins to confess. I told him that he cheated at baseball and that was a sin. He said that it wasn't a sin and was then highly alarmed when others chimed in to tell him yes it was. I remember going to the gas station with my Dad to get a commemorative pillow for the 1974 World Cup (WM 74). I don't remember the final between Germany and the Netherlands (I don't think I watched i watched it), but I do remember playing with matchbox cars by a tree and its root system that we used as a little city and another kid excitedly regaling us with the blow by blow of the game. I remember going to volksmarches with my dad and drinking the hot tea.
The post discusses some rather different conciousness-type phenomena. Many are hard to delineate/keep separate. But one that is fairly easy to separate from the others, is when one's internal monologue (or internal dialogue?) starts. For me, that was age 12. (I can trace my internal discussion with myself back to 12, but not before.)
Oddly, I have a sense that I had a "moment of awakening" at some point in early childhood, but I don't actually remember it. I remember having several similar "whoa, I'm conscious" experiences throughout my life, gradually becoming less frequent.
I'm not sure exactly what's going on here, but I think there is something to these self-reports. What frustrates me is how philosophers of consciousness could (and perhaps some probably are) working on this sort of thing, but many focus on unempirical armchair arguments that don't engage with these sorts of reports or anything similar.
Ooh this is fun! I have no experience like you describe of"gaining consciousness", I always felt conscious. My earliest memory is picking up my younger brother from day care and right as we got to the door of the day care my father turning to me with a look of shock, "oh no! We forgot the car seat!" I don't know what happened after that but I assume we managed to get him home somehow. He's just shy of two years younger than me so I was probably 3-4ish.
I do remember the moment when adult conversation suddenly became fully comprehensible. I was 12. Somehow it clicked for me and never again had the experience of not understanding adult conversation due to being a kid. I was very disappointed to learn I hadn't been missing out on deep philosophical secrets but mostly dirty jokes or innuendo. (Probably because I could already understand the philosophy type stuff, but I thought there might have been more!)
During nursery (age 3?) they had a rule where you all had to go to the toilet to pee before you were allowed outside for playtime. When I was a kid I had this weird thing about going to the bathroom, so my first distinct memory is hiding around the corner at the door and washing my hands for a few minutes to trick the nursery teacher into thinking I'd been. Perhaps not coincidentally I was looking at myself in the mirror and seeing my classmates in the background. I think this might have been a waking up as I can't recall anything before that.
i've seen multiple kids age 5-6 go from remembering stuff before age 3 (at least, to the extent little kids remember anything) to saying they can't remember that far back. seems like an "amnesia wall" is a thing. my impression had been that people with severe childhood trauma might be unable to remember anything from much later ages, like nothing before age 12, but that that's not normal if you had an ok childhood.
I agree with frog-face in that there's a clear distinction between the memories of 3 year old - 13 year old me, and the memories of 13 year old - present me:
- For childhood me, my memories are more of a *random* collection of *sensations* and *thoughts*
- For 13 year old - present me, I can actually *create a narrative* about my personal growth.
If I were forced to create a year-by-year summary of the evolution of my "personal philosophy" (religious and political ideas, behavior) from 13 year old onwards, I could probably do it. Not so much for childhood me.
Do you think that this has to do with the idea in "Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids" that kids older than 2 years old are "easier" to take care of?
I made an attempt to blow out the candles, and felt bit embarrassed on failing it. Yes, there were admittedly only three candles, but I failed which is probably why it imprinted in my memory.
This isn’t a memory brought on by photos. There *are* pictures of the day but after the cake was eaten although i am sitting in the same place I remember.
First metaphysical thought, around 7. A kid is having to make a presentation and I think. Why isn’t that me? Why do I see through these eyes and not those eyes? I suspect, since I remember this vividly, that a lot of the becoming conscious stories in the post are from people who have this kind of metaphysical awakening as their first memory but it’s not be necessarily their first thought, just a memory that survived.
First memory i decided to keep for no reason. It’s my aunts house post Christmas. I’m 8. My sister and myself are watching sesame street, it’s around 11 am, and the room is hot. The CRT TV is large for its time, and colour. The fire is on, there’s a wind outside that’s picking up and snow is forecast. It’s the interregnum between Christmas and new year. The room is fussily furnished and it’s carpeted in a pattern that has slightly faded from my mind. The walls have wallpaper which I felt even then was hideous , I’m sitting in front of the sofa just a few feet from the tv, the room is narrow enough but long. A door is to the left of the TV on the wall behind it, this is to the corridor. On the left wall is the door to the kitchen which is a double door and has distorted glass, to its left is a mahogany trophy cabinet. Behind me and the sofa is the wallpapered wall, no window. The right wall is mostly dominated by a window and outside the trees bend in the increasing gale. The curtain is red, there’s a radiator underneath, about a foot high. Between the TV and the window is an alcove, there’s a lamp and some books, and some kind of miniature statue. I remember this because I decided to. I was bored. Let’s remember this boring day, I think. And here we are.
I have an out of body experience at 6 when i went into my mother’s classroom. I flew to the ceiling and looked down.
I last forgot my keys and where I put them yesterday. I am 48.
Is it an unwelcome comment for me to say that I suspect a lot of these are made up?
Here's an anecdote: I grew up with a kid who became a semi-talented rock musician in late high school. We had to write an essay about formative moments, and this kid -- not prone to dishonesty or BS in my experience -- wrote about the transformative experience of the first time he listened to The Beatles as a very young person. He said it had changed his life, opened his mind, etc.
Except that I'd known him a long time. He never once mentioned The Beatles when we were younger. He liked the same pop music we all did growing up. It just doesn't sound intellectual to say you loved Smash Mouth, and I think at some point he convinced himself of a story that aligned better with his preferred self image.
The earliest clear memory I have is of running off to chase squirrels on an outing with my grandma (I remember where), realizing I couldn’t catch them once they ran right up a big tree trunk, and recognizing they’re not worth chasing. I’d have been about 20 months old when that happened.
I remember being a somewhat older child telling grownups of this memory, and asking, how old was I? They didn’t remember, since they didn’t remember the squirrel incident. But my grandma had snapped a photo of me in the sweater I wore for the outing, which helps me place my age.
I have dimmer memories, just vague impressions, of the Christmas before that, around 17 months old. Seeing a photo later helped me explain the vague impressions, but my memory isn’t of the photo. Rather, the photo explained why I would have had those other, vague impressions.
At about 25 months old, my younger sibling came home from the hospital, and I remember the umbilical stump with its plastic clip. I mistook it for poo at first, which was anatomically confusing.
Maybe I have these early memories because they’re the memories I remember having as a somewhat older child — for example, if I remember something from before I was 2 when I’m 5, then remembering it later only requires remembering back to when I remembered it at age 5.
If my memories go back earlier than what’s considered standard, I doubt it’s because I’m special. I’d chalk it up to some combo of normal variation among kids and adults, even researchers, being perhaps too dismissive of young children’s reports of having remembered something.
Absolutely nothing like this happened to me, I have no clear "first memory" - I have a few (mostly vague and blurry) memories from early childhood, but I can't put them on a clear enough timeline to tell you which came earliest, and none of them were particularly related to noticing I exist or anything like that
We moved when I was 4 and I have a handful of distinct memories of the old house and the pre-school I went to at the time. Shortly after the move I remember laying in my new bed pondering the concept of "forever" as a corkscrew spiraling endlessly through time, and getting really distressed about it. From whatever age I could talk til maybe 8 or 9 I asked everybody non-stop questions about how the world worked, then became conscious that was annoying and got really quiet and shy. Maybe around 12 conscious that I was different from normal kids in some major way. Empathetically conscious when I started dating girls around 14. Workplace conscious at my first career job. Around 30 I had a more profound religious/existential/interconnectedness awakening.
So honestly my response to this question is which one? Kind of mindblowing that people can pinpoint a single moment as "being conscious". For me it's very much been peeling back layers of an onion, and I doubt it's finished even now (mid 30's). I don't even have kids yet.
The first memory that I believe I can date is France winning the 1998 World Cup and “we are the champions” playing as they did so. I would’ve been about 4 at the time. I remember wanting to turn back time and have another go at life when I was about 10. Not sure if that counts as consciousness or just neuroticism tbh. I also remember finding out that the Earth is rotating and not believing it was possible at first
I remember the exact moment I "snapped". I was around 4. I won't go into the details (which I remember very vividly) as it is a very personal memory but here's how it went: I thought "I wonder if X is true", and, instead of doing nothing with that thought, asked my parent and got an explanation for X. The penny dropped for me that I could think about my own thinking and that allowed me to take control of my thoughts.
Up until then my mind felt messy but when I learned that I could understand things that way my eyes opened. I felt an enormous amount of joy. Since then I've been feeling that urge. Whether it was while learning or while teaching, I've been chasing that high and trying to get other people to feel it.
I've told that story to a few close people but never gotten their own story about it, which makes me think it's either rare or not the sort of thing that my close friends want to talk about.
My first memory is of the moment when I first spoke words in my mind. I was reading a book out loud and realized that I could say the words in my head instead. I think I was 5? (I do remember this feeling like a consciousness shift, but more in a metacognitive, self-reflective way as opposed to a "I didn't experience qualia before and now I do" way.)
I don't have a moment of gaining consciousness, I don't think, but I do have the memory of the first time I heard my "inner voice"!
After I learned to read (somewhere between 4 and 5 y.o, I believe), I read everything around me. Labels, signs, plaques, billboards, etc. But I always read it *out loud*. [1]
This must have started as a cute quirk, but the incessant blurting out of words while going around town must have annoyed my dad, who at some point told me to be quiet.
"...But I'm reading", I replied confusedly, as reading up until that point was always incentivized as an activity.
"Well, you don't have to speak to read".
I don't know if this part is some self mythologizing or something, but I remember thinking something to the effect of "dad is either pranking me, or he's lost it". Not in those words of course. [2]
But still, I looked around for the nearest sign. Stared at it for a second. Then... "hearing" those words? Loud and clear? Even though I hadn't moved my mouth, let alone spoken? What? The? FUCK????
My mind was *blown*. It was like finding out I had a superpower all along. I just couldn't believe it!
I then proceeded to spend that day snapping my neck around like logophile flamingo [3] looking for some piece of written work, staring intensely at it for a second, then giggling maniacly to myself.
Which I'm sure was annoying to dad in a whole new and colorful way :o)
[1] Which is I guess a quirk from how we teach reading to kids? Of course we ask the children to read something out loud, so that we can verify that they're reading correctly. I guess I just didn't make the connection at the time that the speaking wasn't strictly necessary.
[2] If true, this suggests something even more interesting: it's not that I didn't/couldn't think before, which maybe would fit better with the theme of the post? But it's more that my own thoughts felt natural, in a way that reading someone else's words didn't. Inception defense system, someone? https://youtu.be/H1Dyp3jexA0?t=62
This all seems like total nonsense to me? Especially first memories (or any memories at all) about *becoming* conscious.
Any first memories I have are in kindergarten or first grade, and they’re pretty run-of-the-mill “goofing around with friends” type things. Playing with lincoln logs (don’t remember details well), or running back in from playing football during recess (my friend Ayyub broke down crying because he was last and so the “rotten egg;” I don’t remember exactly how I reacted at the time, but I *don’t* think it was even a bad-theory-of-mind confusion like: “Whoa, why is he crying when I won? Shouldn’t he be happy? I won!”), or a field trip to some sort of zoo. (My friend Ethan had gotten in with a sort of bad crowd and they were kicking my seat on the bus and being jerks. I did the thing I’d do now—found another friend to be more buddy-buddy with during the trip, and we together weathered the abuse. Ethan moved away the next year, I think.)
I did used to have all sorts of mood and anger problems in elementary (and even some of middle) school, and I’ve sometimes explained my getting over those to friends as “becoming really fully conscious” but I a) definitely can’t point to a *moment* this happened and b) think I’m probably making shit up, because I remember having reasons for being mad all the time and thinking they were pretty good reasons, which sounds like consciousness. I think I’ve just matured since then.
So if I haven’t had any sort of first-awakening, am I just not-conscious-yet? (I’m 17, to be clear.) Or is everyone else just talking out of their ass, and overfitting a convenient narrative to super-vague-really-old “memories.” (I’m leaning toward the latter.)
> So if I haven’t had any sort of first-awakening, am I just not-conscious-yet? (I’m 17, to be clear.) Or is everyone else just talking out of their ass, and overfitting a convenient narrative to super-vague-really-old “memories.” (I’m leaning toward the latter.)
Well most people in the comments here are not doing that. Twitter is Twitter though.
I mean I get that people who are saying they became conscious at 12 are implying that the rest of us haven’t, maybe. I just feel they are extremely late bloomers.
I have no particular reason to believe that memory is necessary to be conscious. In fact, long-term memory recall comes on pretty late in babies (presumably since earlier stuff is a) mostly useless for later life and b) hard to compress since the requisite context mostly isn’t there yet).
People claim to remember state changes, but I’m not convinced that those are of becoming conscious rather than misremembering/recontextualizing. I don’t have a strong prior as to when babies become conscious, but I would expect it to come before long-term memory formation. I’m not sure what version of consciousness the intuition pump regarding cows is subscribing to, but I don’t have a problem believing that cows have internal experience (and moral weight *cough* *cough*) even if they don’t have e.g. complex thought or some other variant.
"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."
No. Consciousness and intelligence aren't the same thing. Just ask ChatGPT. Also, neither consciousness nor intelligence is a Boolean. I think no predications outside of math and physics are really Boolean.
One of the only arguments I've ever conclusively won was with a friend who said all memories before roughly six years old were fabrications, whereupon I listed the plots of five or six Transformers episodes that I almost certainly hadn't watched since I was less than three years old.
Of particular note was the memory of the episode that was airing on the day my mom changed her name (in court in Seattle), and how I only saw and only remembered the last chunk of that episode.
I have a handful of earlier memories, with the earliest two of them being maybe when I was one year old, but I can't defend those as effectively.
I don't remember a shift to consciousness, though I *do* remember an equally sudden shift at age 30 where I was taking a walk and I suddenly understood which inner "muscle" I needed to flex to quiet the inner monologue, after which meditation type activities became straightforward. So I believe such a felt sense of comprehension could happen.
I remember being on the playground at age six, sitting far away from everyone else, talking myself into saying the word "shit" to myself, then having a little panic about getting in trouble for it, before deciding nobody could hear me.
I remember being in first grade, seven years old, walking between buildings at school on a military base in Germany in January 1990, thinking "wow, it's 1990 now, not 1989. I wonder what 1991 will be like. I think that's when we're supposed to go back to the USA".
So I definitely had self conception, reasoning, and a memorable inner monologue by age seven.
I think the troll is not a troll, just wrong.
Incidentally, the same friend I had the argument with so many years ago has no inner visualization skills. We both like legos as adults, more even than our kids do, and I design and build fairly elaborate modular buildings for a lego city I share with my daughter. My friend loves the city, and I've asked him if he'll do his own custom designs, and he very frankly says he lacks the ability to visualize imaginary legos, or much of anything else, and part of the fascination of lego for him is that he has no ability to predict how the pieces will fit together and make a coherent model. It's a total surprise for him, every time, and he can't imagine imagining such a process himself.
My earliest memories are vague and visual; when I was first accidentally left at a shop by my Mum, then on a bus. But my earliest moment of consciousness occurred during a nursery school assembly, aged 3. We were all sitting cross-legged on the hall floor as the usual stories were told - as fact - about Jesus and God. I vividly remember thinking to myself 'What if all this is not even true?' That moment, and that scene, is crystal clear to me.
My wife, a kindergarten teacher, is keenly aware that her class is just 60 months out of the womb, and they need a lot of love and support. She’s often the first adult that interacts with them as an individual, little person. They become aware of others, their own autonomy, and their own thoughts (especially as they learn to write them down), and their own relationships. And she gets to blow their minds nearly every day.
A lot of the tweets sound like normal human development. It would help to have more clarification on what definition of consciousness is, and why the o.g. poster thinks it happens in adolescence. I suspect these realizations happen continuously, if you take the time.
I don't remember it as "awakening to consciousness" per se, but my earliest memory must have been when I was under 2 years old because I was in my crib in my bedroom in our old house.
I had been put down to sleep but didn't want to sleep because my parents had people over and I felt like I was missing something fun. Several times in a row, I stood up and threw my stuffed bear/pillow out of the crib and then started crying because I couldn't reach it. Each time, my father would come in and return the bear, tuck me in, hush me, tell me to sleep, etc.
On maybe the third or fourth cycle of doing this, he left and felt the same irritation so I stood up again to throw the bear but stopped and thought "What am I doing this for?", looked down at the mattress and blanket and realized I was going to end up there eventually, so I just lay down and went to sleep.
I remember being struck by my daughter’s consciousness a couple weeks after giving birth to her. I was surprised that there was something fully formed about her, something that didn’t need to develop. It changed my view of life.
When I was about 4 years old my parents drove me past a large building, covered in tar paper. I noticed that I could remember seeing it at a previous stage of construction. For some reason I thought "I am going to remember this moment forever." It's difficult to remember why that moment was so important, but I think perhaps it was (one of) the first time I was consciously aware of recall and memory, rather than just having the information implicitly available.
Another time someone used a word I wasn't familiar with and I asked what it meant. When I received an answer I thought "hmm I've been asking for a lot of definitions recently." I also seem to remember being grateful that I remembered definitions after asking once without needing them to be repeated, but it's possible that this was a later addition to the memory; it certainly seems like a more adult perspective to have.
My case is a little peculiar. I remember quite a few early memories, but to me the non-verbal aspect is probably as important as the verbal. I relate consciousness to "feeling the world", and it seems to me like a kind of "grokking" where I did have self-reflection, but also where all perceptions and feelings were integrated into a coherent whole, so to speak. Although thinking in words doesn't feel as important intuitively, I think language was important because it played a role in making sense and integrating this information into a coherent whole -- the implicit knowledge that I were a person, that other people were persons, that I existed in a neighborhood in a city, etc..
The most significant part of existence to me was really the plethora of feelings associated with each moment, like a constellation or a very distinct kind of "emotion". Like, I remember the emotion I kind of felt with relation to living where I were living.
I remember looking (directly) at the Sun setting with my brother and perhaps another kid, and remembering not to do that because my eyes would burn (I was maybe 6-7 then?).
I think memory formation can't be the sole criterion, as simply because you can't remember something it doesn't mean you didn't feel anything at the time (of course consider the case of amnesia caused by an accident doesn't retroactively erase the fact you did experience something). I think consciousness happens whenever there is feeling and significant information processing (hence basically all humans), although it does feel like when you integrate different systems it is overall amplified. For this reason I believe animals have some sentience/"consciousness" (I put c. into ""s because it can be associated too much with language which in this case doesn't make much sense) in that they have the same kinds of emotions mostly associated more or less directly from sensory perception and basic instincts, including caring for their babies, etc.. But memory formation might relate to temporal coherence of your thoughts which could be a component in more pronounced feelings.
In summary, I don't think there was a single waking up moment for me -- but being old enough to know basic facts enabled more complex feelings and probably also aided memory formation and recollection. I also think you can put into somewhat distinct categories self-awareness/reality-awareness with sentience. (as another analogy think of something like the movie Matrix, where you may be sentient but unaware of a larger context in which you exist)
I also like Buddha's (correct if I'm wrong, paraphrasing) remarks about "awakening", that our collective awakening is an essential part in ending suffering in the world (both aspects of awakening -- awareness and sentience -- play a significant role, in particular recognizing that other people are also persons).
I also think significant is Thich Nhat Hanh's observations that we spend a whole lot of time (decades, even) studying subjects and "how to follow a profession/make money/etc.", but spend comparatively seemingly little time "learning to live", learning to feel and connect with (and also manage) emotions and experiences that constitute sentient experience. Probably our artistic and cultural exposure tends to be very significant in that, and specially emotional relationships with friends and family. But even just talking about it more might be helpful.
I have a few contenders, one was an ethereal memory of being on my parents bed with them and my little brother, probably around 4, feeling serene happiness. Another at a prekindergarten mother's group, sitting on my mother's lap colouring a picture of a train, my then favourite thing. I realised I could draw outside the lines if I wanted to, the rule was made up, and did it to my mother's disappointment, but I was pleased with myself. I see that moment as the birth of my intellect. Both of these moments felt like waking up for the first time, like coming out of a dreamless sleep.
All of my earliest memories are of the various accidents I was involved in - choking on a marble, falling out of a moving car, accidentally hanging myself or getting a lit cigarette to the eyeball.
I don't ever recall having a "waking up" moment as discussed here.
But then, I've never had that moment of sonder, either, realising everyone else has a rich internal consciousness. You're all still just NPCs to me.
I'm not quite sure how I'd respond to the question. My first memory is from when I was 3. It's a bunch of hospital memories. Getting an IV, walking with my IV pole, eating hospital Jell-O, and the pediatric playroom.
Looking back I'd say I don't think consciousness is binary.
I was definitely conscious at a young age, but I also became more conscious at 14, and again at 19.
My model is a threshold for consciousness, followed by a sliding scale. I only see my movement along the sliding scale at moments of intense reflection and self assessment. So of course I misunderstood my self-perceived jumps as levels.
I have a strong memory of being in my elementary school cafeteria, aged probably 6 or 7, and suddenly noticing that it's weird that I have my own consciousness rather than anyone else's; i.e. why do I have my own point of view? where are other people's points of view "located" in the universe? I still find this kind of dizzying sometimes - it's bizarre that each of us has our own consciousness embedded inside the universe in a way that's consistent. Idk I feel like a crazy person when I think about this problem so I don't usually talk about it.
I don't really think of that as the beginning of my conscious experience, or at least I never have before. I do think that I obtained consciousness around that age though, or at least that there was a pretty distinct internal experiential transition.
I have a friend who claims she obtained consciousness fairly late - around 14 iirc. I've always interpreted this as kind of a joke, but maybe I'll prod her a little more about it.
"the least reliable possible data source this side of a peer-reviewed social science paper" OMG I was dying!
On a more serious note, I wonder if a lot of these are "first time having an inner voice". I think that makes total sense that this typically happens around 6-12, but could happen a lot later. I recently learned there are lots of people with no inner monologue as adults.
Consciousness itself clearly develops slowly over time -- there is no one moment. But it does develop -- even if you think infants are conscious, you probably don't a zygote is ...
I have strong memories of nightmares I had as a toddler. In one I was in a stroller in a mall, surrounded by newly-washed soapy floor tiles I wasn't allowed to walk on. In another, I was lost in a hospital where my sister was being born (so I know I was 2.5). But I know I'm remembering the memory of those nightmares, so the data I'm accessing may have been laid down in its current state by me when I was 4 or 5.
Also, if I press on various events that I know happened when I was young, images and sense memories briefly surface, but I can't really hold on to them. They have that sense of 'long-forgotten familiar and now strange' about them. I saw another commenter talking about sequences of semi-compatible software architectures, and I like that analogy a lot.
I don't have any 'consciousness epiphany' memories, really. I remember telling my kindergarten teacher I was reading Hesse's Siddhartha, and him being a bit confused by this, and me attempting to quote it but getting the quote wrong. So I think I was grappling with metaphysical ideas around then. The first epiphany I can recall is when I was in grade 2, eating lunch with a friend, when I was overwhelmed by realizing "2 times 3 does equal 6. It does!". I had just clicked into some deeper number sense than I'd had before, and I think this was the first time I felt deeply moved by the concept of "mathematics as truth" which I've since observed with wonder in my own 5 year old son.
As a child, 3 events stand out, not sure which came first. All three are just memories: the memory of learning to walk and thinking, why am I constantly falling down while the older kids walk just fine? How do you do that? The memory of waking in the hospital with my favorite toy after severe fevers. The memory of coming home after that hospital event. All presumed before age 3. Age 4-5, a distinct belief that I knew things about the world, facts, that I inherited and that I was never taught. Then in some primary school essay, age perhaps 8, I used the stilted phrase "Ever since I was able to think logically..." ... implying there was a time when I couldn't.
Finally, age 27 or so, the more classic, boring Buddhist kind of sudden awakening after a period of stress. Feeling like everything was the same as before but realizing I was just this ordinary, yet necessary, part of the world, and that nothing mattered and everything made sense, like being a natural part of the Maelstrom of the world.
I remember waking up from a nap the day before my 3rd birthday and being aware like "oh I'm alive now." I got up and walked down the hall to my parents room even though I didn't consciously know where it was and I knew who they were even though I had no expectation of finding them there...my parents remember me saying something weird like "I saw the ceiling and didn't know anything". Anyway from then on I was online. I've talked about this a lot but none of my friends have the same experience.
My memory is terrible overall, but I do have a memory at 12 where I realized I could just sit and think. But I also have earlier memories that include me thinking or were primarily internal. I mostly discounted that memory at 12 as being a false sensation/memory until now, but maybe there was something to it?
I have hazy half-memories starting at around age 3, but basically nothing meaningful seems to have been recorded before ~13.
Even at 13... in retrospect, I have evidence that I was starting to think more deeply about the world around that time (I switched from Catholic to atheist around then, and got into computers and reading blogs around that time), but I can't remember the names of my friends and teachers or anything. Meaningful "I can remember a whole scene of memory" or "I can remember a particular insight I had" started around 17.
My earliest memory is frustration over my inability to communicate from the playpen. This was a constant thing so it's decently etched in my brain. (At this point it may be that it's a memory of a memory; my recall of it is less vivid than it was in my 20's.)
The other robust pre-K memory is hearing my parents communicate by spelling words, and being conflicted over whether to show off my skills or retain the advantage. (Not quite at that level of abstraction, but the idea was there.) I didn't last very long (days?) before showing off. (My mother read to me early, and that doubtless assisted.)
This doesn't feel related to consciousness. I think I was as conscious before the things I remember.
My first memory is when I was two years old and I thought that there was a man in the wall. I was probably hearing the people in the neighboring apartment. My mom told me about other things I said but that is my first memory that I have for sure.
1. Some concept of a dark, warm, red enclosure--a memory I have always recalled possessing before the age of 5, and certainly well before I learned anything at all about the reproductive process. I have a half-memory of sitting in a carseat while picturing this "memory/place."
2. A few discrete memories in the 3-4yy age range (reading with classmates in preschool, going to the beach, playing in sandboxes).
3. A couple of "phase changes" in self-awareness that took place in middle school and high school, and then another longer, more gradual one over my late 20s and early 30s. (I'm 34 now.)
I guess the question is conscious of what? All animals in an awake state must be conscious of their surroundings, as far as their senses allow. For very young animals including humans that's pretty much all they are aware of (besides of course physical sensations of their own body, such as pain or hunger etc), because it is more important to take things in while they are developing basic mental skills.
But meta-consciousness, i.e. being aware of ones consciousness in the above simple sense, and of the same in other animals, is a further layer analogous to what programmers call "reflection". I don't really see the conceptual problem with part of the brain monitoring the rest of it, and I suppose the mystery is about how these levels combine to make a coherent whole. There doesn't even need to be much of a separate brain area, and I'm sure there isn't. It's mostly if not entirely just feedback loops resulting from the way the brain circuits are wired.
Many animals have this meta-consciousness up to a point, especially social animals who must devote a lot of mental effort to judging how their behavior is received by others. But presumably any predator must also have it, to anticipate how their prey will react to the predator. Some predatory actions can be instinctive, such as "crouch flat and creep along silently when approaching". But instinct doesn't explain a hilarious video I once saw of a cat stalking a bird, hopping along on three legs and with the fourth leg clamped over its bell to prevent its tinkling alerting the bird!
There's a level of encoding specificity there which means it's quite difficult for us to remember what it was like to be six months old.
Plus there's probably some adaptive stuff which means our mind boundaries are much looser. Mind boundaries are quite loose in various situations - though in older age mostly dysfunctional ones. But as a baby I can see you might pretty much be your mother.
Perhaps Nagrl might be extended? What is it like to be a Baby?
I think that they are talking about 2 different types of experiences. My oldest memory is from my crib but around 14 I felt that I was a new person, qualitatively different from who I was as a child. Like I have unlocked something.
I remember my parents taking me in the car to our new house when I was about 3. And I certainly remember my first day at school, at 4 1/2, and of course I have increasing numbers of memories from that time on. Pretty sure any philosophising about consciousness came later.
I have a memory that could be categorized as “pre-conscious.” It dates back to the first week of preschool, when I was around 30 months old.
I remember first meeting my best childhood friend. I was sitting in a line on the floor at preschool when I saw him. I immediately had the feeling: this is someone I like. I moved over, and he came and sat down next to me.
For a long time, I thought it was interesting that I had such good intuition about who I would end up liking.
But what’s strange is that my mother later told me I had been playing with this boy in the park all summer beforehand. So, I already knew him quite well.
I just didn’t recognize him consciously at the time. But I had a feeling that he was my friend and my actions were consistent with that feeling. I sometimes wonder if dogs are the same way. They don’t really know what’s going on but act in a world of intuition and feelings.
Also, the only reason I would flag this memory as pre-conscious is the later information given by my mother. So I am skeptical that any of my earlier memories are really me being fully "there".
(Epistemic status: seems vividly real to me but I know memories are fallible)
That said, my earliest memory is of lying (I suppose lying does indicate a level of conscious intent?)
My sister had just been born, and someone was holding me up under my arms to look into a hospital room filled with babies on white tables. So many babies.
They kept asking me if I saw my new sister, but I couldn’t tell which baby they meant.
I was uncomfortable being held up for so long, so I said that I did see her, even though it wasn’t true, just so they would put me down.
No memory of my own, nor perception of my own children's. But I've been teaching a pair of twins for the last two years, age 6-8, and I feel like they've gone through something. When they first started my classes they were quite unable to connect words to actions in a meaningful way; now, they're pretty good at it.
I'm a language guy, so I often think about these issues in terms of language, and I'm worried that language is a big confounder for this. Lots of first memories are likely to be the first memories that people are able to convert into language, and so more a reflection of maturing linguistic capability than underlying changes.
It's not my earliest memory, but I have* a memory from my early childhood (6yo or so?) where I suddenly realize that I'm my own person, i.e., that my thoughts are my own and not shared by anything else, and that I'm only this small part of the world. And I was a bit unsettled by it.
I'm not sure this makes sense to anyone else. If I analyze this realization now with my current knowledge, I would maybe say I discovered the Cartesian boundary (the border that separates a Cartesian agent from the world), but maybe I'm overanalyzing it.
*Actually, I don't really have that memory anymore but I have the meta-memory of explaining this memory to other people, and I can reconstruct the content of the memory from the meta-memory.
My first memory was at 2.5 years old when my family was on the plane immigrating to Canada. We were close to landing and I got airsick.
I remember climbing on to my mom’s lap saying “Mom, I’m sick” (but in our native language), and then shortly throwing up. I don’t remember how/where did I throw up, but I remember that it did happen, and my parents do back that story up.
I can’t say that this was any kind of awakening to consciousness though. For one thing, I already had language skills so I was clearly able to think and verbalize thoughts. I also can’t say that I acquired any philosophical insights after this event either. I just continued on with my life as usual (not that I remember how I used to act).
My earliest memories are (a) my aunt dunking me in a water fountain outside a church possibly after a funeral. I float up to the top and she dunks me down again, repeatedly. (b) I went to the zoo and dad hung me upside down by the very low fence of the crocodile enclosure, teasing me as if he was going to lift me over to the crocs
(a) definitely did not happen and I doubt (b) happened either. So I take other peoples' earliest memories with a bit of a grain of salt, especially amidst a social media discussion where there's real possibility of confabulation of some social media contagion.
I am 38 and very much recall having a better memory of my childhood when I was say ~20 than I do now. That makes me sceptical that anyone's earliest memories are literally the first experience they had. I admit these memories of moments of awakening are not subject to that kind of scepticism, but they might plausibly be false memories like my memory of my aunt dunking me in a fountain.
I don't have a memory of a sudden shift or awakening from unconsciousness in childhood, and I would bet on a progressive evolution. My first memory is very early, at the age of 6 months. It's the fragrance of camping gas in the cabin of my dad's sailing boat that was used to heat my feeding bottle, associated with a very fuzzy image of the cabin. I think it's authentic because: 1) my dad sold the boat after these holidays, 2) there is no photography of the cabin, 3) to my knowledge nobody told me about it, 4) I have no siblings, 5) it's very specific and related to feeding, 6) it's mainly a memory of a fragrance and unusual altogether. I recall this memory was vivid when I was a child but it faded away with time, even though I tried to preserve it, and now I'm sad to admit that what remains is not much more than a memory of a memory.
This one is special, but I have few memories of my first years, and most are mixed with later memories and photos.
I have an interesting memory from when I was 4 or 5, around that age. I observed the (relatively) tall legs of my cousin who was around 8, and my own little legs, and I thought to myself: I really wonder what it must feel like to be so tall! And I remember making a strong effort to memorize that question so that I could experience it and answer it in a few years. And I indeed had that experience later, like anyone would, and the answer was simply: it feels normal, there's nothing special about it.
That's probably my first "philosophical" thought and certainly my first memory of a thought (and maybe the only one for years). But I don't associate this memory with a feeling of becoming conscious. I would bet I was conscious before that. Now my son is exactly this age, and I have no serious doubt that he has a conscious experience. I guess it is also the case for my daughter who will soon turn 2, but it is less clear-cut. She didn't say a word in her first year and developed language suddenly 6 months ago, quickly forming complete phrases. More recently, she started to use "I" correctly, expressing more and more of her inner mind, and now it would be difficult to maintain that she has no conscious experience.
My first memories are from around the time I was 3 years old. But I distinctly remember at my 9th birthday, feeling like something was different. Like I was gonna remember things from then on. I felt like I had become a person.
I have a bunch of scattered early memories, but no single "crystallizing" one where I "became conscious."
I do have a particularly clarifying memory sometime in elementary school where I realized, "I can't make anyone else do anything, I can only control the things I do, so if I want certain things to happen, I have to do them, because I can't make anyone else do anything, I have to do the things that nobody else will do." A lifetime of neuroticism has followed.
It is hard to date some of my early memories. I know that we moved house when I was two and a half and again three years later. I have effectively zero memories of the first house but some vague memories associated with the move and some memories of a sweet elderly couple who lived next door to us at the first house.
By the time of the second move I have some clear memories. The first memory I can date clearly was my third birthday. My sister was home from home from boarding school for the half-term holiday and she made me a chocolate cake.
I have one very clear memory of that house (the second one). I had recurring nightmares of being chased by cars, lorries, and buses. I always knew when I was going to have that dream because before going to bed I had a ritual of looking out of the French windows down the garden with my mother. On nights where I had that nightmare I could see the vehicles lining up in the shrubbery waiting for me to go to bed. I assume it was broad daylight at my bedtime for much of the year. I somehow knew that my mother could not see the vehicles and that I should not mention them to her.
While reading whole post, I couldn’t help thinking “are we talking about when our first episodic memory formed?” or “are were talking about when our first episodic memory of engaging in metacognition formed?”
In other words, is “consciousness” being defined as “the ability to form episodic memories?” Or is it being defined as the “ability to metacognize and, therefore, think about our conscious experience + the ability to form episodic memories?”
The ill-defined nature of consciousness is probably the problem you’re trying to solve for. But I don’t think that anyone can solve for it by leaving the terms ill-defined.
Personally, I think that consciousness can and does exist without metacognition: e.g. when one is in a flow state they are clearly conscious, but flow states don’t involve much metacognition because metacognition would break the deep psychological involvement one feels while being engaged in the flow-state-inducing task.
Metacognition is, to me, consciousness of being conscious, which would suggest that consciousness has to exist without metacognition, since without consciousness, there would be no consciousness to be conscious of.
For me, my first episodic memories are from being around 3 or 4 years old, standing in the new house to which my parents were planning on moving, being very emotional about not wanting to move. (High emotion correlates with memory retrieval, so it probably makes sense that this would be my first episodic memory. Plus, around 3 or 4 is when the ability to form episodic memory tends to form, and so yeah, this was all probably pretty typical.) And honestly, I don’t remember when I first metacognized; apparently the moment it happened wasn’t significant nor emotional enough for my mind to form an episodic memory of it. … What does any of that have to do with consciousness? Well, it probably depends on how you define it, lol.
I try desperately to get my 3yo to tell me what it was like being in the womb or being a baby, to no avail (yet). Lots of people seem to be phrasing these awakenings as internal monologue revelations about one's autonomy, identity, place, etc so I may try to suggest some. Maybe I could witness it happen!
Dunno about the age of first memory. I can usually just be sure if it was single or double digit age. I remember reaching up to grab a cup on the counter, being doused with scalding hot coffee and being rushed to the hospital. I also recall the doctors looming over me as I fell asleep. Pretty sure they had scissors or forceps to cut/grab some bits that were curling off my chest?
I remember putting a toonie in my mouth, choking and coughing it up and thinking "wow, I almost choked alone and it was only dumb luck I didn't just die."
As for an overwhelming sense of awakening, that doesn't seem familiar. I do recall lying about whether I believed in Santa because I thought it was what I was expected to say, even though it was obviously untrue. That seemed meta for me at the time, enough that it influences my parenting today.
I don't have any specific memories like this--just a handful of very early memories, I think the earliest around 3 or 4, mostly very brief flashes.
I have such a hard time believing things like Qiaochu's tweet. How is it even possible to reach your 20s without having to ever solve a problem? I feel like there must either be a communication issue or a memory failure, where they were doing these things, just didn't describe it that way or realize that was what they were doing. The latter of which you could maybe describe as becoming conscious, but honestly I would believe that more than I would believe never thinking about a problem by the same age. Dogs are capable of engaging in problem-solving.
....
In the novel Diaspora by Greg Egan (minor spoilers ahead), the PoV character is an entirely digital mind and the start of the book describes their creation. In particular, the point where they become conscious--it's triggered by an attempt to control other beings the same way they control their own internal experience (the computer they live in prevents this from being possible), struggling, and then realizing that they and the others are both individual, thinking entities. Basically a "theory of mind" idea of consciousness, where they become aware of both their own internal experience and the fact that others have a similar internal experience, akin to a few of the other tweets.
I have memories of experiencing unselfaware qualia as early as the age of 2. By the first grade I remember thinking and asking about what I would consider semi-complex philosophical questions (like the existence of God and why He would do the things He does). I don't have any memories of suddenly gaining self-awareness or consciousness. If feel like this was a more gradual process for me.
My first clear memory is my mother screaming at my father shortly after they separated when he was visiting to see his kids. I was probably around 3 years old. It was the realization that the only person in the world who was legally responsible for me was insane and I was in a new type of Trouble that couldn't be addressed by asking the "adults" for help and this was something I would have to manage alone, and that I needed to come up with a way to solve my own problems and that my mother was not a reliable source of safety, comfort, or solutions and it was in fact dangerous to bring any of my issues or problems to her.
Terrible situation, but I assume it has it's upsides. I was still under the illusion that my parents and teachers were sane while being 15, but because they weren't I drew very wrong conclusions about myself.
Very crippling ones to this day.
Better to learn to trust one's own judgement earlier.
I have terrible memory in general and this one is overwritten many times over by recall to the point where it is narrative and not sense memory but it is my first distinct memory, and also one of my most treasured. At some point when I was 4 years old (circa 1982) my mother and sisters were out of the house doing something all day so my father rented a VCR (the rental of which I understood to be a great luxury) and a movie: Superman II starring Christopher Reeves. We watched it together and when we finished it I asked to watch it again, and we did.
Mine was in the category `people having a sudden realization that they were in control of their destiny and could exert effort to produce results.`
Age 12 -- 8th grade (in the US, that means about to enter high-school)
I realized that I could "be cool" and decide to have more friends and "do fun things". My middle-school experience was very non-deliberate about my hobbies, friends, how I seemed. but going into high school, with lots of new "potential" friends to impress and build a new social circle around, I saw the opportunity ahead.
I still didn't fit in perfectly in high school, but got a lot more deliberate about it. I was playing some video games at the time but no clear trigger from that.
Key triggers:
- getting bored
- doing musical theatre with folks in other school districts
- years of being labelled "the nerdy guy" and realizing that I could keep that part of my identity some while still swinging into the realm of "cool"
- going to bigger schools where there were more and more advanced people like me, so "cool among the smart kids" was a valid niche
- a big shift in the reading material in school from 7th to 8th grade. 7th grade was dull "read aloud this american narrative story" ... 8th grade was lots of eastern philosophy. Tao of Pooh and Siddhartha-by-Hesse stand out as "bridges" from a midwestern upbringing to Eastern philosophy.
As it happens, right after closing the comments on this post I started reading today's CHH post about the first time she got noticed for wearing a sexy outfit.
It feels much more gradual to me, there was no moment when I popped into focus. I remember doing things like setting up a test to see whether Santa Claus really knew things my parents didn't know, but these don't feel different from other memories of childhood.
Back when I was younger, I had a memory from when I was about a half-year old, of my parents putting me into a new-and-unfamiliar stroller and then tipping it backwards in a way they didn't with my usual stroller and me finding this scary and starting to loudly cry about it.
I no longer have direct access to the memory—it was lost at some point in late-childhood-to-early-teenagerhood, and now I only remember remembering it and telling people about it, I don't remember it directly—but I'm reasonably confident it was real, because when I told my mother about the memory back before it was lost she immediately knew what incident it was a memory of: her going stroller-shopping when I was about half a year old, and trying out a jogging stroller briefly.
I don't recall (or recall-having-recalled or suchlike) ever seeing any baby-pictures from even that overall shopping trip, never mind that specific moment, so I expect they don't exist and thus aren't relevantly a confounding factor. And I similarly don't recall having been given any verbal recounting of that shopping-trip prior to my telling my parents about that memory. I don't think it was a very remarkable event in their mind at the time.
But also I'm pretty sure presence or absence of memories of a given time isn't a strong indicator of presence or absence of consciousness at that time. Absence of memory is compatible with presence of consciousness, due to e.g. amnesia-related effects; presence of memory is compatible with absence of consciousness, if the memory happens not to encode consciousness-that-was-happening-at-the-time. (Although I lack firsthand experience with the latter case and I'm not confident it's a thing humans actually do; the me in that six-month-old memory was already pretty clearly conscious.) So I suspect the framing that this post is responding to is kind of fundamentally broken from the outset.
For this task, I have the advantage of moving when I was four years old, so all memories of that prior apartment are conveniently dated. I remember a lot about age 4 and maybe even some age 3 stuff. Being woken up to watch the end of the Miracle on Ice game is another helpful timestamp. No big jump in awareness, but lots of early childhood memories. Are there really people who cannot remember before age 5?
So I was under the table in my kitchen, hanging upside down like a bat, gripping the edge of the table. And I suddenly had this thought: “I’m conscious that I’m conscious that I’m conscious…” — and it just kept looping like that. But I don' think i had the word consciousness.
It felt like this weird spiral, like mental vertigo.
A year ago, I became very interested in a related question. All my life, I've been aware that I basically started having memories at age 5. I have a few scattered ones from before then, but there's a definite discontinuous jump in the number of memories I have at age 5. And again, I've been aware of this forever; at age 6 I was aware I couldn't remember anything before age 5. But my wife doesn't have this experience at all; she basically has a continuous decrease in how much she remembers. So I started going around and asking people about it: do you have an age where suddenly the memories are available, or is it more gradual? People split about 50/50, and the ones with an age usually had it around 5.
However. I asked one of my students about this, and she immediately said she had a specific age...and it was TEN. And she literally phrased it as, "I gained sentience at the age of 10."
So I was under the table in my kitchen, hanging upside down like a bat, gripping the edge of the table. And I suddenly had this thought: “I’m conscious that I’m conscious that I’m conscious…” — and it just kept looping like that. But I don' think i had the word consciousness.
It felt like this weird spiral, like mental vertigo.
Ancient Hindus / Vedic Indians were preoccupied with this question...what is the true nature of consciousness? They were so obsessed with it that they didn't care about anything else. This last claim, according to Roberto Calasso, Italian author, in "Ardor". He makes the case that they were mom maniacally obsessed with this question. I have learned a Sanskrit verse as a child that translates to "That, by knowing which everything becomes known." They believed that if you understood this, other questions would melt away and you were now an enlightened being.
I don't have a story here, but I do have somewhat jumbled thoughts on the topic. I have young kids (turning 5 and 7 this summer) and I'm often struck by the thought that already they have fully developed personalities and complex thoughts and goals and memories, but that most of their memories and thoughts will fade. They and I have a very strong relationship, but if anything were to happen to me, they'd barely remember me in a few years, and even that will be without any strength of emotion. That's kind of mind blowing to me.
Personality is also interesting - through memories will fade, I'm pretty sure their personalities will not change all that much, unless something very drastic happens.
Jeeze, young people are a different species. I look at that frog avatar post, and I absolutely have no idea of what's being communicated. Complete gibberish.
Anyway, my experience: Playing in the back yard when I was maybe 7. I suddenly woke up in bed the following morning. All my life before that point is something that I remember as if it were just a dream...
My earliest memories are from when I was 3. I'm not sure which is chronologically first, though. I'm pretty sure I have no memories from before I was able to speak, though, and I didn't start speaking until I was almost 3.
My "gaining consciousness" moment probably happened when I was 4. I woke up and laid in bed thinking about what my favorite color was. I decided to change it from green to red. I told everyone about my big decision.
It's the first memory I can think of where I exhibited self awareness, and it was soon followed by many more self-aware memories, including contemplating my own death.
I was involved in a bad car accident when I was about a year and a half old. I remember two things about being in the hospital: one of the nurses taking me around in a little red wagon, and looking out the window to the parking lot to try to find my father's car. There's a photo of the latter thing, so that memory could be contaminated by that; but the former thing is to my knowledge genuine.
Related to this, I also remember being at home later and having the garment covering one of my burns irritating me. My thought was something like "this really hurts and I want this to stop." Maybe this was "awakening?"
Even so, I do think there was a real shift to my modern way of thinking at around age 14. No specific event triggered it, but there's a clear before-and-after for me in a difficult-to-articulate way.
I kind of feel like I've gained consciousness thrice. First gradually over my childhood, second when I recollected my personal history to figure out how I had bought so unreasonably deeply into HBD-community stuff, and third last weekend when I was Enlightened.
I think basically both the two stories are true. Especially as you grow up or adapt to new situations, you gradually develop the ability to remember more. But also sometimes you're kind of a lost soul, getting pushed around by the societal currents until you have the right insight, at which point suddenly a lot of your scattered memories click and make sense.
I had a long phasing in of memory from age 4 onward, no particularly memorable “click” into place.
At age 21 I started meditating, journaling, and reading full-length books again (I had been a bookworm as a kid, but was put off reading by high school). I see that year, in retrospect, as a pretty significant shift in my level of consciousness.
I have no internal monologue. No mental pictures. I can't taste or smell something that is not in front of me at the moment. (This phenomenon is called Aphantasia) I just exist in the moment, then the moment passes and I exist in the next moment. My short-term memories are only converted to long-term memories if I convey them with words (i.e. tell the story of what just happened). I know about the events of my past, but they are not memories; they are stories. At times, people remind me of something I did with them, or something that happened when I was with them, but unless I wrote it in my journal or told the story out loud, I don't remember.
All of this makes me question how we define "consciousness". Is memory required to be considered conscious? I can produce thoughts and words. Does that make me conscious? I am aware of my "self". Does that make me conscious?
I'm curious what that's like. How does telling the story out loud help? Are you then able to remember telling the story? To me this conflicts with "I just exist in this moment and then the moment passes and I exist in the next moment". If I take that literally, then "I need to look things up in a journal in order to 'remember' them", would fit, because when you're reading the journal then in that moment, sure, you can access the story you're reading. But if just converting sense-impressions and causal chains into a linguistic description, whether by composing that description in writing or speech, allows them to be retained, then I'd say something like "you have linguistic memories, but not sensory memories you can recall with an 'inner eye'", rather than "they aren't memories."
That is probably a better description - having linguistic memories rather than sensory memories.
I feel as though most people equate memory with the ability to partially re-live the moment in sight/sound/taste/smell/emotion. I remember a friend of mine lamenting that he couldn't even remember is mother anymore several years after she passed because he could no longer conjure up a picture of her in his head. I have friends who, when I ask them to recall a moment, will close their eyes and "see" the people and the events in question, "hear" the sounds and the voices, and then tell me what happened. I don't have access to this type of memory. If you ask me about the birth of my child, I can't go back. I can tell you the story I have told over and over again about that day, but if you ask me about something I have never talked about - how many medical personnel were in the room during the birth, for example - I have no way to access that information.
Thanks for the reply, how things work for you is clearer now.
In answer to the questions in the final paragraph of your first comment, "consciousness" is poorly defined, but the fact that there's some sense-impression there for you to capture in some linguistic construction, suggests to me that you're conscious. I think "consciousness" and "the ability to recall past sensory impressions" are separate. Consciousness is about how you are, not what a future version of you will be able to say about how you were.
Thought experiment: Let's say you could have full imaginative memory as you describe others having, but only for a day - when you went to sleep, all that would remain the next morning is what you had preserved linguistically. I think ~everyone would agree you were conscious.
Change the scenario so "a day" is "5 minutes", and I still see little debate.
Clearly you have some ability to store sense-impressions for long enough to write them down or describe them in words - you can look away from an apple, look at a page in your journal, and although you're not currently looking at the apple, you can write down a description of it. So, in a sense, maybe you can "imagine" what happened 10 seconds ago, or 5 seconds ago, but it doesn't feel like imagining because it's so recent, it just feels like experiencing the world.
If you couldn't experience the world, your access to your own sensorium was simply a text summary, then some might argue that you aren't fully conscious. But that would be on the level of "I don't know what 'red' looks like, I just know the word 'red'".
You say that you live in the moment, but "moment" is poorly defined, and it does seem like you can retain sensory impressions in short term memory, and recall them, although maybe on a very short timescale. I think if one wanted to get nitpicky, "I can experience sensory impressions" is all that's needed for consciousness, "I can remember sensory impressions" is extra. But you do seem to have a bit of that extra, so we don't even have to be particularly nitpicky - you're conscious, clearly.
As I've said elsewhere in this discussion to other people, I think "can form long term memories" and "is conscious" are two different things and shouldn't be confused. Also "is aware, has experiences" is different from "is self-aware, realizes a distinction between self and environment", but people seem to be using "is conscious" for both, interchangeably.
Only if "is able to form and retain long term memories of sensory experiences, in the sensory modality in which they were experienced" is key to someone's definition of consciousness, would you potentially not be classed as conscious - but I don't think most people think of consciousness as equivalent to long term memory formation (which, again, you can do, just with words rather than sense-impressions) or a particular subtype of long term memory formation.
EDIT: Maybe you can't look away from an apple and then write about what it looked like, you'd have to verbalize what you were going to write, while looking at the apple? In any case, I think "consciousness" is about being able to experience the world, not about memories of that experience.
Many of the responses to this post definitely seem to be equating the ability to retain memories with consciousness, and I fully agree that these are two separate ideas. A person whose brain is damaged so they are unable to form new memories would still be considered “conscious”.
Even the idea that a cow might not be conscious, as was suggested in the original article, seems to me to be questionable. Cows perceive the world, process their perceptions, and respond autonomously to that stimulus. They even seem to have memories. Is that enough to diagnose consciousness? I don’t know. Some forms of AI also have these traits, and I am not ready to assign consciousness to robots.
I would certainly argue that I, myself, am at least as conscious as a cow, despite my lack of explicit sensory memories. :D
There's something extra to consciousness. When I put my hand on a hot stove, an automatic reaction occurs which removes my hand, before I become consciously aware of having touched the stove - because "remove hand from danger" is more important than "be consciously aware of danger and decide what to do about it". No conscious processing occurred until after my hand jerked back, but some part of my nervous system perceived the dangerous stimulus and responded.
By "something extra" I don't mean anything mystical, but there's some extra processing that occurs, aside from stimulus and response, which corresponds to "awareness of having received a stimulus of this type".
I'd bet cows have some level of that awareness, but we haven't nailed down exactly where the processing occurs or why/what it's for, so it's hard for me to defend that assertion. And hard to say whether or not AIs have that extra processing.
I have lots of hazy memories starting from the age of around three, but they do not come intrinsically ordered, so I need to apply some conscious deduction, reasoning and guesswork to figure out which one is the first. Like, I remember sitting in my kitchen watching the Czech cartoon "The little mole". I remember first coming to kindergarten to first meet the caretaker, when no one was there, the lights were not lit, and the kindergarten seemed dim and empty. I remember being scared during a family gathering on New Year's Eve at my uncle impersonating a wolf. But I can't be sure which was the first one. It seems obvious to me that retaining ordering of memories is harder than retaining memories themselves, so I am surprised by the number of people who can determine which of their memories is the first one.
However, I am not sure the word "awareness" is applicable for those memories, because they are just about being in the flow of life. However I remember that at the age of five or six I gained, rather than self-awareness, the awareness of others: that other people have their own subjective experience of life. But I think that kinda counts as getting self-awareness, in the sense that you can not define coldness without defining hotness and vice versa. In a similar vein, when I realised existence of others' subjective experience, the directly-perceived-subjective-experience got reframed as "me" to distinguish it from others' experiences. In a sense, I have not gained stronger self-awareness than that since: I have my subjective experience, I think others have something similar, so I distinguish the directly perceived experience as "mine". If there was no one but me, it would not make sense to speak about "me", I'd just be "the" eye of the universe with which it sees itself. There would be no me, just the act of existing.
One of my first memories involves already having a fully formed theory of mind for myself and others. It involves my mom and dad fighting (the memory does not include what they were fighting about, although vague associations with him being away often because he was in the military) and my thinking "when mom said that, she meant X, but when dad heard what she said, he thought it meant Y, and responded with Z, which mom interpreted as A when that's not what he meant, and it made the fight worse, but if I was to explain to each of them what the other meant, that would fix this". With less labeling because I didn't have the concept of variables, this is a mental insight expressed here in words because that's what you have to do in a comment section, not a quotation of my inner monologue. As I recall, I did explain each person's mental state to the other, and it worked. So one of my key early memories involves the idea that sometimes people fight because they don't understand each other or something about a situation, and so more knowledge = less fighting.
This suggests to me that I was "conscious" by various definitions of this word, before the point of this memory. Meaning: there's a difference between "conscious" and "able to form long term memories", and the two shouldn't be conflated.
My theory, based on how long term memories seem to work for me, is that you need a certain amount of conceptual scaffolding for a long term memory to hang on to/a web of concepts within which the series of events within the memory makes sense.
Example: I'm bad at chess. Show me a chessboard, and I will 100% not be able to retain the position of the pieces accurately for any length of time. But a chessmaster will, at a glance. Let them watch a game, and they will be able to tell you who moved what where from beginning to end, where I will be like "there was a game of chess that happened". If I was a small child without an understanding that chess was a game people play, I could have been like "two people were at a table and there was something in the middle". Further back, I might have been able to recognize there are faces in the scene, but couldn't have even understood what was going on.
Example 2: Give me a scientific paper on a topic I understand well, and after reading it I'll be able to tell you what was in it long afterwards, and likely what figures were where in the paper. Give me a paper with lots of math I don't understand in a subfield I'm not at all familiar with, and I probably won't even retain the abstract, and after a while I won't even remember what field the paper claimed to be in, or that I read it at all, unless someone prompts me.
So my idea is, small children don't have the conceptual scaffolding to form long term episodic memories with, but they are nevertheless fully capable of having full-fledged conscious experiences, by whatever definition of consciousness you may like, at an age earlier than you might expect based on self-report of events that would require long term episodic memory to report.
As for when this early memory occurred, all of my early memories have been internally tagged with "around 3 or 4", but I'm not sure that's accurate. I do remember being very young, having a memory, asking mom when it happened, and she said "when you were 4", and doing this several times, and concluding I couldn't remember much before I was 3-4.
My first memory is a a-ha moment, but a physical one. I'm pretty sure I remember learning to walk. Just my parents standing at opposite ends of our hallway and me managing to run from one to the other as I finally figured out this whole balance thing. If true, it would be an unusually old memory.
Other stuff I remember is surely dated to when I was 3 or so, like one time I had pneumonia. And I learned to read before school, at 4 yo I think, and I remember distinctly going through the town in the back of the car and having a sudden moment of realisation at just how much information kept sweeping over me from every sign now, without even focusing on them on purpose, and asking my mom if it was always like this.
I think that my first vague half-memory is at the age of something like two, just being in the attic and mom was nearby, I think? First strong memory at the age of 3-4 being in back seat of the car and being taken to the kindergarten, possibly for the first day.
I don't recall having some sort of a wow experience like "damn, I'm a conscious human being" now ever, which kind of makes me question if I'm conscious even now.
I'm also in the same boat. But also, I think that we can only experience consciousness with our whole being, and there's not much "compute" and bandwidth left even amongst fully grown adults - to verify if even the baseline "adult" consciousness that we're experiencing is the baseline "real and complete adult state of consciousness" that everyone is definitely experiencing. And so we're left to ponder some subset of the thing we want to understand and control fully.
I mean, the "consciousness" that you and I experience, as adults, are almost certainly reduced or different compared to what, say, Scott experiences daily. Neither you nor I (nor most people) can write like Scott can, but Scott bangs out riveting and beautiful pieces of writing effortlessly at least once a week and wonders why everyone else can't.
Similarly, a hedge fund trader might wonder what people actually mean when they say they're 'weak' with numbers. Like, how weak? Surely tax calculations happen in a flash, and everyone can manage basic statistics, algebra and calculus...right? (Hint: nope!)
More relevant to new parents like Scott, I think early life experiences disproportionally shape what we consider " ordinary consciousness" later in life, and I posit that the age of "awakening consciousness" depend on how early we are able to reliably access accurate and productive feedback loops about the world we perceive.
My first strong memory is in Upper Kinder Garten: The gruff P.E. teacher would stand at the school gate checking for latecomers like me and ordering us to stand in the sun for 10 minutes. I remember silently sensing that protesting this or telling the guy to suck it up because my family could only manage to drop me off 10-15 minutes after 7:30 AM would only end badly, so I endured, for a whole year, silently.
In third grade I was aware of feeling hurt when my math teacher bullied me for a whole year, publicly giving me the epithet "mush for brains". I brought this up to my parents, they asked her about it, she dismissed it as "Oh, he has potential but is just lazy and doesn't try hard enough. That's why I call him "mush for brains" in class- so that he snaps out of it" My parents thought that it was really nice that the math teacher was paying "extra attention" to me and actually thanked her. So I endured, silently.
By fifth grade I was getting bullied by my more outspoken, gregarious classmates but the bigger priority for my overworked parents (and everyone in India) are school grades, which I was sucking at.
I had managed to learn that my own opinions on my lived experiences had zero value to anybody - not parents, not teachers, not relatives or indeed anyone else. I got the "maybe you have slight dyslexia, but so does everyone else and all you have to do is Snap Out Of It" thing pretty much everyday for decades, and I endured silently.
Anyway this "silently suffering and accepting that my life will suck and no one cares" thing became permanently ingrained in my psyche, and it is now literally how I experience consciousness. This kind of damage is actively bad in adulthood if one wants to progress a white collar career - because *everyone else* has experienced life very differently and simply does not get why *anyone" would resign themselves to suffering and depression.
I once got called "unprofessional" at work when I was silently suffering a burnout. My boss' point of view was that everyone else was *also* burning out, but they were giving her weekly reminders and asking for raises and promotions, lots of people were letting her know they planned to leave the company - but here I was, occasionally drowning but valiantly coming back to the surface, without ever complaining.
She thought it was very weird and simply kicked me out of the project - thereby exacerbating the burnout of the rest of the team, who all left the company promptly. To me, my boss' way of thinking was so strange and illogical that I had a crippling existential crisis just trying to figure out what the hell just happened. After copious amounts of reading online about psychology, mental health and psychiatry, my existential crisis abated but I'm still depressed.
So uh, anyway, pay attention to your kids' opinions, when they express them as little kids. It has tremendous upside later on.
I’m not downplaying your depression or how it came to be. My childhood was crappy, too, and I live with major physical disabilities, plus a lot of ADHD. This is no play for sympathy. I have no use for that. I just want to note from experience that you are in a mental prison of your own making. You can unmake it. Or you acknowledge it’s a comfortable, safe mental and emotional space you don’t wish to leave. Unmaking the prison is hard. A lot of work went into it. You know its safe contours. The outside world is a scary place. Leaving it behind is worth it.
> Similarly, a hedge fund trader might wonder what people actually mean when they say they're 'weak' with numbers. Like, how weak? Surely tax calculations happen in a flash, and everyone can manage basic statistics, algebra and calculus...right? (Hint: nope!)
I don’t know what being “bad at math” is like, either, unless you mean being slow, or not having enough short-term memory to use it as a mental chalkboard. Managing statistics, algebra and calculus doesn’t guarantee that anything come to you in a flash; nothing comes in a flash to me. Perhaps a lot of people give up understanding these subjects if they don’t get them fast enough?
There are probably social pressures to do this, as evidenced by the fact that a lot of people won’t tolerate pauses in conversation to think.
"I don't recall having some sort of a wow experience like "damn, I'm a conscious human being" now ever, which kind of makes me question if I'm conscious even now."
I've never had it as a single, sudden experience. But I do feel like I've become gradually more conscious as I've lived, and as a result I can't really regard conscious as a binary thing. Present me? Definitely pretty conscious. 20 year old me? Still pretty conscious, but a little less so. 15 year old me? Still definitely conscious, but a bit less so yet. 12 years old? Pretty definitely still yes. Sometime between my earliest memory and 12 the "yes" shades more into "maybe."
But of course, if I'm more conscious now than I was then, there's no reason to believe I couldn't be even more conscious still at some future point.
Hmmm. I have no memory like any of these.
Try forming one now, you might need it later.
My earliest memories are from around the age of 2/3. Ones of my birthday, another's of a vacation, none of them involve any sort of awakening, and they just seemed like ordinary moments in time for me then.
Welll... my earliest memories are from slightly before 2, but they're quite disconnected, and I think the dialog was dubbed in later. One is standing up in a crib and watching my mother sleep with my younger sister. That's almost the entire memory right there. (I don't remember how I felt about that.) The other is watching a toilet flush and wondering about the water. (Wondering what??)
It's my belief that such memories are present in everybody, and I've got lots more that I've never had access to. It's my guess that the reason is that the indexing system changes when we learn language, and the older memories aren't in the new index.
Best I have too. Fuzzy impressions of discrete moments. A soft plastic toy plane (a Caravelle), my scooter by the gate. Both approximately age 3, based on location. First memory of something significant is hearing The Beatles Michelle on the radio and seeing the pattern of sunlight and window frame on the carpet. Feels like the first memory of self.
When I was around eight years old, I asked my dad what happens after you die. He told me nothing happens and your consciousness just 'stops,' you have no more experiences. I remember thinking seriously about this and what it meant, and that it kind of blew my mind even though it scared me, and I'm pretty sure that was the first time I recognized my own consciousness.
It is not my earliest memory by any margin, but I did have a similar experience - one night when I was trying to go to sleep, I just randomly realized that I am going to die one day. And everyone else too. It shocked me enough that I couldn't fall asleep for quite a bit. Not sure how old I was at that point, maybe 10.
I used to get these somewhat regularly until I was like 15 or so. Not sure when they started. But I’d suddenly think about how the universe is vast and I’d die someday and it would just keep going as if I never existed. Eventually I guess I got used to it lol.
After speaking with friends, I think this is a standard developmental milestone for kids/teens. I had it a bit earlier than you, at around 12, and I think it was around then that I started seriously questioning the faith I inherited (Christianity). It just seemed like such a made up thing, and well if that was made up then so were the rest of the reliigions, and so probably our deaths were probably just the end of consciousness with no show afterwards. And I carried that existential dread for a really long time.
What scared me was that such made-up things can exist and have such authority.
The next step, though it didn’t occur to me back then, is what that tells you about humans; in particularly, what is likely to happen if you mindlessly speak your mind and try to reason with everyone.
Hint: Jesus, but without the resurrection part.
I went through a bit of a phase some time in high school, where I'd been atheist(ish) for several years already and been taking "your mind just stops when you die" as a given. After which I read just enough of quantum mechanics to get silly ideas, but not enough to critique them. In particular, I'd taken the "observation collapses the wavefunction and actualizes one possibility out of a large ensemble" thing a little too seriously, and sort of blurred the Copenhagen and MWI stuff together a bit and reasoned as follows:
1. Each conscious individual makes their own observations, collapsing parts of the universal wavefunction, ending up in some version of reality or other based on those observations.
2. Most of the universe is unobserved (to any particular individual) at any particular time.
3. This means that functionally any future event that isn't being immediately ruled out by current, direct observation exists as a (usually infinitesimal) portion of your own universal wavefunction. That is, anything not explicitly ruled out by the laws of physics or your own current observation could happen with small probability, being actualized when you observe it.
4. The permanent cessation of your own consciousness is something you definitionally cannot observe, so outcomes that result in such can never be actualized (in your version of reality), even if they would otherwise be overwhelmingly likely.
5. Thus your consciousness ought to be immortal, or very nearly so. (So should everyone else's, but only in their own reality, which would be separate from your own.)[1]
The obvious conclusion from 5 is that as one grew older or happened into life-threatening situations, would should expect a set of increasingly bizarre and improbable coincidence should conspire to keep you (at least minimally) alive, even in situations where you really, really ought to be dead many times over. Fortunately younger me--silly ideas or no--was far, far too sensible ever to test this.[2]
Having become older and wiser since, I no longer place much credence in the above reasoning. I don't know how first-person consciousness works. I don't know how quantum mechanics *actually* decides on its outcomes. Just because it's cute and sorta holds together doesn't mean its true.
[1] This is probably the point I should note that I'm aware that I'm far from the only person to duplicate this line of reasoning. I just wasn't aware of any of them at the time.
[2]I hope nobody would need me to spell out why this would be a bad, bad, BAD idea to test even you were 100% sure it were true. But ask if you do, and I will. If anything, this sort of reasoning made me *more* risk averse around life-threatening situations, not less.
When you believed this, how did you explain other people dying?
See point 1. Each individual will experience their own reality. Another person dying is a thing *I* can observe from *my* first-person perspective. But not something *they* can observe from *their* first-person perspective.
Of course, this makes the whole notion of an "individual" rather complicated and confusing, as it requires (ala Many Worlds Interpretation) for individual experiences to be constantly branching and multiplying. I don't think I though about this too hard when I was younger, it was just "each person will experience this from their own perspective."
Your reasoning doesn’t seem to give much cause to stop fearing death: your consciousness might not disappear, but it becomes increasingly isolated: <https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AndIMustScream>.
I should add that the whole "blurring together Many Worlds and Copenhagen" is pretty necessary for the thing to really hold together.
By the Copenhagen interpretation (as I understand it), observations are fundamentally causal. They cause wavefunction collapse, which means they ultimately cause all observed outcomes. It makes no sense to talk about a wavefunction collapsing into an unobservable state.
The MWI has it rather the other way around: the universal wavefunction splits into multiple Everett branches--meaning multiple observers--which causes the different observational outcomes. If you're running a Stern-Gerlach experiment, the split will cause one branch with an experimenter that measures spin up and one branch with a (now distinct) experimenter that measures spin-down. If instead you're running Quantum Russian Roulette[1], the split will cause one branch with an experimenter that measures the non-lethal outcome, and another with an experimenter unable to measure anything. So what? That's really not any sort of apparent contradiction as far as MWI goes.
Now, the third-person view of MWI does actually match up quite well to what I envisioned back in high school. Each individual consciousness will have *some* thread that passes down all the right Everett branches to continue essentially without limit, but that thread will get narrower and narrower[2] as it continues. And it does sort of leave unanswered question about how my own, particular first-person experience maps to a particular branch. Which allows room in which one *could* shove the "I'll always map to an observable outcome" postulate back in, but it would clearly be ad hoc and motivated at that point.
[1] which I was tempted to just call Austrian Roulette in honor of Erwin Schrödinger, but I worried it would be unclear.
[2] And thus more and more isolated: it's actually a pretty bleak prospect when you consider it fully.
I came to the same conclusion reading the sequences. With follow-ups:
1. Don't tell anyone you like being in your world.
2. Immortality is inevitable. The only possible eventual outcomes are, either a sufficiently pleasant world where I want to continue existing, or a hell where I want to end my existence but can't.
#2 is my reason to avoid risk.
And a distant third follow-up: God-like post-singularity already exists. Even if immortality is initially achieved through human means alone, eventually whatever becomes of immortal human or computer intelligence WILL become a God-like post-singularity intelligence with ability to do quantum stuff forwards and backwards in time.
My main self-critique here is that consciousness as I perceive it ends routinely when I go to sleep. I often fail to form or retrieve memories while sleeping. So, an unconscious memoryless existence is a proven possibility. From there, to non-existence, is a trivial step.
Yeah as a kid once I realized that dreamless sleep with no memory connected to it is basically a mini-death, it seemed to me that the question of what happens when you die was completely trivial. Why would anything happen? Every night I close my eyes and shut off my consciousness. The only difference is that it when you die, it doesn't turn back on. If you think about that too long, you go into the spiral. But the spiral is just a conscious brain processing nonexistence, while in a process of existing, so it all feels quite scary and impossible.
Oh, the sequences had the opposite effect on me. I'd thought this all out long before the encountering the sequences (and somewhat before they even existed). I never exactly *trashed* the idea, but had sort of compartmentalized it as "even if this is true, there's really not much I can do with it" and stopped thinking about it much.
Anyhow, the sequences prompted me to re-examine the line of reasoning and conclude it to be much less sound that I originally thought. Among other things is mixes together the Copenhagen and Many Worlds interpretations in ways that don't really make sense, and just generally requires extrapolating far too much from very incomplete pictures of reality to be trustworthy at all. Right now in my mind it lives more in the "I can't prove reality doesn't work like this, but there's no specific evidence it does" bucket than the "serious hypothesis" bucket.
"So, an unconscious memoryless existence is a proven possibility. From there, to non-existence, is a trivial step."
This doesn't seem to trivially follow to me at all. Sleeping and then waking up still constitutes a chain of observations. Like all chains of observations, it's not fully complete--much more incomplete than usual--but it's still the same sort of thing that happens when I transition from one waking moment to another. From a first-person viewpoint, falling asleep and never waking up seems different in kind, not just in degree.
After some near death experiences in my relatively long life, I have come to a similar conclusion. I am defacto always existing in the timeline in which I survived the event. Makes me sad for people in all the branches where I did in fact die and my wife and family had to deal with my death.
You aren't so wrong up until point 4, which simply doesn't follow. (It would preclude the possibility of sleep or anaesthetic, for example.)
I don't particularly see why. You can still make observations consistent with states of the world in which you fell asleep, as long as you wake up again. Even while awake, there are innumerable parts of the universe you are *not* currently observing. Nor are you observing even the stuff in your visual range all the time--human perception isn't infinitely fine-grained.
Having said all that, it does point rather strikingly to another flaw in my original logic: even with collapse postulates, there's no *requirement* that a wavefunction eventually collapse. It could just go unobserved and remain indefinitely in superposition. When you go to sleep, the wavefunction presumably evolves for hours without your external observation collapsing it. If it can do so for hours, why not forever? When phrased that way, the whole construction starts to look very question-begging: observing anything (including with it the necessary prerequisite of being alive) provides evidence that you're alive. So what? It's not obvious that should tell you anything about the probability of the converse happening.
This is called quantum immortality and a number of early theoreticians thought it was true.
This doesn't count as consciousness, and I don't even think it's a memory -- more of a lingering visceral association. But anyway, per my mom, I was fed Gerber baby food until I was about 6 months old. To this day, when I see the picture of the baby on the label of Gerber baby food, I instantly taste applesauce and banana.
You should try eating it and see if the current formula matches!
For a baby shower, we did a blind baby food taste test and competed to label the flavors. Surprisingly fun, but to adult palates, a number of those flavors are surprisingly nasty. The apple-sauce adjacent ones were all tasty, but when it got into flavors like chicken-and-gravy... ugh.
I typically claim my first memory as age 2, or just under. I was watching Rugrats and knew that they were babies, and since I was also a baby, my world should look like theirs. So I tried in vain to find the animation border lines of my surroundings, particularly the entertainment center in which the TV was lodged. I remember being like a quarter inch from the corner trying to find a line that didn’t exist.
I had a similar experience. I took notice of the thick border lines that delineated cartoon characters from their surroundings and noticed that I didn’t have any borders. This was a scary realization because what’s stopping my contents from spilling out and blending with the universe? Or maybe that’s exactly what’s happening at any given moment and only cartoon characters have actual discrete selves?
My first memory is helpfully timestamped. I'm standing on a platform watching a man, possibly my uncle, getting on a train, possibly going home after visiting us. I think something like "There's a person leaving, so there must be somebody still here, seeing. Who is that? I am Aaron. I am 2." and then I guess I decided that was enough to uniquely identify me.
My first memory is also helpfully timestamped: it was of an unusual weather event which can be confirmed to have happened when I was just shy of two-and-a-half years old.
I must be part of the boring crowd as I cannot remember a specific haha moment. I have vague memories about the "texture" of my thinking and my environment but in truth it all felt like slowly *growing* up
My earliest memory was around 3 and is the vague vision of a red toy but there isn't any reflective thought attached to it
I do remember crying a bit and talking with my dad after after I projected myself to the moment I was going to die. Is sudden consciousness ("realizing") of my own finitude of any value ?
I remember a lot of haha moments, but no aha moment.
I have fairly clear and consistent memories from the age of about four on. But I also have some `long tail' of fuzzy/hazy memories going back much further, certainly to age one and possibly even to zero (meaning, maybe, 10 months or so).
...but I also think that when I was four, I had more memories of when I was younger. My five year old currently has pretty clear memories of when he was 2 and 3. And when I went on sabbatical with my family, and came back after a year to our old house, my then-two-year old went directly to his toy chest, which he would last have seen when he was one. So at age 2 he certainly had clear memories from when he was 1 .
My theory is that your brain goes through multiple incompatible software architectures as it develops from a half-formed newborn brain, to a semi-usable toddler brain, to nearly-functional child brain, and the brain at age 6 is still able to read the old file format it used for writing memories at age 4, but it no longer has the code to support the format it used for writing memories at age 2.
(Why yes, I am a programmer, why do you ask?)
This is a really good metaphor. To extend it somewhat, maybe the reason we don’t always see notable changes in behavior after an enlightenment is that the change gave the recently enlightened a new architecture that in turn enabled a nicer UI but doesn’t add any significant new functionality.
I like this framing and it maps to my intuitions quite well.
I have a similar sort of programming-informed analogy about how memory and learning works. I think memories are stored in a highly compressed and lossy fashion, but *how* lossy is a function of several things, primarily time. Something you learned recently and reinforced repeatedly will have a large portion of its data still intact. The longer you go without accessing it, the more it fills up with holes, but the bits and pieces that carry the most information will persist the longest.
When your brain does access a memory, it runs some sort of algorithm to fill in the holes. If there are very few holes, this process is quick, reliable and seamless. The more holes there are, the more your brain has to extrapolate--much of which involves borrowing from other things it knows--to fill in the holes.
Meanwhile, memory retrieval is similarly idiosyncratic: it runs on some sort of associative addressing where similar things[1] tend to get accessed together. If you intentionally try to remember [thing], failing doesn't necessarily mean that [thing] still has 0% of its memory footprint left. It just means that the associative keys that you (somewhat subconsciously) tried to pass your memory retrieval system don't happen to match the pieces of [thing] that are still reasonably present and complete. So you might fail to remember [thing] deliberately today, and then be coincidentally reminded of it by something else tomorrow, when you stumble upon one of the keys that *is* still present in your brain's representation of [thing].
Together these paint a picture of why childhood memories are so hard to access. First, they're so old that most of them are naturally very, very degraded[2]. Second, your experience of childhood is very different from your experience of adulthood, which means both that your brain has fewer useful memories to borrow from in filling in the holes, and fewer potentially matches with whatever fragments of those older memories remain. Things like going to a place or holding an object that you haven't seen since you were very young can bring up previously-forgotten memories because you suddenly have new keys that might better associate with those memories, and fresh, pertinent data to help fill in the holes.
[1] For some often difficult-to-pin-down value of "similar"
[2] The exceptions being ones that you've remembered over and over again through the years.
I think a better analogy at least for my memory is that the brain is doing compaction/compression on old memories such that most memories become fuzzy over time and also as you recall memories you are corrupting them so that they become more vivid (relative to the memories you forget) but less accurate.
But it’s not just a matter of time passed. Eighty year olds remember more about their teenage years than 8 year olds remember about their toddler years.
Childhood amnesia sets around age 10.
My earliest timestamped memories are of a daycare I stopped attending at 2, mostly the toys, and the car ride home.
Later, I remember being 5 or so thinking about how I had forgotten so much of when I was younger, and cataloguing the memories I did have. Recalling these early memories at that age is probably the only reason I still have them.
I definitely have a “crib” memory in which I woke up, stared into a space a little, cried, and then was picked up. I am confident of it because I remember remembering it at many, earlier points of my life. Obviously I don’t know old I was, but I was young enough to be sleeping in a crib.
I also remember a lot of things from age 3 that I could not have known unless I remembered them because they are not in pictures, like the yellow color of my kitchen chairs, the long, skinny legs of an aunt who died when I was four..
My first conscious memory is sitting at a basketball game with my parents, aunt and uncle and reacting to the loud end of warm up buzzer. I remember thinking about things and being "conscious" in that sense but I don't remember what was on my mind. I'm guessing I was 6 or so. I can vividly remember the small school benches we had back then, the gym itself and some of the signs.
There’s no way to distinguish between “What is the earliest you were able to have persistent memories?” and “How old were you when you first gained consciousness?”
Some candidates for earliest memories are; when I was getting a vaccinations, I apparently didn’t want to stop moving, so I had to be held down while crying and being injected with needles by strangers. Stuff like that really burns into your brain, and made me scared of doctors, needles and blood until I deliberately overcome the fear 18 years later.
I vividly remember climbing out of my crib, either for the first time, or at a time that was especially inconvenient for my parents. I remember because my dad told me not to do this in a stern way, which may have been one of the first times he talked to me like that. This happens at 18-36 months according to Google, so it might have been then.
I definitely remember my grandmother who died when I was 4. She had late stage dementia, and didn’t speak English, so I remember being scared of her.
Yep, lots of din going on here https://homosabiens.substack.com/p/kodo-and-din
I remember as a small kid thinking about how some of my experiences I won't remember, which won't be that different from them never having happened. I can't remember the specifics of some of the times I thought about that tho. Either way, if you don't remember a dream that doesn't mean you weren't conscious during it. Same with childhood
I can't recall any moment I've "gained consciousness", perhaps I'm of the rare "p-zombie" species? /j
Not really sure what came first - both are from Kindergarden.
One is being really adamant about not wanting to wear a bobble hat, because other children had mocked it -> Recognizing that I have my own preferences that matter and that I can achieve.
The other is noticing how the concept of "left" and "right" works - when being taught to lift our left or right hands and sitting in a circle, I noticed that I had to lift the hand opposite of the person across me (which saved me time thinking about what to do myself, and to which I in part attribute sometimes mixing up right and left to this day ;-P) -> using my intellect to understand how the world works.
There was a recent editorial in Nature about this (on recent research). My earliest memory is of eating my first ice cream sandwich at 2.5. I think toddlers are certainly conscious and it's more that this memories just aren't very durable due to the fact there's massive reorganization taking place in this time period. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-00855-0
Paywalled and not on scihub :(
archive.ps to the rescue: https://archive.is/2ypMx
Yeah, I don't know if this is my idea or if I've absorbed it from elsewhere, but it seems plausible to me that we lose many early memories due to the acquisition of language resulting in a new "filing system."
The earliest thing I can still remember is very carefully pounding flat the texture of our stucco wall (ie the bumps and waves in the wire support, not the individual stucco bits) with my wooden mallet. That was at about 3 years old.
My prime example of "gaining consciousness" is Helen Keller recalling her first encounter with language: https://www.pval.org/cms/lib/NY19000481/Centricity/Domain/105/The%20Day%20Language%20Came%20into%20my%20Life.pdf
> Someone was drawing water and my teacher placed my hand under the spout. As a cool stream gushed over one hand she spelled into the other the word water, first slowly, then rapidly. I stood still, my whole attention fixed upon the motions of her fingers. Suddenly I felt a misty consciousness as of something forgotten—a thrill of returning thought, and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me. I knew then that “w-a-t-e-r” meant the wonderful cool something that was flowing over my hand. The living word awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, joy, set it free! There were barriers still, it is true, but barriers that could in time be swept away.
She talks more about what it was like before she gained consciousness in her other book, "The World I Live In":
https://gutenberg.org/cache/epub/27683/pg27683-images.html#Page_141
"Before my teacher came to me, I did not know that I am. I lived in a world that was a no-world. I cannot hope to describe adequately that unconscious, yet conscious time of nothingness. I did not know that I knew aught, or that I lived or acted or desired. I had neither will nor intellect. I was carried along to objects and acts by a certain blind natural impetus.... After repeatedly smelling rain and feeling the discomfort of wetness, I acted like those about me: I ran to shut the window. But that was not thought in any sense. It was the same kind of association that makes animals take shelter from the rain. From the same instinct of aping others, I folded the clothes that came from the laundry, and put mine away, fed the turkeys, sewed bead-eyes on my doll's face, and did many other things of which I have the tactual remembrance. "
And yet in "The Story of My Life," she talks about playing pranks on adults, trying to communicate with her mouth, and being friends with a servant girl when she was a child. She seemed to have theory of mind well before she had a "mind" of her own.
No memory of awakening to consciousness but I do remember being very embarrassed for pooping my pants, around 2 or 3, which I suppose implies some conception of the self
My first memories were of the tile floor at our old home, where I was crawling I would have been 2-3 I think. I can recall, between 4-10, having some awareness of different types/flavors of thought, being curious, having mystical/spiritual types of experiences, being angry, being excited, etc, and relating or even speculating internally about what different things might connect to those ideas/experiences, as well as being upset if I was shown to be wrong about those connections.
In middle school I got to full self-awareness/self-consciousness, when I observed that a kid I was friends with was annoying and realized I didn't want to be like him, which might have been the first time I considered myself, my mind, as something properly differentiable from others and that I could somewhat shape. Before that though I had a very heightened awareness of experiencing ideas due to a traumatic experience I had where every time I remembered it I tried to suppress that memory, which happened when I was like 9 or something. So in that sense I was phenomenally self aware pretty early, but wasn't socially self aware until puberty.
I have some very vague memories of going camping in an RV with my grandparents; mostly just remembering the feeling that being in an RV was cool. This event happened when I was 3.
Other candidates: I have two memories of the townhouse complex I lived in before my parents bought their (still current) house, which happened when I was 3: one of being in the shared outdoor pool, and one of an older boy teaching me to play rounders in the street.
Finally, I have a memory of looking out a car window, on a nighttime drive in the rain, trying to read the signs as they went by. I've long assumed this was when I was first learning to read, which according to my mom happened around age 3, although I think there's some other evidence it might have been a little later.
My first *existential* memories are in SK, seeing the year on the calendar in our classroom: "1990/1991" and realizing I didn't know what that meant, and later realizing that named years implied a whole world and structure to it that I hadn't been aware of (TBC the letter part I don't have a specific memory, that feeling has attached to the earlier memory)--I would have been 5.
And finally, realizing I was going to die, around age 6--waking up in the night terrified at the realization that one day I would stop being, and going to my parents' bedroom. They (wilfully? I think I remember wondering this even at the time, but I don't know how much to trust that) misunderstood me as worrying about *other* people dying and reassured me that my grandparents were still young and had many years left--not what I was worried about, mom!
Such an interesting post! I don't recall my first memory but I do remember one particular night lying under the stars looking out at the vast night sky between the age of 5-7 and having some sort of freak out/mini panic attack? I then remember having a world-ending dream maybe soon after that.
The classic "Hey doesn't this actually look like I'm hanging by a thread over an infinite abyss?"
Fun fact, technically, you kind of are.
Haha so true!
As I awoke one morning after uneasy dreams, I found myself transformed into a young boy. It was probably around 5-6 when I realized I am not the "previous" boy, the 4-5 yo baby boy.
I think around 12 I realized more fully what time is. I remember thinking that the school year thing will replay until I'm 19 (eastern Europe high school ends at 19), but then there's an abyss. What happens after 19? You pop into adulthood? Who knows!
Around 20 I remember thinking that life is so absolutely terrible at -2^32-1 quality points--either that's the hard stop or it will loop around and be awesome--that it really doesn't matter what a fool I make of myself so I can go ahead and do whatever I feel like, so I become a software engineer.
Just after 30 I realized that I am in control of every action and thought I make and they there are infinite degrees of freedom within the constraints of my life.
So there wasn't anyone moment like what the tweets describe, more like slowly upping resolution.
I'm afraid what realizations await.
There are a few of these I still struggle with:
- The one Scott likes to mention: "I can actually think about my problems and solve them". I know this to be true in theory and I do it, even on a daily basis, but it still feels tenuous, like when you just learned how to ride a bike perhaps.
- Theory of mind of bad or stupid behaviour: I have difficulties conceptualizing what is going on in the mind of somebody who does something evil or stupid. This includes myself! When asked "what where you thinking" I often really don't know. Similarly, often it becomes impossible to explain a misconception once I have learned the correct model. At least that last one is very common, as I can tell from students.
Perhaps related to these I only "realized" a few years ago that people and institutions are often not that competent and benevolent. Of course I knew this on an abstract level but somehow it took me til over 30 to become aware of it. Before the world was somehow still the magical adult world where everyone is a very serious person acting for very serious reasons. I still have to remind that the world is run by people just like me (or often less competent than me) and that I can "just" do things.
Totally agree with this perspective (as I posted above). At least for me there have been a lot more than two stages and I expect there are more still to come.
My first memory is at age 4--holding my younger brother when he came home from the hospital.
No origin-of-consciousness moments, but I remember being either 16 or 17 and thinking, This is the first time I've been able to look back one year and recognize my decisions as being adult-type decisions--the same kind I would make now. Before that, each birthday had me looking back one year at someone who seemed like a child.
I have quite a lot of early memories (Kindergarten and earlier). However, one memory that stands out on this topic:
Somewhere around grade 4-6, I was thinking about consciousness and reflecting on how I saw the "little kids" (anyone a couple years younger than me) as kind of stupid and insignificant. And then I thought, "Uh oh! Maybe in a couple years I'll start to think that people *my* age are like that! That would be very unfair and incorrect. Maybe that's why adults don't treat us kids with respect. I better remember carefully and not forget: I was fully conscious and very intelligent right now."
Sometimes I see old photographs of myself and they reawaken a memory. A birthday party decoration. A friend whose name I've long forgotten. But my first memory is, fittingly, waking up from a dream. An alarm clock was going, which in my dream had somehow become the sound of fire. Then I woke up and was relieved I wasn't currently burning alive.
The memory must be from somewhere around 3-4, because that's when we were living in the room I remember waking up in. However, there's no proof here that I wasn't a p zombie at that point! Perhaps my brain merely processed some stimuli, stored some memories, but there was no me back then to experience any qualia! And only now, as I am re-remembering this memory for the n-th time, am I, for the first time, actually having a conscious experience to go along with the memory.
There is a qualia corollary of the cogito: I know I am conscious right now, but there is no strict evidence I was conscious at any state prior to the current moment. Maybe I wasn't, in a sense, "there" for any of my memories.
I don't have any moment of sudden awakening, just glimpses that are helpfully timestamped. I remember my great grandpa asking how old I was, me saying, "two" and him giving me a two dollar bill. I remember on my third birthday waking up early and running around the house yelling "I'm three!".
One thing I've wondered about though is how much of that I actually remember now, vs remember remembering it. I'd be curious how often or how far back in time we remember things that we've never remembered before. Maybe everything we remembered from long ago is possible because we've occasionally thought about it, like space repetition or something. Wonder if there'd be a way to test this.
I wonder if we could do something like spaced repetition to a child to get them to keep on remembering things from early in life. My theory is that we could get back to the point where they can keep a memory at least 1 day old.
Science project time!
(In reality we somewhat rewrite our memories each time we access them so the true memory wouldn't be quite accurate, but it would still seem real.)
We would need language for instructions though, and language is learned later.
Btw: Injuries (danger in general?) are kept in memory quite well
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/acp.832
> Children who had been 2–13 years of age at the time of a medical emergency (an injury serious enough to require hospital ER treatment) were re-interviewed about their injury and treatment five years after injury, and three years after a previous interview. The children showed excellent recall of the central components of their injury experience, although their recall of hospital treatment was more incomplete. Thus, both the nature of the event being recalled (the injury versus the hospital treatment) and the centrality of information (central versus peripheral) were important. The recall of 2-year-olds, although not as good as that of children just a year older, did not fit with predictions of infantile amnesia since they recalled a considerable amount about their injury.
I just left the same comment before I read this one. And I did try it once, but I didn't have enough contact with the child to make the memory stick. As Marcel mentions, you need the kid to understand language well enough that you can regularly bug them: "Do you remember that time when...."
I definitely fall on the gradually-gained-consciousness side... My first "memory" is some haze of walking into my front porch to see my mom decorating my brithday cake (I was 3; it's pretty much a screenshot of a memory). My second "memory" is having a nightmare of a dragon silhouette in front of the moon and running to my parents' bed to sleep with them (I was 3-4; it lacks details asides from the specific nightmare imagery). While there were other assortments of ideas/feelings/imagery that may count as "memories", my first true *memory* was when we moved (I was 5-6), which was when I started remembering entire scenes and events in a reasonable degree of detail.
I recall laying in bed at my grandmother's house and becoming conscious of my control of my hands. Realizing that my will is somehow transmitted to the meat hooks of my body, and I can make them do anything I want. This happened at a time well after I had been able to walk and hold things, maybe around 4-5.
I also remember noticing my conscious control of my hands for the first time. I've no idea when I first noticed, though. Even in my teens or twenties, I remember occasionally really thinking about it and being kind of... I dunno, amazed? (I tried just now and I got maybe 10% of the amazed experience. It does still seem kind of weird if I really focus on it)
How do we know whether this "snap" is irreversible?
I have some candidates for vivid early memories, but most of last week is blurry
"But she also said she 'doesn’t remember' giving birth to me, so I’m not sure how much I trust her here." I have a vivid memory at four years of age, sitting on my grandfather's shoulders at the auction where he bid on and bought our first house because my father had to work that day. My late father always told me that was bullshit, he was there and I never sat on anybody's shoulders. I have never been clear whose memory is most authoritative.
Hmm, that makes me think we maybe are like AI when young. Someone here said people hallucinate things like pink elephants when we're drunk but LLMs hallucinate things like "perfectly detailed reports of court cases". Perhaps your "sitting on the shoulders" memory is like the AIs court case...
My earliest memories are from 4 or 5, but they are just of things happening (playing in a pile of mud with a friend, scratching my elbow on a barbed wire fence, etc) and not associated with any actual insight or introspection.
My first memory is of me lying scrunched up in the doorframe of the kitchen, drinking from a baby bottle. Don't actually know what age.
I think I was pretending that the bottle was a flute and I was playing it (my mom used to play the recorder for us). It might have also been the first time I was aware that drinking milk from the bottle was a specific experience (temperature, flavor, texture of the mouthpiece, when you bite into it *like this* more milk comes out than when you bite *like that*).
Another very clear memory is my 5th birthday, where I compared my gift to that of my twin brother.
Sometime later that year I also did a test to go to school early. I distinctly remember being shown pictures and asked to name what it was, with the correct grammatical article. My only mistake was "das Tunnel" instead of "der Tunnel". That latter factoid is possibly an implanted memory, but I remember the person showing me the cards with pictures. I was also asked at that time how high I could count, and answering that the question made no sense, because numbers just go on forever.
Which brings me back to an earlier memory of being on the escalator at a mall, bored out of my mind. My mom told me to count numbers. I kept running out of numbers, so she basically ended up teaching me the number system. From around that time I also recall looking at the sliding doors at the supermarket and trying to figure out how they worked. Similar memory of studying the laser at the garage door of my grandparents. Also how elevators work.
IMO it's not a coincidence that all these memories are about figuring out how the world works, and running into stuff that's not self-evident, but requires a *mental model* to understand.
There is a case to be made for thinking of consciousness as a meta-awareness or self-awareness. At least, I remember a few chapters on this in the Blackwell companion to consciousness when I took a course on this some 20 years ago.
If we take this approach, which I am partial to, then first memory doesn't really mean much. But first moment when one thinks "I am a person in the world" or "this is what being me is like right now" or "I wonder if I will remember this later" do. And those might just happen, for most people, a bit later: 10-12 sounds about right judging by my 12-year old and her friends. Maybe that is what that reddit guy meant.
Are there individual differences? Probably. Are people who never have this meta-consciousness as human as those that do? I'm not entirely sure.
I basically agree with this but your last sentence gave me pause. I think we have to take as axiomatic that, at a bare minimum, any person with conscience experience—whether they claim that fact or we infer it—is fully “human”, with all the moral weight that entails. Do you agree? If not, I’d be very interested to know why.
12 sounds very late. I clearly remember my 8 year old self having complex enough thoughts and agency that I can't imagine not being conscious then. Heck, one of my oldest musings was "what would it be like for an instant to experience being simultaneously all of the living beings in the world?". That sounds like the idea of someone who has qualia and sense of self.
So it's going to be as much difficult to say when AI gain consciousness. You inspired me writing an article about that...
Isn't it likely that one simply forgets their first conscious moment? Maybe it happens a few times before it sticks. You forget a lot of things that happen after you get consciousness, too, anyway
btw, I can pinpoint my earliest memory to the date: my family singing happy birthday on my 3rd birthday
My first memory was of eating grapes in the kitchen. Two years old. I told my mom this recently and she didn't believe me. I responded by describing the floor plan of that house (that we moved out of when I was 2) in sufficient detail that she concluded it was a real memory. For what it's worth.
I date this memory to when I was five years old, because I remember it being in the living room of our house in Illinois, and we moved from that house the month before I turned six:
I looked at our couch — which at that age would have been as tall as I was — and suddenly conceived of an enormous version of the same couch, with a Giant sitting on it holding a book, and reading that book to his giant son sitting next to him. And I thought: what if my life were just the story that the Giant was reading to his son? And so I experimented by narrating the next few minutes to myself ("Brandon walked from the living room into the hallway" or whatever), in the third person, as though my story were being told by that Giant from the book.
Quiet to-myself narration (hopefully my lips didn’t move!) was a regular habit for many years after that, probably indulged in for at least a few minutes of every day. Which meant that things like emotions, travails, and conflicts were often processed by immediately re-telling them to myself as though they formed some kind of coherent plot.
I suddenly wonder if, in elementary school, there were days when I was performing my life more for my own interior narrator, than for all the kids who had to share the classroom with me?
I think there's two separate things going on here. My first "yeah, that's definitely mine and not something someone else implanted later" memories look like they're from around 2-3. I remember figuring out how to open the fridge by bracing my feet against the side and pushing, and my kids both figured that out around 2-3. I also remember being a little disgusted when my aunts would talk baby talk to me. "Hey, I'm trying to talk correctly, don't set a bad example, I need to learn!", and that was probably around the same time or slightly earlier.
Those are distinct from and way earlier than learning the thing about being able to change reality around you. Won't go into the details on mine but that was around 9 or 10; I was a passive participant in life before that point, and active after.
I know many adults who don't appear to have ever hit that second stage yet. I've always thought of it as entering logic phase, in the classical model (typically 8-12) but it sounds like it's not guaranteed.
Not conscious yet; still waiting for the moment when I Awaken 🙏🙏🙏
I have plenty of memories from early childhood, but I can neither place them in a sequence (so, cannot say which one is first). I do have clear "reflective" memories, where I thought of myself in the abstract. I realised I had a different way of thinking, observing, noticing the world than others. This was at a pretty early age, maybe even at 5 or 6, but for sure by the age of 12-13, I had a clear identity of how I was, indeed, different from others in my age group.
The QC tweet also reminds me of a moment when I realised how I could change myself through conscious effort in a pre-decided direction.
Nevertheless, while there are various moments which are "memories", I would say that a narrative of "series of improvements in agency/consciousness" represents my experience better than pin-pointing some stand-alone origin.
On that first part, bingo. My memory is generally poor as it is (a trauma response) but generally all my memories are linked to life chapters and while I can sequence the chapters, not the paragraphs within them. Sometimes I can sequence them if I try hard enough via context (i.e. I must have been age X because I remember house Y) but other than my entire life is basically vague memories of "4-9", 10, 11-13, 14-18, 19-24, 25-29, 30-32, 33-50, 50-now. And by vague I mean vague, as in at most two dozen memories where I barely know the details, like a barely remembered dream and maybe one or two strong full memories. I'm always amazed when people tell me stories of last month, much less, their young in exacting detail.
On his mother, that also doesn't surprise me. I have no memory of my own kids at all beyond intellectually knowing I had some. Literally couldn't tell you a single childhood story involving my kids.
@Solhando already mentioned this but there's no way to discern how much observership bias is involved. The earliest memory I've been able to muster as an adult, whenever this topic has come up, is seeing some dangly toy contraption illuminated in the moonlight as I lay in my crib, at ?? months. I can even recall the conflicting emotions of fear and awe in that moment, and can ascribe significance to them now, relative to the Emergence of the Prime Observer. But maybe when I was eight, I had eight additional memories (including that one devastating equipment malfunction by Tannhäuser) from earlier times that have been lost to time. And since we know memory formation is energetically sigmoid-y, feels reasonable to assume there were at least some minimalist episodic memories that had been encoded prior that hadn't found any additional connectivity since
My earliest memory is being in an hospital at age 2 or so. The child in the bed beside me always hammered his feet against some metal thing standing beside his bed and I couldn't sleep due to that.
I cried loud for the nurse in the hope she helps and when she arrived got scolded instead, because of course the other child immediately stopped hammering against the metal thing with his feet, and then I was totally unable to explain what actually happened because I simply had not enough words available to me.
Now, that memory is actually older than my feeling of becoming conscious, which happened at 3 or 4 in kindergarten. I just remember one day was special. I went outside. And suddenly knew I was there, things were TOTALLY different from one second to next. Up to that moment I kinda felt like a passive, dreaming passenger in my body but I suddenly felt having agency (without knowing the word at that time of course) and decided at that moment I must be some kind of superhero.
> six-month-old is dumber than a cow, then babies must go from unconscious to conscious
This assumes "consciousness" comes from intelligence, and isn't something like opposable thumbs.
It's an interesting idea, but if that's so, where's the evolutionary benefit? Does consciousness make you better at something?
See “Beast Machine” theory of consciousness by Anil Seth and the work of Mark Solms (The Hidden Spring) who claim precisely this — that consciousness does play a critical role in the survivability of organisms. It’s not derived from intelligence but provides a mechanism for intelligence to be applied towards e.g. free energy minimization
Interesting, but I assume this means something like "being able to reflect on the self and its place in the world enables you to enact longer term strategies"? Because if that's the case, it still means that "qualia" ought to be some inextricable side effect of doing that.
My four year old learned about death last year and at night when we're getting snuggly will say "I don't want to die" or "I hope I never die <in place or at time>". Seems kinda conscious-y!
OTOH my 7 year old never has expressed anything of the sort. I've sat him down before and asked him if he ever wonders why we're here and what the meaning of anything is and he goes "huh? no! what?"
I did ask 7yo "if you didn't have breakfast this morning how would you feel?" conditional hypothetical question and he passed though. Very curious.
I don’t have a memory of suddenly becoming conscious. (My first memory is of taking my first steps.) But I do have an awakening memory of sorts. It was 1975; I was eight years old. I was walking alone in the woods and reflecting on how argumentative adults were. (My parents were NOT particularly argumentative; I was thinking about adults in general.) Religion, for example: countless people convinced of the correctness of their beliefs, yet at most only a fraction of them could actually be correct. And I reflected further about how adults seem more committed to winning arguments than to actually being correct. I realized in that moment that I was in dire epistemic peril (though the word wasn’t in my vocabulary). If I wanted to actually be correct about anything, and not just seem to be correct to impress others, I would have to be very careful not to make that mistake. In retrospect, this was my awakening as an aspiring rationalist.
Around age 5-6, looking out the rear window of the car after being picked up from kindergarten. I vividly remember the brown wood paneling on the kindergarten facade, and telling whoever picked me up that some boy toppled my building blocks tower, while at the same time feeling weird for talking about something so unimportant. (This was the only normal kindergarten I ever went to, and I was there only for a few months; this is my only memory of it, and no one else remembers this specific situation.) All of my "earlier" memories are obvious confabulations based on parents' anecdotes or photographs.
Hum... playing in the creek behind grandma's house as a pre schooler (would have been in K if they had it) is the oldest memory that I have any confidence in. All the rest could have been primed by pictures or stories. But no else was around down at the creek and maybe it was a bit scary? After that, maybe full consciousness around college graduation? Before that life just occurred and I flowed along with the current. Talked to my high school science teacher (all four years) at the 50th reunion last year, and he said he was afraid that life was just going to run me over. Guess I got lucky and life currents washed me up on a nice beach.
I have some memories of what I think was 3-5:
Shitting myself, realising how warm was it to use it as a chair and getting reprimanded by a kindergarden teacher.
Bringing down the TV and its placard on myself (the old TV)
Getting my ass whooped cause I almost got killed by a bus cause I was crossing the street.
Getting lost somewhere in the field while visiting some cousins.
I cant really recall anything too introspective, Maybe when I got an F because I forgoth homework when I was 7, or when I red my first word when I was 6.
Ludi, I love your shitting comment just because you are the first person I've ever heard express that in a way I can empathize as I had a similar vivid memory once with vomit and people think I'm nuts lol.
I was in my late teens and during a night of heavy drinking (nothing new then) I decided to make my drink of the night Alize. I have no memory of that night other than I remember I woke up in my own bed vomiting all over myself while still completely drunk and thought "I'm still drunk, it's cold out, and this vomit is extremely warm and comforting like a form fitting second blanket, I'm going back to sleep, I'll clean up in the morning".
Still can't even so much as smell Alize without nausea but that feeling of warmth and the detached dissociated analysis of its positive qualities has always stuck with me.
I have a few memories of mundane early-childhood experiences, but I can't date or order most of them—except that one happens to be of a phone conversation with my aunt about my then-upcoming third birthday, which allows it to be dated.
I also started having attacks of solipsism at a fairly early age, but again, not sure exactly when.
I guess an obvious question to my mind is, why does any of this matter/what makes anyone think that there's a real distinction to be drawn here?
The context in which I'm most used to arguing about this is in debates about whether nonhuman mammals and birds are conscious/have subjective experience/have something it's like to be/are moral patients, which of course has implications for ethical vegetarianism/veganism. I'm on the pro-animal-consciousness side, and have long been perplexed by a theory on the other side that consciousness is generated by some kind of self-reflected metacognitive process that requires the conscious mind to be aware that it's conscious, which most nonhuman animals can't be. This implies that young children also aren't conscious, even if their adult selves have memories of this stage, and at least one locally prominent intellectual bites the bullet on this and holds that three-year-olds aren't moral patients. I think my early attacks of solipsism are potentially relevant to this debate, but I never really managed to get anywhere with it.
Leaving aside that particular question, though, the whole thing seems like it's mostly just vibes and trolling. I figure we should mostly go with a minimalist account of the distinction (i.e., a maximalist account of which people are conscious) unless there's specific reason to think otherwise.
I have lots of very early childhood memories, some of them pre-verbal. Looking at my diaper pins and realizing that the yellow plastic part looked like a duck. Looking out the window at night at our neighbors' houses, and their lights turning on and off as they went about their business seemed definitely coordinated. Placing a glass on the ground and it suddenly, spontaneously broke. Sticking my fingers in a socket and getting a shock. Nudging my mom's ironing board, looking up, and the tip of the iron suddenly appearing over the edge of the board. Wondering for awhile what was "inside" people and then finding the answer when I cut my finger on something sharp. I still have that scar. These are all before I could talk.
I'm not sure I have a memory like "Now I am awake!!" but once I remember pooping while in a bathtub and then ... sometime later I was outside of the bathtub and my mom was cleaning soggy poo out of the bathtub. I remember wondering at the time if the two events were related, and then concluding they probably were. That I was continuous, and events are connected.
I never understood the socket thing. How can anyone stick a finger there? The openings are way too small.
Elizabeth Bishop wrote a poem about this.
https://poets.org/poem/waiting-room
I vividly remember some time in my early teenage years (I forget exactly when) beating the video game Portal, unlocking the developer commentary, and then playing through with that commentary and realizing that art is made by people who make choices about what goes into the art.
Not quite what you asked about, but it's the closest I have to something like that, so I figured I'd share.
Never heard about anything like this, seems interesting. In my earliest memories I was already as conscious as I've ever gotten, so the transition, however gradual, must have happened before that and went sadly unremembered.
I have a pet theory that people like those who posted the tweets in this article must have some obscure interest in making themselves seem precocious, by a posteriori meaning-loading moments that were probably much less dramatic and metacognitive at the time they happened.
Sure, there must be a moment where your first meta reflection thought erupts, but everyone I've ever asked about their first memory (n ≈ 30 I guess?) has replied with a somewhat blurry event, either completely banal like waking up in the morning before going to school, or traumatic/shocking to some extent.
Don't toddlers start manipulative behaviors quite early, like lying to get more sweets or faking pain for cuddles and.. sweets I guess? For them to engage in this kind of behavior, wouldn't they have had to wrestle with primitive meta-images of the self, and planning along steps to reach a certain outcome knowing how others would react to the behavior they present? Maybe that's one of the first inklings of "consciousness", except if we assume toddler behaviors arise completely free from conscious thought and pondering, "naturally" or through unconscious mimicry of behaviors they discern from their parents and other toddlers?
That's why I mostly don't buy the "I remember gaining consciousness when I was in a wheat field at age 5 and realized the universe was infinitely larger than myself and thus my importance in this world was staggeringly reduced from instinct-puppetry to deep-thought-agency" kinda thing. To me it's more likely that it's just the earliest one they can remember to this day, which says pretty much nothing about what the child's meta-cognition was like around that time (6 months prior to the consciousness event or whatever).
agreed. first memory seems as if it would likely be either completely banal or traumatic on average.
Does Skinner's model of a child randomly trying behaviours and then responding to reward and punishment not explain how kids can manipulate their parents? I don't think this requires any deep insight or even consciousness to pull off.
It's also pretty well established that memories mutate over time, being slightly altered each time they are remembered, just as stories grow in the telling. It might not even be a conscious process, but I can imagine people who tell about their first memory regularly eventually developing a more interesting version of it.
My own first memory is of being in the kitchen in winter with my mother, I would have been 4, most likely. I have a handful of other memories from around that time, none of any significance. My brother's first memory is of saying 'Mama where are X, Y, and Z?' (me and our sisters, all older than him); to which my mother responds 'They're at school.' He claims this happened when he was less than a year old. Obviously this is nonsense, but he has been claiming this with conviction since the age of 6 or so (now 31).
I don't know that toddler's have to have complex ToM to manipulate folks, but I agree that the twitter posts here are pretentious and trying to make themselves seem precocious. My memories are also hazy.
I have two vivid memories from age three:
- I was in the hospital for appendicitis. They were wheeling me into the OR on a stretcher but I was scared so I grabbed a door frame to try to stop them from wheeling me in.
- I was at a relative’s lake house. I slipped off the pier into the water and went under. There was a large crab underwater there waving its claws at me. My mother jumped up from where she was sitting and leapt into the water to save me.
Both of these are based on things that actually happened to me (I actually had appendicitis, I actually fell in a lake) but I’m 100% certain neither is actually a real memory. (The second memory includes an event I couldn’t have seen from my perspective underwater... Also, I don’t think freshwater crabs exist?)
My first real memory (or at least, the memory I have tagged as “first!”) is waking up from a nap and walking down the hall and seeing my father sitting in the living room playing solitaire. (With actual cards. I’m old.) There’s nothing special about this memory and I don’t know why it stuck. (Maybe it’s really an amalgam of lots of “waking up after nap time” memories.)
Hm, I mean I have memories that are definitely real (from age >13) and corroborated by many people where I "see" myself (and the whole situation) from above. That it's embellished in your mind does not necessarily mean it is completely fake?
Freshwater crabs definitely do exist some places, when I was a kid I caught one in the foothills of the andes mountains ~60plus miles and +3500ft of elevation from the ocean.
My first memory involves me breaking a mercury thermometer in my bedridden great grandma's room. I remember a lot of adults being very concerned and trying to remove all the cool shiny liquid that I really wanted to play with. It's not a significant life event. I just remember it because it was intense and after a while it was also what I'd think of as my first memory, so I kept bringing it up in my mind. I think that's all there is to it. To me it seems like the most plausible scenario is that consciousness is gradual and memories of people gaining it are just moments they had some profound realisations that they then go on remembering because it felt profound.
I seem to have gone through this a couple times, like a flashlight with loose batteries.
I remember being in a stroller and my sister taking an ice cream cone from me and my dad telling her that she could have it because she’d dropped hers. That is what I believe is the earliest one but it didn’t just become continuous after that.
I remember leaning my head against windows a lot because they were cool and I would watch wind blow through the trees. And I’d just imagine things.
Then another one in preschool where I was wearing a pith helmet and looking at a leaf with a magnifying glass and holding a purse, which I remember insisting was a satchel because it was okay for boys to have a satchel. Not sure where I learned the word satchel from.
I don’t recall the specific moment they became continuous though.
I do think, at a high level for humans and with some hand waving in what this means, that consciousness is a software event. Or rather, awareness of consciousness is a software event. I think it’s probably what caused the creative explosion in early hominids.
I have significantly earlier memories than this (which I can be sure are of less than age 3.5 because they are of a house I moved out of at that age) but I do remember a distinct experience of attempting deliberately to remember something. I would have been about four, and I was looking at the orange sofa in our kitchen during the evening. (Great memory past self, real classic /s)
I don't recall any notable moment of first self awareness, in this or any other memory.
Definitely no "single moment".
My first memory that stuck was when I was under 3 years old, getting lost on a ferry from England to Norway, and knocking on cabin doors asking where my mum was. Could have been a big moment in my emergent consciousness, but it could have just been that the story was repeated so often that it became my only stable "memory" for a while.
My first "existential moment" was about a year later, asking where my grandad was (who'd died over a decade before I was born), understanding what it means to be dead, then being inconsolable.
I think I developed a kind of meta-consciousness, realising that I had some semblance of free will to control my behaviour/choice architecture at some stage when I was 11 or so. I recognised the difference between immediate preferences and meta-preferences, threw my Pokemon cards in the bin, and committed to resist short-term temptation and live my life more productively. Didn't become super productive, mind, but felt like a big moment.
The ambiguity of the word "consciousness" is, I think, bigger, and more problematic to this discussion than people suspect. I understand consciousness as something like "first-person experience" (here I go replacing one unclear term with another). So when someone says "I only gained consciousness when I was 12", I understand it to mean "after I was 12, being me felt like something, but when I was 11, it wasn't like anything to be me, there wasn't any perceiver of experiences of whom you could say that it was me". Is that really what is meant? That you could interact with this person when they're 11, have a conversation with them if they're verbal at this age (as is likely), with no experience on the other end? WTF. I have no way of checking that I'm not the only human being having experiences and it's not all my hallucination, but I have that assumption as a matter of politeness.
I cannot relate to the stories of ever gaining "first-person experience" — I have it and I don't remember not being aware of myself, to suddenly notice myself later; gaps in my memory feel like failures to recall experience rather than lack of experience. I have lots of childhood memories — though, for one thing, many of them (but not all) are childhood trauma (i. e. a relative bullying me), and for another thing, my memory is unusually good in certain aspects. 12 is shockingly late for first memories for me, by that time I already had a pretty complex personality; I'd say my earliest memories are probably from 2 or 3 years old.
My mom told me that she has very early memories, from before she was verbal at all. She described an exact situation, involving her mother, in great detail, and part of the recollection is definitely that she wasn't verbal (I think it was part of the situation, like she felt or knew something she couldn't get across because she couldn't talk yet.) It could be a false memory, of course, but I'm not quite certain. Her mother doesn't remember the situation, but it was an ordinary one, not something she'd be likely to remember.
Also, my mom told me that, before I learned to talk, I was crying and she didn't know what was wrong, so she said (without really meaning it, just something that came in the moment) something like "Where does it hurt? Can you at least show me and then I'll know" and I pointed to the tummy and she was surprised by the implication that I understood her question and gave her some meaningful response. This could be some coincidence or misunderstanding, though. And *theoretically* it doesn't mean I wasn't a p zombie (because p zombie behavior should not be different in any way), but practically it does show a certain level of being involved in the situation somehow.
It's very fun to read about all these experience that are very alien to me - I never had anything quite like this. Or at least, I have no memories of anything of the sort ever happening to me.
I do have some early memories, but I'm suspicious of most them, since there's a big overlap between the stories my parents told me about my childhood and what I "remember".
Most of it is very vague anyway, and usually involves interactions with people. Nothing before the age of 4 for sure.
The first vivid memory I have no doubts about is much later, I was 8. And it's probably so vivid and memorable because it was a very embarrassing incident I was teased about for the rest of my school years.
TBH I think this is the norm, I think people are overly confident in their memories.
It's not my first memory, but I vividly remember the moment when I found out that two different people can have the same name. I had a friend named Chris Hanley when I was a child in Passaic, NJ and then around age 6 moved to a different town and met a different Chris Hanley was like "What the fuck is going on??!!!"
😀
I have a few memories I know are from ages 2-3, because we lived in a different country for a year. I couldn't say for sure what the "first" one was, but I remember the following clearly, because I learned Theory of Mind:
I went to my mom with a cup, asking for apple juice. She started to pour it into my cup, and when there was enough for my liking I pulled my cup away. Predictably (to you, not to me), the apple juice coming from the bottle spilled on the floor. My mom explained to me that when I had enough, I had to let her know before pulling the cup away. Clearly this was a new category of thing (other minds) to worry about.
I think that I gradually gained reflective self-consciousness, and that early memories have less of it--they feel less "interior" perhaps. I think a Theory of Other Minds needed me to have a sufficient amount of interiority to contemplate self-other distinctions. But this may not be strictly necessary for memory.
My first memory is going to the hospital because I drank a bunch of cherry tylenol (which I liked the flavour of). I don't remember the drinking of it, or the trip to the hospital. I just remember the white walls, the bed in the corner, drinking charcoal (that bit really stands out to me), and getting a popsicle afterward. Unfortunately I don't recall any metacognition related to the event. Though strangely for the longest time I thought this happened around the age of 5, and thus wasn't my first memory (my believed-first memory was me asking my mom if we had fruit roll-ups and she said we did, and pointed to the hiiiiighest cupboard in the kitchen, far out of my reach). But I recently asked my mom about it, and she said I was only 2 when it happened. So perhaps I was judging firstness just based on how distant the memory felt, and unsurprisingly the hospital memory was very vivid relative to distance.
Very tangential to consciousness, but a somewhat interesting look at first memories.
I have a fair number of memories from when I was young, probably 2-4 years of age, I don't recall any of them being standout in terms of "I'm conscious now", maybe the one in which I was in my parents bedroom and found a pair of scissors. I decided to give my favorite stuffed animal a quick haircut because that seemed like a thing that needed to be done. Fortunately I didn't entirely ruin it, the same stuffed animal is now in my own kids bedroom, but I can at least recall having a thought process even if it was half baked.
I do have a vivid memory of the time my mind switched into a more adult mode of thought. That probably was closer to 10-12, I don't recall the exact age, but I was on a trampoline with a friend and we were playing 'pokemon', which basically meant jumping up and down while throwing our hands out and imagining blasting things with fire or whatever. At some point, the thought passed through my head "this is kinda pointless", and the thought was like glass shattering inside my head. I now saw what I was doing specifically as play, and could get bored of it in a way I didn't before that.
My earliest memory related to some form of consciousness is somewhere around age 2 (corroborated by my parents because it involves a kindergarten teacher talking to them about my precocious behaviours). I remember being put to bed for nap time in day-care and lying there not understanding why I had to nap and why the other children around me could just go to sleep on command. I kept my eyes closed pretending to sleep until I couldn't anymore out of boredom. It was a clear moment of realizing there was an "I" that didn't conform to the external world around me. I also vaguely remember not wanting to sleep in case I didn't wake up again, and that there were too many interesting things to do to sleep. I do worry this is interpretation in retelling it though. The only thing that feels clear is the memory of turning my head and seeing children around me sleeping and feeling intensely alienated by the experience, eventually leading me to get up and ask my teacher if I could read books.
In contrast, around age 8 I clearly remember wanting to die and having to convince myself not to find ways to kill myself, like drinking bleach. I felt deep despair throughout most of my childhood, and it culminated at a point where I had an internal dialogue about whether or not life was worth living if you experienced it the way I did. In the end I decided that if I couldn't cope with the world, I could use my life to try and ease the suffering of others by being a kind, supportive person. That was a real turning point for me in terms of living consciously and taking control of my agency. It's also the first anecdote I tell a therapist when I start work with them, because it feels monumental to me. Luckily I am no longer so depressed as an adult, and still always doing my best to be kind.
I think this all speaks to psychologist Robert Keagan's development theory (laid out in his book "In Over Our Heads") where he describes different stages of self-conception that people progress through (which I learned about through its lens that these developmental stages continue in adulthood, and not all adults reach all levels of "consciousness" in this context). The Second stage, where people move from being purely impulsive to conceptualizing the self as a consistent entity that exists over time, seems to correspond to that early 4-6 moment of consciousness people describe. The Third stage, understanding that you exist in systems with others, matches that 12-18 stage.
The later stages 4 & 5, which are maybe formal definitions of what Twitter today would call "agency," are even more interesting (ie I can make choices to co-author the systems I'm in). As is his argument that the "cultural curriculum" that teaches us how to be adults does a poor job helping people reach the later stages.
For years I thought my first memory was getting in trouble for something silly at about age 5 and I've generally considered my memory of early childhood to be quite poor.
However, I've always had the distinct memory of the bizarre pain and invasiveness of a doctor extracting a tube from my ear, which I had assumed happened sometime in elementary school (it just "felt" like that age in my memory). A couple of years ago while looking at my medical records I discovered this procedure happened when I was barely 2.
Honestly it was comforting because my relative lack of childhood memories has given me some anxiety that the haze of the distant past would continue to grow thicker until I'd forgotten my childhood entirely. Now I think it's possible those memories are still stored in my brain and I'm just not nostalgic enough about that time period to readily bring them forth, but with practice and technique I probably could produce more of them.
That said, I have no idea what any of this means for consciousness, and I'm suspicious enough about memory to not draw many conclusions about this age 2 memory. For instance, it seems entirely plausible to me that the raw sensation stayed in my memory and the thoughts of, "this is a unique pain that feels very invasive and I don't like it at all" were added later as I remembered the raw feeling. Or maybe that's not how any of this works.
What is the point of memory? Why does memory have to be a marker of consciousness? Is consciousness the same thing as self consciousness?
My first memories are from kindergarten, but I'm unsure if I was conscious at that time or, as the original Tweeter said, I had merely recalled and connected to the memory later.
I'm reasonably certain I had consciousness during primary school as I was playing the "cutting stuff seen from car window with inaginary blade" game while traveling with my parents which necessitates visual qualia at least.
I've only realised how weird consciousness is in college and only there did I notice that people differ surprisingly in their reports of inner experiences. All my dormmates were selected for academic achievment yet some got what I referred to from the slightest hint, like "blueness of blue", and to some we couldn't explain what we've meant at all, and even after hours all we've got were confused looks.
I have to admit, at the time, I felt quite nice to be of the type "who gets it", and only later when I've come to agree with Keith Frankish's school of thought that consciousness is merely quasi-phenomenal, did I change my mind to envy those who were born without this particular mental flaw.
Not sure if this is the same thing but did not gain self awareness until I was 31 years old. Was operating under some sort of autopilot and then in an instant realized what and who I was and where I was in the world
Can you describe more on what that was like and why it happened?
Yes went to see my doctor for the umpteenth time about depression. Broke down crying, he stared at me and went to another room and came back with yet another anti depressant and just handed it to me. Left, went and sat down in my car and was overwhelmed with a feeling of being completely alone and that I was dying, describe it as waking up and you're treading water in the middle of the Pacific. Up until that point it was like I had never even been exposed to the concept of having agency in my own life and that I urgently needed to do something
Do you think that it's possible you were self-aware earlier, but that the "chain of awlf-awareness" became severed somehow?
If I was it was early enough that I don't remember
I remember visiting my grandmother's house at age 4 or 5, talking to my uncle (or aunt?). I was showing off counting to 100 (my latest trick). My uncle told me to keep going beyond 100. This was new territory for me. So I counted: "101, 102, ... 109, 200!" My uncle corrected me that 110 follows 109. This was a revelation to 4-yo me, as I started to understand that "one hundred" was a different type of quantity than "eighty" or "ninety".
I have other memories from around this time (e.g. first day of kindergarten) that are also sharp and involve an internal realization. I have vague memories of when I was younger, but they are more like impressions. They have faded as I've aged and might be corrupted by watching old family videos.
Enough kids aged 2-7 make spontaneous remarks about "when they were big" and how they died that it spurred some research (see: Division of Perceptual Studies, University of Virginia). Happened around me more than once, too, but the parents did their best to shut such things down, so no record thereof. In Czech society, no one wants his kids to be "weird" or even "crazy", and such things would be considered weird and crazy.
If you absolutely rule out reincarnation as a concept, you can stop reading here; for everyone else, I propose the hypothesis that the veil of early childhood amnesia could be a protective mechanism against reliving bad things that you can do nothing about anymore.
Interestingly, the collection of cases that abovementioned Division of Perceptual Studies has been maintaining seems to indicate that violent deaths are overrepresented in the database.
My first episodic memory is of being 2 or 3, of a night I was super pissed off that my mom made me wear a diaper to bed despite my being potty trained. The discomfort of the diaper and my level of righteous rage at the matter are still very vivid in my mind so many years later.
But my first memories, period, are from before that, about ideas and introspection rather than events specifically. The first *thought* I remember having was that there was hard reality, and there was a separate world of dreams and imagination; and I recall several instances of trying to distinguish the two, as in: "Is this a dream right now, or reality?" For instance, I distinctly remember the first time I thought, "Oh, cartoons are fake. But this 3-D meaty world of high-def people and objects is real."
I've always assumed this was a very strange thing about me, about having memories that early and about them being so philosophical in nature. I am interested to read these comments to see if anyone has a similar story.
My earliest memories are of dreams. First involves crawling under a porch with a neighborhood friend and getting cut on a sharp edge — I had never bled in real life, and the blood itself generated the pain in my dream.
Second was a nightmare that has been seared in my memory ever since — Santa Claus came over (entering through the back door, not the chimney). My dad comes down to see was the commotion is, Santa rips off his hat to reveal that he’s the Big Bad Wolf. I yell “punch him, Dad!” But it’s too late and the Wolf bites off his head and I wake up.
Sometimes I think it’s not optimal to have such a strong autobiographical memory, and I wonder if negative emotion is connected somehow.
My earliest ‘memory’ is a brief snapshot crawling on the kitchen floor, but I suspect this is confabulated. My first verifiable memory is also the first day of kindergarten, my twin sister and I were crying.
While I can’t point to a specific memory of gaining consciousness, I do have a specific memory at age 17 of having an experience of greater introspection and understanding about my thoughts and emotions. Having grown up somewhat emotionally dysregulated and been through years of on and off counseling to get better control, I suddenly felt like I could experience my thoughts and emotions as they came, like a river, and being able to inspect and interrogate each one. Dramatically improved my ability to just be chill about things.
I also had an experience about three years back after reading a lot of David Chapman, as if something was building inside me emotionally and was about to burst. I told a friend that I felt something was off and not to be alarmed if I started acting weird, and half an hour later had a sudden moment of feeling that my emotional state was like the wheel of a car, which I could steer in any direction I chose. I grabbed hold of it and swung it all the way to the happy end, and spent several hours just smiling, thanking people, asking to hug them, and reflecting on the fact I was having an unusual mental experience while simultaneously enjoying it. Faded slowly after a couple hours. My friends were weirded out. Fell off the meditation train some time after and never replicated it, never took psychedelics either.
Also, reading some of the other comments, when I was maybe 5 or 6 I was watching an educational show on the computer and learned that in billions of years the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies would collide and be destroyed, and it freaked me the fuck out. I told my parents, they were very confused and were about to take me and my sisters out for dinner, I instead insisted on staying home and crying.
Not sure I was particularly concerned about the galaxy so much as the certainty that everything would be destroyed inevitably, even though I wouldn't be there to see it, BUT OH MY GOD I WON'T BE THERE TO SEE IT I'M GOING TO DIE.
I also went to bed a lot of nights crossing my fingers that nuclear war wouldn't start and kill me while I slept. I grew up in Spain, we're on nobody's nuke list. I think I was just a weird and anxious kid.
Not exactly consciousness, but I find myself going through much of life without "agency". There was one time, in my late 20s, while reading many articles on LessWrong about agency, that I felt for the first time an existential fear of death. Generally, the idea of ceasing to exist doesn't bother me. But in this moment, I felt it viscerally, and wondered how I could have possibly not felt it before.
Eventually, it faded and now I'm back to "normal". I know I can talk about and reflect on this happening, and reflect on myself in general, but it's not the same. It's almost as if there are some higher-level connection in my brain that just aren't happening.
On the other hand, my earliest memory is from when I was around 4.
I have very few episodic memories that I can intentionally recall, although I'm sure lots are in there somewhere. I definitely feel like I was ~always conscious in the self-aware sense. I would tell my friends about I wanted to die just to satisfy my curiosity about the experience of dying when I was four.
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You could tell two stories about “first memories”:
Intelligence and memory gradually grow from infancy to adulthood, and at some point they reach a point where people can form reflective memories. There logically has to be some first memory, so if you ask someone for their earlier memory, they can usually think of it.
There’s some moment when the developing brain suddenly shifts from a preconscious to a conscious mode of thought.
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You're overlooking the most-likely story: Concepts gradually coalesce in the brain, as they do in a neural network being trained, becoming stronger attractors which provide more and more predictive power, and as they do, memories formed using those concepts become clearer and more stable. "There logically has to be some first memory" is the sandpile fallacy. Years later, there may be an oldest-surviving-and-recallable memory, but at the moment that memory was formed, earlier memories were no doubt still available.
This seems right to me.
I don't have any particular memory of consciousness switching on like this.
I have fairly distinct memories of preschool, which I think I was 4. I have other memories around that time, but I cannot fit them into a chronology so I can't be sure they are earlier. School memories are easy to date because you know what grade you were in.
As a child I felt what may have been an unusual degree of control over myself. I usually did things my own way and I think other kids thought I was a bit weird for that. I did get along with people well enough anyway, so it wasn't in a weirdly autistic way. Nor do I think it was in a cool way where I displayed unusual levels of self-confidence externally. More just that from a young age I did not have a high regard for other people's opinions. But I don't recall an epiphany where I realized I was in control of myself.
Mine might be fake on priors because it's implausibly young, but I really do think I remember it, in the category of "thinking about your own mind for some reason." I was at my 2nd birthday party, and the adults were talking about the "loot bags" (local name for "goody bag," the little bags of garbage toys kids get to take home from birthday parties). The bags themselves were blue, and at first I thought they said "blue bags" because that was a word I knew and then I realized that was wrong and "loot" must be a word. This is a memory that took place fully inside my mind, so it's unverifiable but also it definitely isn't from someone telling me the story later.
I don't know if this is true but I once heard that memory and language are related in such a way that kids who talk very young are more likely to have very early memories, and I was reportedly a bilingually chatty toddler.
This reminds me of an early memory of mine. I was surely conscious before this, but when I was (dunno) five or six I was reading a comic book—the protagonist was in a prison cell but was thin enough that he could slip between the bars, and said as much to somebody else: “See? I can just slip between the bars!”
What makes this stick for me was that I had seen the word many times and in my head pronounced it “bet ween”, and in this occasion I realized that it was the word “between”, which I already knew.
As an adult I have always marveled at how many things I must have experienced without understanding them, and without even knowing or caring that I didn’t.
I was conscious for a few minutes when I was 2. I disabled it out of spite. As a philosophical zombie, I have no problem with suffering or vivisection. I do not know what morality or socially awkward means. For fun, I enjoy reaching for police officers' guns, stealing tanks from military bases and holding my breath. When faced with a problem, I simply overclock my brain and force up the solution by ceaselessly thinking about the problem for several days. I reward my conscious servant-thralls with utility and hedons, which I hoard in my surgically-implanted marsupial pouch.
I feel as though I have no /real/ memories until as late as high school even though I know a lot about my experiences before then (I can recall the names of each of my teachers and which students I had as classmates, I know what years we did particular lessons and projects, etc.) None of these come in the form of a first person experience but as a knowing of the facts of a situation as if I read about it. One relevant example is that, after graduating high school, I encountered my elementary school bully who had moved away and recognized him immediately before we spoke to each other despite not being able to sit and imagine what his face or any of my classmates looked like at that time. No conscious memory of it, but clearly /some/ kind of memory there. Even for fairly recent memories where I can get very specific about the event, I need to close my eyes and focus on it to "remember" experiences vs. accurately answering questions about them.
But I feel pretty conscious! I am able to reflect on my internal state, internal dialogue, and so on, and remember the thoughts I was having and ways I was speaking to myself very closely in the scope of the same day or two. I am, however, fairly alexithymic and frequently need to follow paths like "I am breathing heavily and clenching my hands, therefore I am probably upset" to assess my emotional state. This likely explains it, but my internal dialogue feels unmediated and able to reply to itself and reflect on how it's operating.
Hard tellin'
I vividly remember* a moment when I was 9 years old in my school, standing in the large playground, and I realized that it was entirely in my control to ruin my life. Like, I *could* at any point throw myself off the stairs, I could go to the police guy I had seen and punch him, I could try to hurt someone. And of course I would not do these things, but not doing this was a *choice*.
This moment struck me as significant even at the time. Significant enough that I promised myself I wouldn't forget it, and "anchored" that day as the day I recognized my own free will, and built realization into the narrative of my own self-conception.
I'm fairly confident this wasn't actually the earliest conscious memory. But that realization of its importance anchored it, and made me recall it every few years afterwards, maintaining it when most of my other memories of the time have faded.
* the memory itself is, by now, fairly vague at best. I know the visual appearance of the playground from that perspective, and the visual look of some of the specific thoughts on things I could do. But much of the content is second-hand from later (early teenager) reminiscing about it.
I definitely had the "light bulb" moment, at age 3 or 4. "Wow, I'm conscious now!". At least, I remembered this as my awakening moment throughout all my childhood.
I've got a study idea! Follow a cohort of children for 10 years, giving each an MRI every year. Later, ask them each when they became conscious, and check if anything in the brain developed morphologically for all of them across that year.
My first memory, (defined as I can vividly imagine the details of the scene and feelings I had) takes place at 22 after waking up from a severe head injury. I could still tell you all the same events of my life, recognize everyone, and know all the same facts, but my visual memory was gone. It was as if all my video memory was erased, but the Wikipedia database of my life was fine.
The interesting part of it is that I didn’t realize anything was wrong after waking up. I did not think anything changed. It was many years later when I thought back at my memories that I realized the memories post concussion were in the form of a video and the ones before it were just knowledge. I also think my visual imagination lessened, since when I read Scott’s early piece on visual imagination the first time, pre concussion, im pretty sure I could imagine vividly, and now I cannot.
None of this helps knowing when I was conscious, which was presumably well before the concussion, but it’s interesting in its own right.
I no longer equate consciousness with thinking, per se. What I mean is that for years I've been just "trying to figure it all out" with "it" being this cat's cradle called my life, which was itself meshed with numerous other cat's cradles.
One evening not so long ago, while sitting on our front porch with some in-laws I had a mystical experience where, for the very first time, I realized I was awake. I've since come to understand that being awake is something that must be practiced and that there is no distinction between practice and being awake -- when practice is practiced as practice. I catch myself all of the time being "asleep while driving." Being awake or being conscious, for me, is being aware of what is happening right now and it has nothing to do with rational or non rational thoughts. Thoughts are just what the mind does on its own quite naturally.
The earliest memory I can date is seeing Monsters, Inc. in theaters when I was almost three years old. I know it was in theaters because we didn’t have a TV and don’t get a DVD player at home until years later (and never owned Monsters. Inc. on DVD). There’s a scene in the first act where the orange and yellow furred monster returns to base contaminated by a pink sock stuck to his shoulder. This prompts a squadron of semi-humanoid monsters in faceless hazmat suits to descend from out of frame and subsume the orange and yellow furred monster. My memory of the scene is aesthetically tuned up to 11, more of a sensory dreamscape than something I was conscious of watching on a screen. In retrospect, there’s a good chance I didn’t fully understand what a movie was when I went to see it.
It’s hard to place first memories, but I had the good luck of going to a school with many campuses, all renting space from different buildings. There was one for the 2yo program, and a different one for the 3-4yo program. I have several memories from the latter but I think also one from the former. We must have had BBQ the night before and my mom sent some leftover baked beans in my lunch. My earliest memory is, “Alright! Beans!”
Learning to swim at the pool, probably aroubd 4/5
I too have an early memory, the summer before kindergarten (4/5?), of swimming in the municipal [kiddie] pool.
I have a range of early memories some of which are probably fake.
I remember being in the crib and my babysitter was heating food in the microwave and I was mad at her. But I think it's fake and based on some story.
I like to test for dreams by whether I remember the walls and the spatial layouts. Even if I do, I can usually see that it doesn't make sense in dreams. I vaguely remember the iconic spatial layout of my early childhood house, but I don't remember the walls. So it makes me think I don't remember living in that house.
I switched kindergarten after one year and I remember both kindergartens, but the later memory is better. Still, one room is suspiciously dream like, even though I would pass through it often, because it was leading to the dining hall and exercise room. It's also in that room that I have a memory of being stricken by a ray of sunlight lighting up the dust in the air.
Very convenient for the world dreaming conspiracy that you can't make an alumni visit to your kindergarten to confirm the spatial layout.
My earliest memory is from when I was between 1 and 2 years old. I was getting a cast removed (I had had surgery to correct a congenital deformity). I panicked when they were about to cut the cast off and had to be restrained.
My second-earliest memory, I must have been 2. Standing up in my crib. My parents doing some kind of bit where a stuffed doll would peek around the corner of the doorway and talk to me in a funny voice. This sent me into some kind of euphoria, and I was laughing uncontrollably.
I have no memory of any moment or event that felt like "gaining consciousness".
On the subject of "kindergarten test" -- could it have been early childhood screening? I know we have that in Minnesota, and you have to do it before going to kindergarten. (The friends who sent their son early say that there was some additional testing, too, but that seems less likely to be universal.) I have access to a 6-year-old who did the screening at 3; he appears to still have some memory of it.
My earliest memory was from daycare; I must have been about 3. I specifically remember being bored (I think I was new to daycare, and older than most of the group), and also a little bit of the indoor play structure that I was being bored on. Me being bored on that particular structure probably wasn't an isolated experience, so it's not immediately obvious to me whether this is purely episodic memory, or a mixture of episodic and procedural. Irritatingly, I have no memory of my mom's favorite story from that daycare, which is when (again, at age 3!) I managed to walk away from it to go exploring.
The next memory that I can date was when I was 5; specifically, I remember arguing with the speech therapist about whether she'd promised that I'd get a "5." or a "5+" as a grade.
Is "episodic memory" a close equivalent of "consciousness"? I find the idea of consciousness-as-inner-monologue compelling, and it's true that for memories before ~middle school I don't *remember* either having or not having an inner monologue; most of my early memories are of things outside of me (possibly including my own behavior), rather than of my mental state. This is still largely true: I can attest to currently having an inner monologue, and have more than zero recollection of my past mental states, but when I think back to e.g. things I did over a decade ago, I tend to remember where I went and whom or what I saw in rather more detail than how I felt about it. (Notable exceptions are "that intensely embarrassing thing I did in middle school" and "crushes", which are not necessarily distinct categories.)
From the preface to my book, Beethoven's Anvil: Music in Mind and Culture:
I have been told that, one morning when I was very young, I listened to a certain record over and over, thereby driving a visiting uncle to distraction. While I do not remember that incident, I do remember the song itself. As I play the tune to my inner ear the voice sounds like Burl Ives—it might even have been him, through I’ve never attempted to verify this—and the guitar sounds crisp.
The melody is simple and quite repetitive; the words are simple as well. I don’t remember them all and what I do remember doesn’t feel quite like a connected sequence. Here they are, as I remember them:
Fiddle-de-dee, Fiddle-de-dee
The fly he married the bumblebee
The fly said he will you marry me
And live with me sweet bumblebee
Fiddle-de-dee, Fiddle-de-dee
The fly he married the bumblebee
That fragment of a song may well be my oldest memory—I’ve got a few ancient ones, none of them clearly placed in time, not with respect to one another, much less absolutely. It is my mind’s tether to history, my umbilical to the world.
* * * *
Chapters 2 & 3 available here: https://www.academia.edu/232642/Beethovens_Anvil_Music_in_Mind_and_Culture_Chapters_2_and_3
My super-high-IQ best friend has a credible memory from when she was 16 months old (along with a lot of other specific memories from her toddlerhood): she remembers her family sitting together in their living room and watching the Neil Armstrong moon landing. (She was born in 68.) She didn’t understand what was happening, but she remembers the unusual tension, silence, and rapt attention of her family members as they watched.
I feel like there's an important distinction between your first memory, and the first time you remember thinking about an experience as (or just after) it happened. My first memory is just a thing, but it contains no information about the experience of living through it.
Anyway, I'm not sure which is first, but one of the earliest is around the age of 9, having seen a trailer for Jurassic Park the last time I was at the movies. I was down the street from where I lived and I was looking at a hedge and thinking about how long it would be until the movie came out. That's one of the first discrete times I can remember standing outside of my own experience and assessing it in some way.
Tough one. Most of my earliest memories aren't self-reflective. They are mundane; e.g. watching a TV show everyone liked in my aunt's living room as a toddler (reruns of the original Star Trek) or seeing a movie with my dad and eating a movie-themed cookie he bought for me (Star Wars, Vader cookie). I guess the 1970s were a Golden Age for popular SciFi? But then there is the story about how I accepted Jesus as my savior at age four...
I'm not sure if I remember it or if it was told to me so many times that I think I remember it? In any case, the process at an evangelical church is strictly volitional, and you are asked certain questions to make sure you have reflected on what salvation means, so I have to assume I was self-aware enough to answer such questions in a convincing way.
I was always told the "age of reason" is around seven, but if "reason" means being able to consciously reflect about the state of one's soul, then I guess I had some sort of 'reason' at age four?
Also, it's not directly related to your question, but since you brought up PNSE, Sasha Chapin's recent account of his "mind exploding" will be of interest to many: https://substack.com/home/post/p-164025908
I think there may be a fundamental difference between your first-day-of-kindergarten memory and your taking-the-test-to-get-in memory: the latter may only still exist in some capacity as a memory because subsequent events force you to recall it ("I started kindergarten early, I must have had to take a test to get in early... oh yeah, I remember something about taking that test"). Whereas, the former may be your first memory that *stands on its own two feet as a memory* which fully made its way into the linear narrative of your life rather than existing as a footnote under more recent memories that sit in the linear narrative.
I'm not articulating myself well; am I making sense here? They're not my memories, so I have no way of knowing of course.
That's fascinating. The theme of my earliest memory is also consciousness, but I never took it to be causative- I didn't think of it at the time as the first moment I was conscious, but I don't have any evidence to suggest otherwise. Why should self-awareness connect to memory like that?
For the pile: I was ~5 walking down the street with my mom and asking her how I was in control of my arms. It didn't make sense to me that I could just want my arm to move and it would comply. Still doesn't.
I guess it's not memory in general- my mom wouldn't have understood me if I hadn't formed memories before that point. It's less unintuitive that episodic memory depends on awareness of experience, but that's not quite an answer.
I’m actually so confused and dumbfounded by this. Are people maybe meaning the word “conscious” to mean something more specific than having an experience where you feel some kind of sensation? It sounds like people are maybe using the word to mean more “being aware of one’s self” or “having greater awareness of one’s self as a being existing in the world” which is an interesting mental feature but not what I thought conscious means. Like sometimes I have dreams where I’m not a character but just a nonexistent observer, I’d still say I’m conscious during those dreams but lacking a self. I have two earliest memories because I’m unsure if one of them was real or just a dream but neither had any kind of “snapping” sensation or transition from one state of mind to another. I definitely feel like my mental features and understanding of the world and my place in it changes dramatically as I got older but I think I was conscious before I was even born. There’s videos of me as a baby where I’m laughing and looking at things and clearly having reactions, it would be extremely shocking to me if there wasn’t any internal experience and I was a just a p-zombie. I worry that if we conflate consciousness (mentally expediting something) with more narrow self awareness that we could morally disregard beings that still experience pain and joy and maybe even have interest/preferences.
I definitely have a memory I would consider "this is when I became conscious". Nothing particularly interesting was happening, other than the fact I was 'becoming conscious' - I was actually in the middle of awkwardly running through the living room. Must have been either 2 or 3 at the time. It's like my brain suddenly noticed it could think about thinking itself and started the recursive loop, and qualia manifested. Not that I had any way of describing that at the time, it was just a very surprising moment, "huh, hold on, what's this? I'm me?". I don't even remember if I stopped moving to consider the change or slowed down or anything like that. It didn't feel much like a 'first memory' in the sense that it was pretty clear what I had been doing before then, etc (since forgotten, but there was a sense of continuity of action), but I suppose it could qualify!
(Editing to add: This memory is from ages ago now, so I only share the bits I know I actually remember, as the rest has been distorted by time, as memories go. Hence things like "I don't even remember if I stopped moving to consider the change or slowed down or anything like that", which you would think would need to be part of the memory - I can tell you that the now-distorted memory includes me continuing to run unchanged, but I have no reason to believe that is correct; it's not the anchor point of the memory, so I mistrust it.)
Because my father's career was in the international oil industry, I have the advantage that we moved frequently and that time-stamps memories by location. My first four years were in Venezuela and we did not live there again so all memories from there must be from between 0 and 4. Stripping out all memories that could be contaminated by family stories or family pictures, I have four categories of memories probably in a rising hierarchy of complexity and from earliest to latest.
Event vignettes - memories of things happening and the experience of that thing. Exploring a just-built empty house with some friends; falling from a bulldozer and gashing my head (and the whole subsequent emergency room visit); splash pool, trips into the Andes, riding in a car with rusted out floor boards and watching the road go by beneath my feet, etc.
Conversations - Snatches of dialogue from events.
Self-reflection - Hearing something said and reflecting on the implications of what was sais. For example, Billy Frank Snorgrass intimating that the Easter Bunny was not real was discombobulating. It was one thing that he might not be real at all but an entirely different thing that everyone should be lying about him being real.
Awareness of agency - My father was sawing a large sheet of plywood in the garage and needed someone to hold up the far edge to keep it from bending. He called me in to do so. I came over and held it up over my head (because I was short). My mother saw this and decided it was dangerous and came out and took my place, holding it just above her knees. However, when my dad finished the cut, the sheet fell down at his side and she lost her grip at her end and it fell and scraped her shins. I can remember my wishing that she had not taken my place and believing that had I continued, the accident could have been avoided.
I am guessing that the vignettes and conversation memories might be as early as 2-3 and the reflection and agency memories more like 3-4 but cannot be certain.
My earliest memory is of being at home in a hallway with stairs going up alongside the hallway. This wasn't my home growing up.
When I told my parents this they said the home I was born in had that configuration, but I couldn't possibly be remembering it because we moved out of there when I was 18 months old. Notably I had not been in any other home with that design. (Grew up in Melbourne; lots of space; most homes are single storey.)
I can't tell you if or when I first developed consciousness. I can tell you that for as long as I remember, my consciousness and self-awareness have felt the same as they do now. I am quite sure I am currently conscious - but then that's what any P-zombie would insist.
I have a lot of clear memories from not too long after my third birthday because my mom was pregnant and I had a lot of questions about that and I have memories of her big belly and meeting my brother in December. So I'm pretty confident that I have quite a few memories while being two because they had to be from the previous summer.
-I suddenly didn't want to eat apple sauce or orange juice because I imagined it might be made from old people skin, specifically my elderly neighbors. I knew it wasn't and that it would sound dumb to try to explain it to my mom so I just wouldn't tell her why.
-I understood pretty quickly that people weren't IN the TV, but I couldn't get that actors weren't actually experiencing the stuff that was happening to them, like death and car accidents.
-I saw a TV show where a plane crashed and later when I was playing in my sandbox I saw a jet fly over I wanted to get my mom out of the house so she wouldn't be in the house when the jet crashed into it, but I couldn't explain it through my tears.
-I remember needing to be carried immediately after becoming exhausted on a walk and kind of noticing gravity for the first time and hating it. And asking about it and feeling bad about having to deal with gravity for the rest of my life.
-I remember being amazed that my dad could distinguish a $1 bill from a $5 dollar bill.
-I remember being terrified of the neighbor's dog--a friendly bulldog I now understand--because I could see its teeth.
I have quite a few more memories from that time, but harder to fit them to a short little narrative. Just like being in a car or noticing a missing brick.
This is a favorite topic of mine. I like to say that the Hard Problem of Consciousness is so hard that not only do we not know what a solution should look like, we can’t nail down a definition of ‘consciousness’ that a majority of interested people will agree describes their own experience! The tweets above speak to a consequence of this fact.
I believe a useful heuristic in this area is modes of thinking as processes. There are at least three modes of thinking that *can* come online in childhood; though we need to agree that consciousness as "being a subject that experiences qualia" actually predates that, and probably comes online sometime in early infancy, while memory in a form an adult would recognize comes online later. The contents of your consciousness could contain any or all of which at any given time. They are:
1. Recognizing oneself as an agent in the world, capable of physical autonomy.
2. Recognizing oneself as enacting agency in regard to your own thoughts.
3. Recognizing that thought can take processes 1 and/or 2 as objects and operate on them as one would any other object, such as a chair or feeling hungry.
Since Scott asked for it, my experience went like this: I was conscious as “an experiencer of qualia” since shortly after birth, though memory retrieval was limited to no more than a few seconds into the past; this grew as time went on and eventually expanded to the maximum of whatever my earliest memory is, which was different at 5 than it is now. I came to instantiate processes 1 and 2 not in a flash, but gradually between ages 3-4. There was a moment in kindergarten--so age 5--where I was in the playground and realized that my memory now(then) went as far back as I cared to remember, though very early memories were weird and kind of garbled. The very next thought was that I should make a marker in memory so that I will have a non-garbled milestone/marker to recall back to, should that ever prove helpful (mind you I didn’t use these words, it was more abstract/vibey than that). So, I looked around the playground and fixated on a gazebo. I thought, yep, that’ll do. And to this day I can still picture the gazebo as clear as day, even though I have no memory whatsoever of the day, or even hour, before or after that.
I'm 27. I remember trying to pinpoint my earliest definite memory when I was in middle school. I have many vague memories from kindergarten as well as with my next-door neighbor best friend who was a girl that I interacted with a lot ages 3-9. They just have no temporal ordering.
Then there is an even more vague memory of a memory that I couldn't depend on. It's about sunlight rushing in my room through a window in the morning. I have a strong sense that it was just before meeting said neighbor as she moved in. I mean, I could ask when exactly they moved since it feels like spring. That would make me around 2.5 years old.
Oh, maybe moving from the littles' side to the bigs' side of the kindergarten. That would be around age 4.
My 2c. I have quite a few memories from when I was ~2yo. Birthday, my mother pregnant with my sister, house where we lived... The earliest ones usually revolve around food and frustration for not being able to communicate what I wanted.
I never had such a snap into consciousness. At best some important updates to world models with the biggest happening around I was 21: "Time flows in only one direction", "Shit Happens but also other stuff", "agency is a thing and you have it"...
I never thought about it this way, but my (probably) earliest memory is actually all about consciousness. I had to have a tonsillectomy at age 2 or 3 and my mother explained to me what was going to happen:
I was going to be put into a deep sleep and then my tonsils were going to be removed, but I would not feel or know anything and afterwards I would wake up and remember nothing.
I pondered this and got slightly scared. I think what disturbed me most was the whole being made to sleep thing. I just could not imagine by what magic somebody else could possibly do this to me (which in retrospect is odd since - being a toddler - this must have happened to me many times). So I told my mother, if I was going to have to sleep anyway, I might as well go to sleep now. And that's what I did.
Next thing I know, I am holding a new toy in my hands (about this I am not sure; it makes most sense that the toy was a reward for the surgery, but it seems I may have already had it during the conversation before the surgery - this would not be atypical for my mother, she never had the ability to delay gratification when it came to rewarding or punishing us). I asked my mother when the surgery would be and she told me it had already happened. No pain, nothing!
I cannot remember the weeks of healing afterwards which were quite tough according to my mother. In retrospect, I am quite grateful for this. My own son had to have his tonsils reduced last year and it was devastatingly heart-wrenching and brutal. I will never forget how I held him afterwards, still half sedated and he just cried and cried, only stopping to cough up mucus and blood. Whenever he slipped out of consciousness a nurse came and pressed his throat to induce more coughing because "the mucus has to come out". I wanted to murder her.
Anyway, I hope that will not be his first memory.
I also recall an approximately-kindergarten-level placement/aptitude test. It was in a gymnasium that seemed very big and unfamiliar, so perhaps it was near the beginning of my school year. There were tables set up in a circuit and I had to go to each one in turn and do some kind of test/challenge/interview. I remember being asked "how high can you count?" and I remember feeling confused and intrigued by the question, because it had never before occurred to me that there was a limit to counting, and I said something like "gee, I dunno, I guess you can count as high as you want?" and I remember the interviewer laughing and saying "I'll just put down 100." I remember that feeling wrong/unjust/confusing because I knew there were numbers bigger than 100 that could be counted to.
(I don't know if this has anything to do with "consciousness" and I'm not particularly convinced that "conscious" is a ever a very useful concept.)
This post aligns so well with my first memory. I clearly remember in kindergarten we got to watch "The Hoober-Bloob Highway" as a class. According to wikipedia, "The plot revolves around a newborn child, referred to as "Bub", as he tries to decide what he wants out of his life, or even if he wants to go at all, before being sent down the Hoober-Bloob Highway to be born."; note that that understates the fantastical Seussian nature of the video.
But that was probably just priming me for what I really remember. I'm not on the spectrum or OCD (at least, never been diagnosed as such) but I definitely have some stim-like behaviors, in particular finger flicking in a very symmetrical way. The kid sitting on the floor next to me noticed, and asked a question about it, which I remember as "something something something magic fingers?". As soon as he said "magic fingers" I became very aware that "I" was inhabiting a body that was doing something with my fingers.
I always thought it was cool that I would so clearly remember that as my earliest memory, just because of how the memory and the movie felt magical at the same time someone said the word "magic", all converging together. But reading this post, and the other comments, I think that was the spark of consciousness.
I find a lot of the stuff here very odd. Based on my own experience, that of others I’ve talked to, my recent attendance at an infant consciousness conference, my impression is something like:
These first memories are more likely to be around 3 than later (my mother’s is from age 1 or earlier, mine I have a lot of difficulty dating, but looks like around the 0-4 range).
There doesn’t have to be anything that special about it - some sort of experience of discomfort is common, but I’ve never heard of someone with an experience where one is suddenly in some way aware of their consciousness. I believe it happens but this post might make too much of such cases.
I have had experiences more like this a bit later (again hard to date, but sometime in kindergarten I think), which I still have periodically but try to avoid because they are distressing. Something like “I am the only being in the universe, I am everything” was my early read of it. Quite a bit more dramatic and vivid than awareness of my own consciousness, more like “pulling back” and viewing everything around me less like a movie or book. I don’t know how common this experience is and it’s hard to explain so it’s hard to ask about, but I remember I had it by kindergarten because I confided in a classmate that I was the only person in the universe, and we got into an argument because he insisted that, no, he was the only person in the universe.
If I recall, a plurality of attendees at the infant consciousness conference (they were polled) said that consciousness most likely starts early in the third trimester (I am more generous and think second trimester is plausible) - I’ve definitely run into rationalists who think babies aren’t conscious, but the view seems rare outside of that.
I don’t remember the details, but there was a good deal of talk at the conference about the idea that babies have conscious perception but not cognitive representation of certain stimuli. They seem to be unable to use color in reasoning tasks by default, but they can be trained to so it is thought (by Ned Block at least) that they consciously perceive colors but don’t cognitively represent them by default (don’t weep for the babies, adults have the same problem in their peripheral vision). Once conference goer speculated, partially due to experiments on rats, that we retain many memories from a very young age, but can’t access them easily because we call up memories with cognitive categories that differ radically from those we used as infants.
An "infant consciousness conference" sounds super-relevant. Any other anecdotes from it that might be illustrative?
Sadly nothing else really comes to mind - my background is more on the philosophy end, whereas much of the conference focused on cognitive science, which I often had a hard time following (I also only attended the second day of it). The NYU Conferences I've attended in the past have often been recorded, but I can't find a recording of this one (yet), but if it's helpful this is the page for it:
https://wp.nyu.edu/consciousness/past_events/2024-2/infant-consciousness-conference/
Two memories from when I was two years old. My maternal grandfather died when I was two years, five months. My only memory of him is standing in my aunt's kitchen, but it's a very clear memory. The second is trying to drink Clorox. I was sitting on the drain board while my mother washed dishes. There was an empty gallon bottle of Clorox on the drain board. It reminded me of the jug Snuffy Smith drank from in the cartoons. So I decided to drink like Snuffy Smith, and picked up the bottle and tried to take a swig. Got a drop in my mouth and had to go to the hospital.
The difference between the memories is the first is a real image I observed. The second is a thought process, but I see that memory as if I was watching it happen from across the room.
I have a very, very early memory from infancy. Our family was moving into our first home. I was less than a year old. I remember brightness (visually but no distinct image - like lying in the bright sunshine with your eyes closed) and my mother was saying this is going to be your new home and a wide feeling of overall satisfaction and happiness. I never spoke about this with anyone or had it implanted as a story that I am confusing as a memory. In my early thirties when my first child was born I told my mom about this memory and sort of thought I dreamt it or made it up, but she distinctly remember exactly what I said. So I guess it is an actual memory. I don’t know if that equates to consciousness per se. I do have many, many vivid memories from my early childhood while we lived in that house before moving to another town when I started kindergarten at about age 6. I’ve never thought about the notion of gradual consciousness but hearing the concept it makes sense to me. Separately, after college I was in the U.S. Navy’s Nuclear Power Program. The first year of the program, particularly the first 6 months or are ultra intense study of math and science. I was always a good natural student (meaning solid grades with no effort). I never studied as hard or learned as much as I did in Nuclear Power School. I’ve always felt it changed my brain substantially and in retrospect probably did make me more conscious, but certainly a better human on several dimensions (as a result of broader awareness and possibility). So I guess this is to say at least in my experience there seems to be some connection to brain usage, learning, memory and consciousness.
All of this seems to conflate consciousness with memory. Can we not be conscious in the moment and then not recall it? I listen to & read a fair amount (as a lay person) of content on consciousness and it seems to me that the relationship between consciousness and memory is under-served. Maybe I need to go deeper into the literature.
This is weird, because almost everyone else I've talked to up until now said they could remember things back to 2 or 3 years old. I thought I was defective for not remembering anything earlier than 4 years old.
(I haven't discussed this much with others in the past 30 years, so perhaps if I asked them now, they'd say their earliest memories are from some later age.)
My memories from around 4 no longer exactly exist. I have a few memories, but only of my thought processes. All sense impressions are reconstructions, usually from a 3rd-person POV. For instance, I know that when I was in preschool, a teacher told us that a new kid would arrive the next day from another country, and we should be nice to him. So the next day, over my mother's objections, I brought a bunch of random things along with me, as props to use to teach him English.
They were not useful. Either he wasn't interested, or already knew English. But all that's left of my sensory memory is a vague notion of how large and bright the classroom was, which might be completely false; and that one of the things I brought was a bright red plastic disposable cup.
When I was 5 or 6, my parents took me to see a doctor to discuss growth hormone injections, because I was shorter than the other kids. The doctor told me that the injections would make me grow quickly now, but I might stop growing sooner and end up shorter. (This is false; they would probably have made me taller. Stupid doctor.)
I decided being taller throughout most of my life was more-important than being taller now, so I told the doctor I would have no injections and just wait for my growth. And then the doctor told my parents how wise I was to leave it in the hands of God. And I got quite... angry? Angry isn't the word; I didn't express that emotion. But I realized that this adult doctor, despite being an expert, was in some way an idiot: if he thought it was wise to leave health outcomes in the hands of God, he shouldn't have become a doctor. And my parents were nodding in agreement. They were all being stupid, and ascribing a stupid reason to my decision when I thought I'd been clear about my reasons. It wasn't a first moment of consciousness; it was a moment of having the veil ripped away, and the terrifying realization that though adults knew a lot of stuff, they could still be stupid, and I couldn't trust them.
This is not a reconstruction from anything anyone told me; I never told my parents what I'd thought. But I have no sensory memories at all of the event except for thinking that perhaps I was sitting on a table or some other non-chair-like surface when this happened.
I used to have clear memories back to age 3 but when I broke my internal monologue a few years ago I also broke my clear episodic memory and now all my episodic memories are encoded as what I would previously have called memory-of-memory - recalling them is effortful and I expect they are somewhat fabricated, I can only get glimpses of full sense memories like I used to. Information recall is not affected, as far as I can tell.
On the other hand my awareness of the world around me currently has markedly improved and so has my general equinamity, so I don't miss my continuity of consciousness that much. I used to be quite obsessed with remembering everything or I wouldn't be me any more / my experiences would somehow be wasted, it was probably healthy to let that go.
So…
How did you do that.
Just meditating, like most people who manage to mess around with this kind of brain configuration setting.
In this particular case, a kind of homebrew mantra meditation where I'd overwrite my thoughts with a single word like 'peace', but that just happened to be what worked for me to get past the defences.
I'm not convinced I wholeheartedly recommend it, I'm happier and more relaxed but a lot less driven and agentic, and I had to work on undoing some of it to actually be able to get anything done again.
My first memory that’s “about” consciousness is from when I was 5 or 6. I was at school and suddenly thought something like: hey, I can see my own thoughts, but not anyone else’s. What if I’m the only one who’s actually real?
(As far as I can tell, this was just a passing thought, and I didn’t actually become a solipsist first-grader. But for whatever reason it was memorable to me that I had that thought!)
I definitely have memories from before that, but that’s the first thought that you’d have to be conscious to have that I remember having.
I can no longer remember my first memories, or suspect those memories might be reimagined and can't confirm (the oldest event I feel I remember is hating the taste of banana-flavored diarrhea medicine and can to this day bring the impression of that taste to my mind, which would have been at age of 2 years and 10 months, but this is a point I've been told about by my parents and have discussed before, so I'm not sure if it's a false memory) , but I have clear evidence of having formed other memories at that age of 2 years 10 months.
See, my mother kept a "childhood diary" and in it she reports that, at the age of 3 years and 10 months, upon viewing annual "penkkarit" celebration of highschool students, I asked my mother if she remembered "seeing the same celebration a year ago, just when we had come off a cruise ship" (coincidentally, that cruise probably was where I got the diarrhea). Which is a true event, never discussed since and not documented in any photographs, so clearly it was a true recollection of the event.
No evidence of older episodic memories are reported, while they appear to have been frequent since, so it does sound like there was a pretty sharp cutoff of the ability to form long-term episodic memories at 2y10m. As for consciousness, I have no recollection of ever having "gained consciousness", but I do have a general impression that in my oldest memories I was an non-deliberative ("instinctive") passive observer, while I do remembering reasoning through my actions at age of 6-7 at the latest.
Interestingly, I /think/ I have lost or severely reduced internal narrative: I appear to retain an internal voice ("for example, when typing this, I "hear" the words I'm about to write in my mind) which can be also used for deliberation, but I don't think thoughts of form "I feel...", "what should I...", "I'm going to...", etc, ever seem to appear, and I DO recall a moment when it occurred to me "wait a moment, isn't it the case that I used to have such thoughts appearing in the stream-of-consciousness? seems odd, because I no longer seem to". I confess I might be imagining things because it's really really difficult to communicate "what is it like to be a human", but it feels like my form of consciousness has changed without me even noticing it at the time. It just feels like my memories from my later childhood posses a more vivid and experiencing self ("*I* feel pain" vs "there is an impression of pain").
Ooh, interesting! I haven't run into many other people reporting my exact 'lost internal monologue' thing before (I also have the ability to switch one on again for composition etc but lost the automatic one).
To me, though, I think I experience things more vividly than before - just more wordlessly, rather than processing experiences all into words before they crystalise.
Human variation is so fascinating :)
Yes, i have always maintained a very vivid memory of crawling away from a set of tiles falling off a kitchen wall at 3 1/2 in company of my screaming mom and my grandma: run for your life!. Except i found out some 40 years afterwards that It wasn't exactly so, but a 10 months baby being put away by my mom quietly after she heard that cracking in the wall, with plenty of time to do so and much less indiana Jones' vives. So: biographical memory IS certainly VERY unreliable to start with, so this discussion is kinda amusing bullshit.
Not in the "oldest memory" category but more in the "sudden realization" one.
In middle school, my room was the typical middle schoolers mayhem. It seemed "natural" for me and would only sort things if forced by my parent.
In particular, I had a stack of "stuff" that was always lying around somewhere. If it was on my bed, I would have to move it to my desk to go to bed. And then later I would have to move it from my desk to my bed to use my desk. Every time, and regardless of the comments coming from my parents, I would just do that because it seemed the most obvious thing to do in the moment.
One evening, quite late, I suddenly realized : if I took some time to sort out everything, I would not have to do the "move stack around" thing, and it would actually save time in the long term. I actually went up and cleaned my room, until my mother showed up, angry, accusing me of being up to play video game even though I had school the day after.
It's hard to explain how much the way I think completly changed that night. Suddendly, doing some effort now to make things easier later became an option. Before that, the only option I ever had was to do what was the easiest thing in the moment. Not out of laziness, but because I could not even begin considering alternatives.
I don't know how to disaggregate "memories" from "memories of memories." There may even be some "memories of familiy stories that I internalized as memories." As an Army brat, I can date some of my memories based on where my family lived at the time.
In Tucson (1970-1972?) when I was 3-5 years old, I remember having a dream that the house burned down. I don't remember much from San Antonio, though I do remember the Dumbo ride at Disneyland from around that time. I do have many more specific memories of Heidelberg - second half of kindergarten to third grade (mid-seventies). I remember trips or a trip to the Boxburg playground/park. I remember fireworks over the Neckar River (which I had incorrectly remembered as the Rhine). I remember that I would walk to school with Nelson and John -- and that they were faster runners than I was, so they would run ahead of me and leave me behind. I remember overhearing a debate in the sandbox about whether Santa was real or not, asking my mother the truth and then when I learned the truth hoping that I learned it before my older sister (alas I had not). I remember a sleepover at school where we watched movies in sleeping bags. I remember the cheerleaders practicing "two bits, four bits, six bits, a dollar, all for Heidelberg, stand up and holler." I remember standing in line for my first confession - one of my friends was stressing out that he did not have any sins to confess. I told him that he cheated at baseball and that was a sin. He said that it wasn't a sin and was then highly alarmed when others chimed in to tell him yes it was. I remember going to the gas station with my Dad to get a commemorative pillow for the 1974 World Cup (WM 74). I don't remember the final between Germany and the Netherlands (I don't think I watched i watched it), but I do remember playing with matchbox cars by a tree and its root system that we used as a little city and another kid excitedly regaling us with the blow by blow of the game. I remember going to volksmarches with my dad and drinking the hot tea.
The post discusses some rather different conciousness-type phenomena. Many are hard to delineate/keep separate. But one that is fairly easy to separate from the others, is when one's internal monologue (or internal dialogue?) starts. For me, that was age 12. (I can trace my internal discussion with myself back to 12, but not before.)
Oddly, I have a sense that I had a "moment of awakening" at some point in early childhood, but I don't actually remember it. I remember having several similar "whoa, I'm conscious" experiences throughout my life, gradually becoming less frequent.
I'm not sure exactly what's going on here, but I think there is something to these self-reports. What frustrates me is how philosophers of consciousness could (and perhaps some probably are) working on this sort of thing, but many focus on unempirical armchair arguments that don't engage with these sorts of reports or anything similar.
Ooh this is fun! I have no experience like you describe of"gaining consciousness", I always felt conscious. My earliest memory is picking up my younger brother from day care and right as we got to the door of the day care my father turning to me with a look of shock, "oh no! We forgot the car seat!" I don't know what happened after that but I assume we managed to get him home somehow. He's just shy of two years younger than me so I was probably 3-4ish.
I do remember the moment when adult conversation suddenly became fully comprehensible. I was 12. Somehow it clicked for me and never again had the experience of not understanding adult conversation due to being a kid. I was very disappointed to learn I hadn't been missing out on deep philosophical secrets but mostly dirty jokes or innuendo. (Probably because I could already understand the philosophy type stuff, but I thought there might have been more!)
During nursery (age 3?) they had a rule where you all had to go to the toilet to pee before you were allowed outside for playtime. When I was a kid I had this weird thing about going to the bathroom, so my first distinct memory is hiding around the corner at the door and washing my hands for a few minutes to trick the nursery teacher into thinking I'd been. Perhaps not coincidentally I was looking at myself in the mirror and seeing my classmates in the background. I think this might have been a waking up as I can't recall anything before that.
i've seen multiple kids age 5-6 go from remembering stuff before age 3 (at least, to the extent little kids remember anything) to saying they can't remember that far back. seems like an "amnesia wall" is a thing. my impression had been that people with severe childhood trauma might be unable to remember anything from much later ages, like nothing before age 12, but that that's not normal if you had an ok childhood.
I agree with frog-face in that there's a clear distinction between the memories of 3 year old - 13 year old me, and the memories of 13 year old - present me:
- For childhood me, my memories are more of a *random* collection of *sensations* and *thoughts*
- For 13 year old - present me, I can actually *create a narrative* about my personal growth.
If I were forced to create a year-by-year summary of the evolution of my "personal philosophy" (religious and political ideas, behavior) from 13 year old onwards, I could probably do it. Not so much for childhood me.
Do you think that this has to do with the idea in "Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids" that kids older than 2 years old are "easier" to take care of?
My first memory is my 3rd birthday.
I made an attempt to blow out the candles, and felt bit embarrassed on failing it. Yes, there were admittedly only three candles, but I failed which is probably why it imprinted in my memory.
This isn’t a memory brought on by photos. There *are* pictures of the day but after the cake was eaten although i am sitting in the same place I remember.
First metaphysical thought, around 7. A kid is having to make a presentation and I think. Why isn’t that me? Why do I see through these eyes and not those eyes? I suspect, since I remember this vividly, that a lot of the becoming conscious stories in the post are from people who have this kind of metaphysical awakening as their first memory but it’s not be necessarily their first thought, just a memory that survived.
First memory i decided to keep for no reason. It’s my aunts house post Christmas. I’m 8. My sister and myself are watching sesame street, it’s around 11 am, and the room is hot. The CRT TV is large for its time, and colour. The fire is on, there’s a wind outside that’s picking up and snow is forecast. It’s the interregnum between Christmas and new year. The room is fussily furnished and it’s carpeted in a pattern that has slightly faded from my mind. The walls have wallpaper which I felt even then was hideous , I’m sitting in front of the sofa just a few feet from the tv, the room is narrow enough but long. A door is to the left of the TV on the wall behind it, this is to the corridor. On the left wall is the door to the kitchen which is a double door and has distorted glass, to its left is a mahogany trophy cabinet. Behind me and the sofa is the wallpapered wall, no window. The right wall is mostly dominated by a window and outside the trees bend in the increasing gale. The curtain is red, there’s a radiator underneath, about a foot high. Between the TV and the window is an alcove, there’s a lamp and some books, and some kind of miniature statue. I remember this because I decided to. I was bored. Let’s remember this boring day, I think. And here we are.
I have an out of body experience at 6 when i went into my mother’s classroom. I flew to the ceiling and looked down.
I last forgot my keys and where I put them yesterday. I am 48.
"First memory i decided to keep for no reason."
Interesting, I have never consciously tried to keep a memory. It never occured to me that one can do that.
Is it an unwelcome comment for me to say that I suspect a lot of these are made up?
Here's an anecdote: I grew up with a kid who became a semi-talented rock musician in late high school. We had to write an essay about formative moments, and this kid -- not prone to dishonesty or BS in my experience -- wrote about the transformative experience of the first time he listened to The Beatles as a very young person. He said it had changed his life, opened his mind, etc.
Except that I'd known him a long time. He never once mentioned The Beatles when we were younger. He liked the same pop music we all did growing up. It just doesn't sound intellectual to say you loved Smash Mouth, and I think at some point he convinced himself of a story that aligned better with his preferred self image.
The earliest clear memory I have is of running off to chase squirrels on an outing with my grandma (I remember where), realizing I couldn’t catch them once they ran right up a big tree trunk, and recognizing they’re not worth chasing. I’d have been about 20 months old when that happened.
I remember being a somewhat older child telling grownups of this memory, and asking, how old was I? They didn’t remember, since they didn’t remember the squirrel incident. But my grandma had snapped a photo of me in the sweater I wore for the outing, which helps me place my age.
I have dimmer memories, just vague impressions, of the Christmas before that, around 17 months old. Seeing a photo later helped me explain the vague impressions, but my memory isn’t of the photo. Rather, the photo explained why I would have had those other, vague impressions.
At about 25 months old, my younger sibling came home from the hospital, and I remember the umbilical stump with its plastic clip. I mistook it for poo at first, which was anatomically confusing.
Maybe I have these early memories because they’re the memories I remember having as a somewhat older child — for example, if I remember something from before I was 2 when I’m 5, then remembering it later only requires remembering back to when I remembered it at age 5.
If my memories go back earlier than what’s considered standard, I doubt it’s because I’m special. I’d chalk it up to some combo of normal variation among kids and adults, even researchers, being perhaps too dismissive of young children’s reports of having remembered something.
Absolutely nothing like this happened to me, I have no clear "first memory" - I have a few (mostly vague and blurry) memories from early childhood, but I can't put them on a clear enough timeline to tell you which came earliest, and none of them were particularly related to noticing I exist or anything like that
We moved when I was 4 and I have a handful of distinct memories of the old house and the pre-school I went to at the time. Shortly after the move I remember laying in my new bed pondering the concept of "forever" as a corkscrew spiraling endlessly through time, and getting really distressed about it. From whatever age I could talk til maybe 8 or 9 I asked everybody non-stop questions about how the world worked, then became conscious that was annoying and got really quiet and shy. Maybe around 12 conscious that I was different from normal kids in some major way. Empathetically conscious when I started dating girls around 14. Workplace conscious at my first career job. Around 30 I had a more profound religious/existential/interconnectedness awakening.
So honestly my response to this question is which one? Kind of mindblowing that people can pinpoint a single moment as "being conscious". For me it's very much been peeling back layers of an onion, and I doubt it's finished even now (mid 30's). I don't even have kids yet.
The first memory that I believe I can date is France winning the 1998 World Cup and “we are the champions” playing as they did so. I would’ve been about 4 at the time. I remember wanting to turn back time and have another go at life when I was about 10. Not sure if that counts as consciousness or just neuroticism tbh. I also remember finding out that the Earth is rotating and not believing it was possible at first
I remember the exact moment I "snapped". I was around 4. I won't go into the details (which I remember very vividly) as it is a very personal memory but here's how it went: I thought "I wonder if X is true", and, instead of doing nothing with that thought, asked my parent and got an explanation for X. The penny dropped for me that I could think about my own thinking and that allowed me to take control of my thoughts.
Up until then my mind felt messy but when I learned that I could understand things that way my eyes opened. I felt an enormous amount of joy. Since then I've been feeling that urge. Whether it was while learning or while teaching, I've been chasing that high and trying to get other people to feel it.
I've told that story to a few close people but never gotten their own story about it, which makes me think it's either rare or not the sort of thing that my close friends want to talk about.
My first memory is of the moment when I first spoke words in my mind. I was reading a book out loud and realized that I could say the words in my head instead. I think I was 5? (I do remember this feeling like a consciousness shift, but more in a metacognitive, self-reflective way as opposed to a "I didn't experience qualia before and now I do" way.)
I don't have a moment of gaining consciousness, I don't think, but I do have the memory of the first time I heard my "inner voice"!
After I learned to read (somewhere between 4 and 5 y.o, I believe), I read everything around me. Labels, signs, plaques, billboards, etc. But I always read it *out loud*. [1]
This must have started as a cute quirk, but the incessant blurting out of words while going around town must have annoyed my dad, who at some point told me to be quiet.
"...But I'm reading", I replied confusedly, as reading up until that point was always incentivized as an activity.
"Well, you don't have to speak to read".
I don't know if this part is some self mythologizing or something, but I remember thinking something to the effect of "dad is either pranking me, or he's lost it". Not in those words of course. [2]
But still, I looked around for the nearest sign. Stared at it for a second. Then... "hearing" those words? Loud and clear? Even though I hadn't moved my mouth, let alone spoken? What? The? FUCK????
My mind was *blown*. It was like finding out I had a superpower all along. I just couldn't believe it!
I then proceeded to spend that day snapping my neck around like logophile flamingo [3] looking for some piece of written work, staring intensely at it for a second, then giggling maniacly to myself.
Which I'm sure was annoying to dad in a whole new and colorful way :o)
[1] Which is I guess a quirk from how we teach reading to kids? Of course we ask the children to read something out loud, so that we can verify that they're reading correctly. I guess I just didn't make the connection at the time that the speaking wasn't strictly necessary.
[2] If true, this suggests something even more interesting: it's not that I didn't/couldn't think before, which maybe would fit better with the theme of the post? But it's more that my own thoughts felt natural, in a way that reading someone else's words didn't. Inception defense system, someone? https://youtu.be/H1Dyp3jexA0?t=62
[3] https://youtu.be/QLV_K7DVeyU?t=74
This all seems like total nonsense to me? Especially first memories (or any memories at all) about *becoming* conscious.
Any first memories I have are in kindergarten or first grade, and they’re pretty run-of-the-mill “goofing around with friends” type things. Playing with lincoln logs (don’t remember details well), or running back in from playing football during recess (my friend Ayyub broke down crying because he was last and so the “rotten egg;” I don’t remember exactly how I reacted at the time, but I *don’t* think it was even a bad-theory-of-mind confusion like: “Whoa, why is he crying when I won? Shouldn’t he be happy? I won!”), or a field trip to some sort of zoo. (My friend Ethan had gotten in with a sort of bad crowd and they were kicking my seat on the bus and being jerks. I did the thing I’d do now—found another friend to be more buddy-buddy with during the trip, and we together weathered the abuse. Ethan moved away the next year, I think.)
I did used to have all sorts of mood and anger problems in elementary (and even some of middle) school, and I’ve sometimes explained my getting over those to friends as “becoming really fully conscious” but I a) definitely can’t point to a *moment* this happened and b) think I’m probably making shit up, because I remember having reasons for being mad all the time and thinking they were pretty good reasons, which sounds like consciousness. I think I’ve just matured since then.
So if I haven’t had any sort of first-awakening, am I just not-conscious-yet? (I’m 17, to be clear.) Or is everyone else just talking out of their ass, and overfitting a convenient narrative to super-vague-really-old “memories.” (I’m leaning toward the latter.)
I’m 44 and had the same thought.
> So if I haven’t had any sort of first-awakening, am I just not-conscious-yet? (I’m 17, to be clear.) Or is everyone else just talking out of their ass, and overfitting a convenient narrative to super-vague-really-old “memories.” (I’m leaning toward the latter.)
Well most people in the comments here are not doing that. Twitter is Twitter though.
I mean I get that people who are saying they became conscious at 12 are implying that the rest of us haven’t, maybe. I just feel they are extremely late bloomers.
I have no particular reason to believe that memory is necessary to be conscious. In fact, long-term memory recall comes on pretty late in babies (presumably since earlier stuff is a) mostly useless for later life and b) hard to compress since the requisite context mostly isn’t there yet).
People claim to remember state changes, but I’m not convinced that those are of becoming conscious rather than misremembering/recontextualizing. I don’t have a strong prior as to when babies become conscious, but I would expect it to come before long-term memory formation. I’m not sure what version of consciousness the intuition pump regarding cows is subscribing to, but I don’t have a problem believing that cows have internal experience (and moral weight *cough* *cough*) even if they don’t have e.g. complex thought or some other variant.
"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."
No. Consciousness and intelligence aren't the same thing. Just ask ChatGPT. Also, neither consciousness nor intelligence is a Boolean. I think no predications outside of math and physics are really Boolean.
One of the only arguments I've ever conclusively won was with a friend who said all memories before roughly six years old were fabrications, whereupon I listed the plots of five or six Transformers episodes that I almost certainly hadn't watched since I was less than three years old.
Of particular note was the memory of the episode that was airing on the day my mom changed her name (in court in Seattle), and how I only saw and only remembered the last chunk of that episode.
I have a handful of earlier memories, with the earliest two of them being maybe when I was one year old, but I can't defend those as effectively.
I don't remember a shift to consciousness, though I *do* remember an equally sudden shift at age 30 where I was taking a walk and I suddenly understood which inner "muscle" I needed to flex to quiet the inner monologue, after which meditation type activities became straightforward. So I believe such a felt sense of comprehension could happen.
I remember being on the playground at age six, sitting far away from everyone else, talking myself into saying the word "shit" to myself, then having a little panic about getting in trouble for it, before deciding nobody could hear me.
I remember being in first grade, seven years old, walking between buildings at school on a military base in Germany in January 1990, thinking "wow, it's 1990 now, not 1989. I wonder what 1991 will be like. I think that's when we're supposed to go back to the USA".
So I definitely had self conception, reasoning, and a memorable inner monologue by age seven.
I think the troll is not a troll, just wrong.
Incidentally, the same friend I had the argument with so many years ago has no inner visualization skills. We both like legos as adults, more even than our kids do, and I design and build fairly elaborate modular buildings for a lego city I share with my daughter. My friend loves the city, and I've asked him if he'll do his own custom designs, and he very frankly says he lacks the ability to visualize imaginary legos, or much of anything else, and part of the fascination of lego for him is that he has no ability to predict how the pieces will fit together and make a coherent model. It's a total surprise for him, every time, and he can't imagine imagining such a process himself.
My earliest memories are vague and visual; when I was first accidentally left at a shop by my Mum, then on a bus. But my earliest moment of consciousness occurred during a nursery school assembly, aged 3. We were all sitting cross-legged on the hall floor as the usual stories were told - as fact - about Jesus and God. I vividly remember thinking to myself 'What if all this is not even true?' That moment, and that scene, is crystal clear to me.
My wife, a kindergarten teacher, is keenly aware that her class is just 60 months out of the womb, and they need a lot of love and support. She’s often the first adult that interacts with them as an individual, little person. They become aware of others, their own autonomy, and their own thoughts (especially as they learn to write them down), and their own relationships. And she gets to blow their minds nearly every day.
A lot of the tweets sound like normal human development. It would help to have more clarification on what definition of consciousness is, and why the o.g. poster thinks it happens in adolescence. I suspect these realizations happen continuously, if you take the time.
I don't remember it as "awakening to consciousness" per se, but my earliest memory must have been when I was under 2 years old because I was in my crib in my bedroom in our old house.
I had been put down to sleep but didn't want to sleep because my parents had people over and I felt like I was missing something fun. Several times in a row, I stood up and threw my stuffed bear/pillow out of the crib and then started crying because I couldn't reach it. Each time, my father would come in and return the bear, tuck me in, hush me, tell me to sleep, etc.
On maybe the third or fourth cycle of doing this, he left and felt the same irritation so I stood up again to throw the bear but stopped and thought "What am I doing this for?", looked down at the mattress and blanket and realized I was going to end up there eventually, so I just lay down and went to sleep.
I remember being struck by my daughter’s consciousness a couple weeks after giving birth to her. I was surprised that there was something fully formed about her, something that didn’t need to develop. It changed my view of life.
When I was about 4 years old my parents drove me past a large building, covered in tar paper. I noticed that I could remember seeing it at a previous stage of construction. For some reason I thought "I am going to remember this moment forever." It's difficult to remember why that moment was so important, but I think perhaps it was (one of) the first time I was consciously aware of recall and memory, rather than just having the information implicitly available.
Another time someone used a word I wasn't familiar with and I asked what it meant. When I received an answer I thought "hmm I've been asking for a lot of definitions recently." I also seem to remember being grateful that I remembered definitions after asking once without needing them to be repeated, but it's possible that this was a later addition to the memory; it certainly seems like a more adult perspective to have.
My case is a little peculiar. I remember quite a few early memories, but to me the non-verbal aspect is probably as important as the verbal. I relate consciousness to "feeling the world", and it seems to me like a kind of "grokking" where I did have self-reflection, but also where all perceptions and feelings were integrated into a coherent whole, so to speak. Although thinking in words doesn't feel as important intuitively, I think language was important because it played a role in making sense and integrating this information into a coherent whole -- the implicit knowledge that I were a person, that other people were persons, that I existed in a neighborhood in a city, etc..
The most significant part of existence to me was really the plethora of feelings associated with each moment, like a constellation or a very distinct kind of "emotion". Like, I remember the emotion I kind of felt with relation to living where I were living.
I remember looking (directly) at the Sun setting with my brother and perhaps another kid, and remembering not to do that because my eyes would burn (I was maybe 6-7 then?).
I think memory formation can't be the sole criterion, as simply because you can't remember something it doesn't mean you didn't feel anything at the time (of course consider the case of amnesia caused by an accident doesn't retroactively erase the fact you did experience something). I think consciousness happens whenever there is feeling and significant information processing (hence basically all humans), although it does feel like when you integrate different systems it is overall amplified. For this reason I believe animals have some sentience/"consciousness" (I put c. into ""s because it can be associated too much with language which in this case doesn't make much sense) in that they have the same kinds of emotions mostly associated more or less directly from sensory perception and basic instincts, including caring for their babies, etc.. But memory formation might relate to temporal coherence of your thoughts which could be a component in more pronounced feelings.
In summary, I don't think there was a single waking up moment for me -- but being old enough to know basic facts enabled more complex feelings and probably also aided memory formation and recollection. I also think you can put into somewhat distinct categories self-awareness/reality-awareness with sentience. (as another analogy think of something like the movie Matrix, where you may be sentient but unaware of a larger context in which you exist)
I also like Buddha's (correct if I'm wrong, paraphrasing) remarks about "awakening", that our collective awakening is an essential part in ending suffering in the world (both aspects of awakening -- awareness and sentience -- play a significant role, in particular recognizing that other people are also persons).
I also think significant is Thich Nhat Hanh's observations that we spend a whole lot of time (decades, even) studying subjects and "how to follow a profession/make money/etc.", but spend comparatively seemingly little time "learning to live", learning to feel and connect with (and also manage) emotions and experiences that constitute sentient experience. Probably our artistic and cultural exposure tends to be very significant in that, and specially emotional relationships with friends and family. But even just talking about it more might be helpful.
I have a few contenders, one was an ethereal memory of being on my parents bed with them and my little brother, probably around 4, feeling serene happiness. Another at a prekindergarten mother's group, sitting on my mother's lap colouring a picture of a train, my then favourite thing. I realised I could draw outside the lines if I wanted to, the rule was made up, and did it to my mother's disappointment, but I was pleased with myself. I see that moment as the birth of my intellect. Both of these moments felt like waking up for the first time, like coming out of a dreamless sleep.
All of my earliest memories are of the various accidents I was involved in - choking on a marble, falling out of a moving car, accidentally hanging myself or getting a lit cigarette to the eyeball.
I don't ever recall having a "waking up" moment as discussed here.
But then, I've never had that moment of sonder, either, realising everyone else has a rich internal consciousness. You're all still just NPCs to me.
I'm not quite sure how I'd respond to the question. My first memory is from when I was 3. It's a bunch of hospital memories. Getting an IV, walking with my IV pole, eating hospital Jell-O, and the pediatric playroom.
Looking back I'd say I don't think consciousness is binary.
I was definitely conscious at a young age, but I also became more conscious at 14, and again at 19.
My model is a threshold for consciousness, followed by a sliding scale. I only see my movement along the sliding scale at moments of intense reflection and self assessment. So of course I misunderstood my self-perceived jumps as levels.
I have a strong memory of being in my elementary school cafeteria, aged probably 6 or 7, and suddenly noticing that it's weird that I have my own consciousness rather than anyone else's; i.e. why do I have my own point of view? where are other people's points of view "located" in the universe? I still find this kind of dizzying sometimes - it's bizarre that each of us has our own consciousness embedded inside the universe in a way that's consistent. Idk I feel like a crazy person when I think about this problem so I don't usually talk about it.
I don't really think of that as the beginning of my conscious experience, or at least I never have before. I do think that I obtained consciousness around that age though, or at least that there was a pretty distinct internal experiential transition.
I have a friend who claims she obtained consciousness fairly late - around 14 iirc. I've always interpreted this as kind of a joke, but maybe I'll prod her a little more about it.
"the least reliable possible data source this side of a peer-reviewed social science paper" OMG I was dying!
On a more serious note, I wonder if a lot of these are "first time having an inner voice". I think that makes total sense that this typically happens around 6-12, but could happen a lot later. I recently learned there are lots of people with no inner monologue as adults.
Consciousness itself clearly develops slowly over time -- there is no one moment. But it does develop -- even if you think infants are conscious, you probably don't a zygote is ...
I have strong memories of nightmares I had as a toddler. In one I was in a stroller in a mall, surrounded by newly-washed soapy floor tiles I wasn't allowed to walk on. In another, I was lost in a hospital where my sister was being born (so I know I was 2.5). But I know I'm remembering the memory of those nightmares, so the data I'm accessing may have been laid down in its current state by me when I was 4 or 5.
Also, if I press on various events that I know happened when I was young, images and sense memories briefly surface, but I can't really hold on to them. They have that sense of 'long-forgotten familiar and now strange' about them. I saw another commenter talking about sequences of semi-compatible software architectures, and I like that analogy a lot.
I don't have any 'consciousness epiphany' memories, really. I remember telling my kindergarten teacher I was reading Hesse's Siddhartha, and him being a bit confused by this, and me attempting to quote it but getting the quote wrong. So I think I was grappling with metaphysical ideas around then. The first epiphany I can recall is when I was in grade 2, eating lunch with a friend, when I was overwhelmed by realizing "2 times 3 does equal 6. It does!". I had just clicked into some deeper number sense than I'd had before, and I think this was the first time I felt deeply moved by the concept of "mathematics as truth" which I've since observed with wonder in my own 5 year old son.
Both continuum and discrete step.
As a child, 3 events stand out, not sure which came first. All three are just memories: the memory of learning to walk and thinking, why am I constantly falling down while the older kids walk just fine? How do you do that? The memory of waking in the hospital with my favorite toy after severe fevers. The memory of coming home after that hospital event. All presumed before age 3. Age 4-5, a distinct belief that I knew things about the world, facts, that I inherited and that I was never taught. Then in some primary school essay, age perhaps 8, I used the stilted phrase "Ever since I was able to think logically..." ... implying there was a time when I couldn't.
Finally, age 27 or so, the more classic, boring Buddhist kind of sudden awakening after a period of stress. Feeling like everything was the same as before but realizing I was just this ordinary, yet necessary, part of the world, and that nothing mattered and everything made sense, like being a natural part of the Maelstrom of the world.
I remember waking up from a nap the day before my 3rd birthday and being aware like "oh I'm alive now." I got up and walked down the hall to my parents room even though I didn't consciously know where it was and I knew who they were even though I had no expectation of finding them there...my parents remember me saying something weird like "I saw the ceiling and didn't know anything". Anyway from then on I was online. I've talked about this a lot but none of my friends have the same experience.
My memory is terrible overall, but I do have a memory at 12 where I realized I could just sit and think. But I also have earlier memories that include me thinking or were primarily internal. I mostly discounted that memory at 12 as being a false sensation/memory until now, but maybe there was something to it?
I have hazy half-memories starting at around age 3, but basically nothing meaningful seems to have been recorded before ~13.
Even at 13... in retrospect, I have evidence that I was starting to think more deeply about the world around that time (I switched from Catholic to atheist around then, and got into computers and reading blogs around that time), but I can't remember the names of my friends and teachers or anything. Meaningful "I can remember a whole scene of memory" or "I can remember a particular insight I had" started around 17.
Relevantly: I'm 58.
My earliest memory is frustration over my inability to communicate from the playpen. This was a constant thing so it's decently etched in my brain. (At this point it may be that it's a memory of a memory; my recall of it is less vivid than it was in my 20's.)
The other robust pre-K memory is hearing my parents communicate by spelling words, and being conflicted over whether to show off my skills or retain the advantage. (Not quite at that level of abstraction, but the idea was there.) I didn't last very long (days?) before showing off. (My mother read to me early, and that doubtless assisted.)
This doesn't feel related to consciousness. I think I was as conscious before the things I remember.
My first memory is when I was two years old and I thought that there was a man in the wall. I was probably hearing the people in the neighboring apartment. My mom told me about other things I said but that is my first memory that I have for sure.
This topic has always fascinated me. I remember:
1. Some concept of a dark, warm, red enclosure--a memory I have always recalled possessing before the age of 5, and certainly well before I learned anything at all about the reproductive process. I have a half-memory of sitting in a carseat while picturing this "memory/place."
2. A few discrete memories in the 3-4yy age range (reading with classmates in preschool, going to the beach, playing in sandboxes).
3. A couple of "phase changes" in self-awareness that took place in middle school and high school, and then another longer, more gradual one over my late 20s and early 30s. (I'm 34 now.)
Not Scott telling me to get in the comments with natural language training data about the subjective experience of becoming conscious. Nope.
I guess the question is conscious of what? All animals in an awake state must be conscious of their surroundings, as far as their senses allow. For very young animals including humans that's pretty much all they are aware of (besides of course physical sensations of their own body, such as pain or hunger etc), because it is more important to take things in while they are developing basic mental skills.
But meta-consciousness, i.e. being aware of ones consciousness in the above simple sense, and of the same in other animals, is a further layer analogous to what programmers call "reflection". I don't really see the conceptual problem with part of the brain monitoring the rest of it, and I suppose the mystery is about how these levels combine to make a coherent whole. There doesn't even need to be much of a separate brain area, and I'm sure there isn't. It's mostly if not entirely just feedback loops resulting from the way the brain circuits are wired.
Many animals have this meta-consciousness up to a point, especially social animals who must devote a lot of mental effort to judging how their behavior is received by others. But presumably any predator must also have it, to anticipate how their prey will react to the predator. Some predatory actions can be instinctive, such as "crouch flat and creep along silently when approaching". But instinct doesn't explain a hilarious video I once saw of a cat stalking a bird, hopping along on three legs and with the fourth leg clamped over its bell to prevent its tinkling alerting the bird!
Yes that sounds about right.
There's a level of encoding specificity there which means it's quite difficult for us to remember what it was like to be six months old.
Plus there's probably some adaptive stuff which means our mind boundaries are much looser. Mind boundaries are quite loose in various situations - though in older age mostly dysfunctional ones. But as a baby I can see you might pretty much be your mother.
Perhaps Nagrl might be extended? What is it like to be a Baby?
I think that they are talking about 2 different types of experiences. My oldest memory is from my crib but around 14 I felt that I was a new person, qualitatively different from who I was as a child. Like I have unlocked something.
I remember my parents taking me in the car to our new house when I was about 3. And I certainly remember my first day at school, at 4 1/2, and of course I have increasing numbers of memories from that time on. Pretty sure any philosophising about consciousness came later.
I have a memory that could be categorized as “pre-conscious.” It dates back to the first week of preschool, when I was around 30 months old.
I remember first meeting my best childhood friend. I was sitting in a line on the floor at preschool when I saw him. I immediately had the feeling: this is someone I like. I moved over, and he came and sat down next to me.
For a long time, I thought it was interesting that I had such good intuition about who I would end up liking.
But what’s strange is that my mother later told me I had been playing with this boy in the park all summer beforehand. So, I already knew him quite well.
I just didn’t recognize him consciously at the time. But I had a feeling that he was my friend and my actions were consistent with that feeling. I sometimes wonder if dogs are the same way. They don’t really know what’s going on but act in a world of intuition and feelings.
Also, the only reason I would flag this memory as pre-conscious is the later information given by my mother. So I am skeptical that any of my earlier memories are really me being fully "there".
(Epistemic status: seems vividly real to me but I know memories are fallible)
That said, my earliest memory is of lying (I suppose lying does indicate a level of conscious intent?)
My sister had just been born, and someone was holding me up under my arms to look into a hospital room filled with babies on white tables. So many babies.
They kept asking me if I saw my new sister, but I couldn’t tell which baby they meant.
I was uncomfortable being held up for so long, so I said that I did see her, even though it wasn’t true, just so they would put me down.
No memory of my own, nor perception of my own children's. But I've been teaching a pair of twins for the last two years, age 6-8, and I feel like they've gone through something. When they first started my classes they were quite unable to connect words to actions in a meaningful way; now, they're pretty good at it.
I'm a language guy, so I often think about these issues in terms of language, and I'm worried that language is a big confounder for this. Lots of first memories are likely to be the first memories that people are able to convert into language, and so more a reflection of maturing linguistic capability than underlying changes.
Still very interesting, though.
It's not my earliest memory, but I have* a memory from my early childhood (6yo or so?) where I suddenly realize that I'm my own person, i.e., that my thoughts are my own and not shared by anything else, and that I'm only this small part of the world. And I was a bit unsettled by it.
I'm not sure this makes sense to anyone else. If I analyze this realization now with my current knowledge, I would maybe say I discovered the Cartesian boundary (the border that separates a Cartesian agent from the world), but maybe I'm overanalyzing it.
*Actually, I don't really have that memory anymore but I have the meta-memory of explaining this memory to other people, and I can reconstruct the content of the memory from the meta-memory.
I'm pretty confident I just forgot earlier memories than the first one I can remember. It's decades ago!
My first memory was at 2.5 years old when my family was on the plane immigrating to Canada. We were close to landing and I got airsick.
I remember climbing on to my mom’s lap saying “Mom, I’m sick” (but in our native language), and then shortly throwing up. I don’t remember how/where did I throw up, but I remember that it did happen, and my parents do back that story up.
I can’t say that this was any kind of awakening to consciousness though. For one thing, I already had language skills so I was clearly able to think and verbalize thoughts. I also can’t say that I acquired any philosophical insights after this event either. I just continued on with my life as usual (not that I remember how I used to act).
My earliest memories are (a) my aunt dunking me in a water fountain outside a church possibly after a funeral. I float up to the top and she dunks me down again, repeatedly. (b) I went to the zoo and dad hung me upside down by the very low fence of the crocodile enclosure, teasing me as if he was going to lift me over to the crocs
(a) definitely did not happen and I doubt (b) happened either. So I take other peoples' earliest memories with a bit of a grain of salt, especially amidst a social media discussion where there's real possibility of confabulation of some social media contagion.
I am 38 and very much recall having a better memory of my childhood when I was say ~20 than I do now. That makes me sceptical that anyone's earliest memories are literally the first experience they had. I admit these memories of moments of awakening are not subject to that kind of scepticism, but they might plausibly be false memories like my memory of my aunt dunking me in a fountain.
My earliest memory is standing across from my older brother who was teasing me about only being *three* when he was *four*.
I don't have a memory of a sudden shift or awakening from unconsciousness in childhood, and I would bet on a progressive evolution. My first memory is very early, at the age of 6 months. It's the fragrance of camping gas in the cabin of my dad's sailing boat that was used to heat my feeding bottle, associated with a very fuzzy image of the cabin. I think it's authentic because: 1) my dad sold the boat after these holidays, 2) there is no photography of the cabin, 3) to my knowledge nobody told me about it, 4) I have no siblings, 5) it's very specific and related to feeding, 6) it's mainly a memory of a fragrance and unusual altogether. I recall this memory was vivid when I was a child but it faded away with time, even though I tried to preserve it, and now I'm sad to admit that what remains is not much more than a memory of a memory.
This one is special, but I have few memories of my first years, and most are mixed with later memories and photos.
I have an interesting memory from when I was 4 or 5, around that age. I observed the (relatively) tall legs of my cousin who was around 8, and my own little legs, and I thought to myself: I really wonder what it must feel like to be so tall! And I remember making a strong effort to memorize that question so that I could experience it and answer it in a few years. And I indeed had that experience later, like anyone would, and the answer was simply: it feels normal, there's nothing special about it.
That's probably my first "philosophical" thought and certainly my first memory of a thought (and maybe the only one for years). But I don't associate this memory with a feeling of becoming conscious. I would bet I was conscious before that. Now my son is exactly this age, and I have no serious doubt that he has a conscious experience. I guess it is also the case for my daughter who will soon turn 2, but it is less clear-cut. She didn't say a word in her first year and developed language suddenly 6 months ago, quickly forming complete phrases. More recently, she started to use "I" correctly, expressing more and more of her inner mind, and now it would be difficult to maintain that she has no conscious experience.
My first memories are from around the time I was 3 years old. But I distinctly remember at my 9th birthday, feeling like something was different. Like I was gonna remember things from then on. I felt like I had become a person.
I have a bunch of scattered early memories, but no single "crystallizing" one where I "became conscious."
I do have a particularly clarifying memory sometime in elementary school where I realized, "I can't make anyone else do anything, I can only control the things I do, so if I want certain things to happen, I have to do them, because I can't make anyone else do anything, I have to do the things that nobody else will do." A lifetime of neuroticism has followed.
It is hard to date some of my early memories. I know that we moved house when I was two and a half and again three years later. I have effectively zero memories of the first house but some vague memories associated with the move and some memories of a sweet elderly couple who lived next door to us at the first house.
By the time of the second move I have some clear memories. The first memory I can date clearly was my third birthday. My sister was home from home from boarding school for the half-term holiday and she made me a chocolate cake.
I have one very clear memory of that house (the second one). I had recurring nightmares of being chased by cars, lorries, and buses. I always knew when I was going to have that dream because before going to bed I had a ritual of looking out of the French windows down the garden with my mother. On nights where I had that nightmare I could see the vehicles lining up in the shrubbery waiting for me to go to bed. I assume it was broad daylight at my bedtime for much of the year. I somehow knew that my mother could not see the vehicles and that I should not mention them to her.
While reading whole post, I couldn’t help thinking “are we talking about when our first episodic memory formed?” or “are were talking about when our first episodic memory of engaging in metacognition formed?”
In other words, is “consciousness” being defined as “the ability to form episodic memories?” Or is it being defined as the “ability to metacognize and, therefore, think about our conscious experience + the ability to form episodic memories?”
The ill-defined nature of consciousness is probably the problem you’re trying to solve for. But I don’t think that anyone can solve for it by leaving the terms ill-defined.
Personally, I think that consciousness can and does exist without metacognition: e.g. when one is in a flow state they are clearly conscious, but flow states don’t involve much metacognition because metacognition would break the deep psychological involvement one feels while being engaged in the flow-state-inducing task.
Metacognition is, to me, consciousness of being conscious, which would suggest that consciousness has to exist without metacognition, since without consciousness, there would be no consciousness to be conscious of.
For me, my first episodic memories are from being around 3 or 4 years old, standing in the new house to which my parents were planning on moving, being very emotional about not wanting to move. (High emotion correlates with memory retrieval, so it probably makes sense that this would be my first episodic memory. Plus, around 3 or 4 is when the ability to form episodic memory tends to form, and so yeah, this was all probably pretty typical.) And honestly, I don’t remember when I first metacognized; apparently the moment it happened wasn’t significant nor emotional enough for my mind to form an episodic memory of it. … What does any of that have to do with consciousness? Well, it probably depends on how you define it, lol.
I try desperately to get my 3yo to tell me what it was like being in the womb or being a baby, to no avail (yet). Lots of people seem to be phrasing these awakenings as internal monologue revelations about one's autonomy, identity, place, etc so I may try to suggest some. Maybe I could witness it happen!
Dunno about the age of first memory. I can usually just be sure if it was single or double digit age. I remember reaching up to grab a cup on the counter, being doused with scalding hot coffee and being rushed to the hospital. I also recall the doctors looming over me as I fell asleep. Pretty sure they had scissors or forceps to cut/grab some bits that were curling off my chest?
I remember putting a toonie in my mouth, choking and coughing it up and thinking "wow, I almost choked alone and it was only dumb luck I didn't just die."
As for an overwhelming sense of awakening, that doesn't seem familiar. I do recall lying about whether I believed in Santa because I thought it was what I was expected to say, even though it was obviously untrue. That seemed meta for me at the time, enough that it influences my parenting today.
I don't have any specific memories like this--just a handful of very early memories, I think the earliest around 3 or 4, mostly very brief flashes.
I have such a hard time believing things like Qiaochu's tweet. How is it even possible to reach your 20s without having to ever solve a problem? I feel like there must either be a communication issue or a memory failure, where they were doing these things, just didn't describe it that way or realize that was what they were doing. The latter of which you could maybe describe as becoming conscious, but honestly I would believe that more than I would believe never thinking about a problem by the same age. Dogs are capable of engaging in problem-solving.
....
In the novel Diaspora by Greg Egan (minor spoilers ahead), the PoV character is an entirely digital mind and the start of the book describes their creation. In particular, the point where they become conscious--it's triggered by an attempt to control other beings the same way they control their own internal experience (the computer they live in prevents this from being possible), struggling, and then realizing that they and the others are both individual, thinking entities. Basically a "theory of mind" idea of consciousness, where they become aware of both their own internal experience and the fact that others have a similar internal experience, akin to a few of the other tweets.
I have memories of experiencing unselfaware qualia as early as the age of 2. By the first grade I remember thinking and asking about what I would consider semi-complex philosophical questions (like the existence of God and why He would do the things He does). I don't have any memories of suddenly gaining self-awareness or consciousness. If feel like this was a more gradual process for me.
My first clear memory is my mother screaming at my father shortly after they separated when he was visiting to see his kids. I was probably around 3 years old. It was the realization that the only person in the world who was legally responsible for me was insane and I was in a new type of Trouble that couldn't be addressed by asking the "adults" for help and this was something I would have to manage alone, and that I needed to come up with a way to solve my own problems and that my mother was not a reliable source of safety, comfort, or solutions and it was in fact dangerous to bring any of my issues or problems to her.
Terrible situation, but I assume it has it's upsides. I was still under the illusion that my parents and teachers were sane while being 15, but because they weren't I drew very wrong conclusions about myself.
Very crippling ones to this day.
Better to learn to trust one's own judgement earlier.
I have terrible memory in general and this one is overwritten many times over by recall to the point where it is narrative and not sense memory but it is my first distinct memory, and also one of my most treasured. At some point when I was 4 years old (circa 1982) my mother and sisters were out of the house doing something all day so my father rented a VCR (the rental of which I understood to be a great luxury) and a movie: Superman II starring Christopher Reeves. We watched it together and when we finished it I asked to watch it again, and we did.
Mine was in the category `people having a sudden realization that they were in control of their destiny and could exert effort to produce results.`
Age 12 -- 8th grade (in the US, that means about to enter high-school)
I realized that I could "be cool" and decide to have more friends and "do fun things". My middle-school experience was very non-deliberate about my hobbies, friends, how I seemed. but going into high school, with lots of new "potential" friends to impress and build a new social circle around, I saw the opportunity ahead.
I still didn't fit in perfectly in high school, but got a lot more deliberate about it. I was playing some video games at the time but no clear trigger from that.
Key triggers:
- getting bored
- doing musical theatre with folks in other school districts
- years of being labelled "the nerdy guy" and realizing that I could keep that part of my identity some while still swinging into the realm of "cool"
- going to bigger schools where there were more and more advanced people like me, so "cool among the smart kids" was a valid niche
- a big shift in the reading material in school from 7th to 8th grade. 7th grade was dull "read aloud this american narrative story" ... 8th grade was lots of eastern philosophy. Tao of Pooh and Siddhartha-by-Hesse stand out as "bridges" from a midwestern upbringing to Eastern philosophy.
As it happens, right after closing the comments on this post I started reading today's CHH post about the first time she got noticed for wearing a sexy outfit.
https://www.cartoonshateher.com/p/my-20-year-sexy-clothes-era?r=62w6
I imagine the majority of women have a similar memory.
It feels much more gradual to me, there was no moment when I popped into focus. I remember doing things like setting up a test to see whether Santa Claus really knew things my parents didn't know, but these don't feel different from other memories of childhood.
Back when I was younger, I had a memory from when I was about a half-year old, of my parents putting me into a new-and-unfamiliar stroller and then tipping it backwards in a way they didn't with my usual stroller and me finding this scary and starting to loudly cry about it.
I no longer have direct access to the memory—it was lost at some point in late-childhood-to-early-teenagerhood, and now I only remember remembering it and telling people about it, I don't remember it directly—but I'm reasonably confident it was real, because when I told my mother about the memory back before it was lost she immediately knew what incident it was a memory of: her going stroller-shopping when I was about half a year old, and trying out a jogging stroller briefly.
I don't recall (or recall-having-recalled or suchlike) ever seeing any baby-pictures from even that overall shopping trip, never mind that specific moment, so I expect they don't exist and thus aren't relevantly a confounding factor. And I similarly don't recall having been given any verbal recounting of that shopping-trip prior to my telling my parents about that memory. I don't think it was a very remarkable event in their mind at the time.
But also I'm pretty sure presence or absence of memories of a given time isn't a strong indicator of presence or absence of consciousness at that time. Absence of memory is compatible with presence of consciousness, due to e.g. amnesia-related effects; presence of memory is compatible with absence of consciousness, if the memory happens not to encode consciousness-that-was-happening-at-the-time. (Although I lack firsthand experience with the latter case and I'm not confident it's a thing humans actually do; the me in that six-month-old memory was already pretty clearly conscious.) So I suspect the framing that this post is responding to is kind of fundamentally broken from the outset.
For this task, I have the advantage of moving when I was four years old, so all memories of that prior apartment are conveniently dated. I remember a lot about age 4 and maybe even some age 3 stuff. Being woken up to watch the end of the Miracle on Ice game is another helpful timestamp. No big jump in awareness, but lots of early childhood memories. Are there really people who cannot remember before age 5?
@Scott What do your kids say, if you ask them if they think (or don’t think) that they are conscious?
So I was under the table in my kitchen, hanging upside down like a bat, gripping the edge of the table. And I suddenly had this thought: “I’m conscious that I’m conscious that I’m conscious…” — and it just kept looping like that. But I don' think i had the word consciousness.
It felt like this weird spiral, like mental vertigo.
A year ago, I became very interested in a related question. All my life, I've been aware that I basically started having memories at age 5. I have a few scattered ones from before then, but there's a definite discontinuous jump in the number of memories I have at age 5. And again, I've been aware of this forever; at age 6 I was aware I couldn't remember anything before age 5. But my wife doesn't have this experience at all; she basically has a continuous decrease in how much she remembers. So I started going around and asking people about it: do you have an age where suddenly the memories are available, or is it more gradual? People split about 50/50, and the ones with an age usually had it around 5.
However. I asked one of my students about this, and she immediately said she had a specific age...and it was TEN. And she literally phrased it as, "I gained sentience at the age of 10."
So I was under the table in my kitchen, hanging upside down like a bat, gripping the edge of the table. And I suddenly had this thought: “I’m conscious that I’m conscious that I’m conscious…” — and it just kept looping like that. But I don' think i had the word consciousness.
It felt like this weird spiral, like mental vertigo.
When you've acquired consciousness you also got to know what it's like to be a bat! Way ahead of the pack!
Ancient Hindus / Vedic Indians were preoccupied with this question...what is the true nature of consciousness? They were so obsessed with it that they didn't care about anything else. This last claim, according to Roberto Calasso, Italian author, in "Ardor". He makes the case that they were mom maniacally obsessed with this question. I have learned a Sanskrit verse as a child that translates to "That, by knowing which everything becomes known." They believed that if you understood this, other questions would melt away and you were now an enlightened being.
I don't have a story here, but I do have somewhat jumbled thoughts on the topic. I have young kids (turning 5 and 7 this summer) and I'm often struck by the thought that already they have fully developed personalities and complex thoughts and goals and memories, but that most of their memories and thoughts will fade. They and I have a very strong relationship, but if anything were to happen to me, they'd barely remember me in a few years, and even that will be without any strength of emotion. That's kind of mind blowing to me.
Personality is also interesting - through memories will fade, I'm pretty sure their personalities will not change all that much, unless something very drastic happens.
Jeeze, young people are a different species. I look at that frog avatar post, and I absolutely have no idea of what's being communicated. Complete gibberish.
Anyway, my experience: Playing in the back yard when I was maybe 7. I suddenly woke up in bed the following morning. All my life before that point is something that I remember as if it were just a dream...
My earliest memories are from when I was 3. I'm not sure which is chronologically first, though. I'm pretty sure I have no memories from before I was able to speak, though, and I didn't start speaking until I was almost 3.
My "gaining consciousness" moment probably happened when I was 4. I woke up and laid in bed thinking about what my favorite color was. I decided to change it from green to red. I told everyone about my big decision.
It's the first memory I can think of where I exhibited self awareness, and it was soon followed by many more self-aware memories, including contemplating my own death.
I was involved in a bad car accident when I was about a year and a half old. I remember two things about being in the hospital: one of the nurses taking me around in a little red wagon, and looking out the window to the parking lot to try to find my father's car. There's a photo of the latter thing, so that memory could be contaminated by that; but the former thing is to my knowledge genuine.
Related to this, I also remember being at home later and having the garment covering one of my burns irritating me. My thought was something like "this really hurts and I want this to stop." Maybe this was "awakening?"
Even so, I do think there was a real shift to my modern way of thinking at around age 14. No specific event triggered it, but there's a clear before-and-after for me in a difficult-to-articulate way.
I kind of feel like I've gained consciousness thrice. First gradually over my childhood, second when I recollected my personal history to figure out how I had bought so unreasonably deeply into HBD-community stuff, and third last weekend when I was Enlightened.
I think basically both the two stories are true. Especially as you grow up or adapt to new situations, you gradually develop the ability to remember more. But also sometimes you're kind of a lost soul, getting pushed around by the societal currents until you have the right insight, at which point suddenly a lot of your scattered memories click and make sense.
I had a long phasing in of memory from age 4 onward, no particularly memorable “click” into place.
At age 21 I started meditating, journaling, and reading full-length books again (I had been a bookworm as a kid, but was put off reading by high school). I see that year, in retrospect, as a pretty significant shift in my level of consciousness.
I have no internal monologue. No mental pictures. I can't taste or smell something that is not in front of me at the moment. (This phenomenon is called Aphantasia) I just exist in the moment, then the moment passes and I exist in the next moment. My short-term memories are only converted to long-term memories if I convey them with words (i.e. tell the story of what just happened). I know about the events of my past, but they are not memories; they are stories. At times, people remind me of something I did with them, or something that happened when I was with them, but unless I wrote it in my journal or told the story out loud, I don't remember.
All of this makes me question how we define "consciousness". Is memory required to be considered conscious? I can produce thoughts and words. Does that make me conscious? I am aware of my "self". Does that make me conscious?
I'm curious what that's like. How does telling the story out loud help? Are you then able to remember telling the story? To me this conflicts with "I just exist in this moment and then the moment passes and I exist in the next moment". If I take that literally, then "I need to look things up in a journal in order to 'remember' them", would fit, because when you're reading the journal then in that moment, sure, you can access the story you're reading. But if just converting sense-impressions and causal chains into a linguistic description, whether by composing that description in writing or speech, allows them to be retained, then I'd say something like "you have linguistic memories, but not sensory memories you can recall with an 'inner eye'", rather than "they aren't memories."
That is probably a better description - having linguistic memories rather than sensory memories.
I feel as though most people equate memory with the ability to partially re-live the moment in sight/sound/taste/smell/emotion. I remember a friend of mine lamenting that he couldn't even remember is mother anymore several years after she passed because he could no longer conjure up a picture of her in his head. I have friends who, when I ask them to recall a moment, will close their eyes and "see" the people and the events in question, "hear" the sounds and the voices, and then tell me what happened. I don't have access to this type of memory. If you ask me about the birth of my child, I can't go back. I can tell you the story I have told over and over again about that day, but if you ask me about something I have never talked about - how many medical personnel were in the room during the birth, for example - I have no way to access that information.
Thanks for the reply, how things work for you is clearer now.
In answer to the questions in the final paragraph of your first comment, "consciousness" is poorly defined, but the fact that there's some sense-impression there for you to capture in some linguistic construction, suggests to me that you're conscious. I think "consciousness" and "the ability to recall past sensory impressions" are separate. Consciousness is about how you are, not what a future version of you will be able to say about how you were.
Thought experiment: Let's say you could have full imaginative memory as you describe others having, but only for a day - when you went to sleep, all that would remain the next morning is what you had preserved linguistically. I think ~everyone would agree you were conscious.
Change the scenario so "a day" is "5 minutes", and I still see little debate.
Clearly you have some ability to store sense-impressions for long enough to write them down or describe them in words - you can look away from an apple, look at a page in your journal, and although you're not currently looking at the apple, you can write down a description of it. So, in a sense, maybe you can "imagine" what happened 10 seconds ago, or 5 seconds ago, but it doesn't feel like imagining because it's so recent, it just feels like experiencing the world.
If you couldn't experience the world, your access to your own sensorium was simply a text summary, then some might argue that you aren't fully conscious. But that would be on the level of "I don't know what 'red' looks like, I just know the word 'red'".
You say that you live in the moment, but "moment" is poorly defined, and it does seem like you can retain sensory impressions in short term memory, and recall them, although maybe on a very short timescale. I think if one wanted to get nitpicky, "I can experience sensory impressions" is all that's needed for consciousness, "I can remember sensory impressions" is extra. But you do seem to have a bit of that extra, so we don't even have to be particularly nitpicky - you're conscious, clearly.
As I've said elsewhere in this discussion to other people, I think "can form long term memories" and "is conscious" are two different things and shouldn't be confused. Also "is aware, has experiences" is different from "is self-aware, realizes a distinction between self and environment", but people seem to be using "is conscious" for both, interchangeably.
Only if "is able to form and retain long term memories of sensory experiences, in the sensory modality in which they were experienced" is key to someone's definition of consciousness, would you potentially not be classed as conscious - but I don't think most people think of consciousness as equivalent to long term memory formation (which, again, you can do, just with words rather than sense-impressions) or a particular subtype of long term memory formation.
EDIT: Maybe you can't look away from an apple and then write about what it looked like, you'd have to verbalize what you were going to write, while looking at the apple? In any case, I think "consciousness" is about being able to experience the world, not about memories of that experience.
Many of the responses to this post definitely seem to be equating the ability to retain memories with consciousness, and I fully agree that these are two separate ideas. A person whose brain is damaged so they are unable to form new memories would still be considered “conscious”.
Even the idea that a cow might not be conscious, as was suggested in the original article, seems to me to be questionable. Cows perceive the world, process their perceptions, and respond autonomously to that stimulus. They even seem to have memories. Is that enough to diagnose consciousness? I don’t know. Some forms of AI also have these traits, and I am not ready to assign consciousness to robots.
I would certainly argue that I, myself, am at least as conscious as a cow, despite my lack of explicit sensory memories. :D
There's something extra to consciousness. When I put my hand on a hot stove, an automatic reaction occurs which removes my hand, before I become consciously aware of having touched the stove - because "remove hand from danger" is more important than "be consciously aware of danger and decide what to do about it". No conscious processing occurred until after my hand jerked back, but some part of my nervous system perceived the dangerous stimulus and responded.
By "something extra" I don't mean anything mystical, but there's some extra processing that occurs, aside from stimulus and response, which corresponds to "awareness of having received a stimulus of this type".
I'd bet cows have some level of that awareness, but we haven't nailed down exactly where the processing occurs or why/what it's for, so it's hard for me to defend that assertion. And hard to say whether or not AIs have that extra processing.
I have lots of hazy memories starting from the age of around three, but they do not come intrinsically ordered, so I need to apply some conscious deduction, reasoning and guesswork to figure out which one is the first. Like, I remember sitting in my kitchen watching the Czech cartoon "The little mole". I remember first coming to kindergarten to first meet the caretaker, when no one was there, the lights were not lit, and the kindergarten seemed dim and empty. I remember being scared during a family gathering on New Year's Eve at my uncle impersonating a wolf. But I can't be sure which was the first one. It seems obvious to me that retaining ordering of memories is harder than retaining memories themselves, so I am surprised by the number of people who can determine which of their memories is the first one.
However, I am not sure the word "awareness" is applicable for those memories, because they are just about being in the flow of life. However I remember that at the age of five or six I gained, rather than self-awareness, the awareness of others: that other people have their own subjective experience of life. But I think that kinda counts as getting self-awareness, in the sense that you can not define coldness without defining hotness and vice versa. In a similar vein, when I realised existence of others' subjective experience, the directly-perceived-subjective-experience got reframed as "me" to distinguish it from others' experiences. In a sense, I have not gained stronger self-awareness than that since: I have my subjective experience, I think others have something similar, so I distinguish the directly perceived experience as "mine". If there was no one but me, it would not make sense to speak about "me", I'd just be "the" eye of the universe with which it sees itself. There would be no me, just the act of existing.
One of my first memories involves already having a fully formed theory of mind for myself and others. It involves my mom and dad fighting (the memory does not include what they were fighting about, although vague associations with him being away often because he was in the military) and my thinking "when mom said that, she meant X, but when dad heard what she said, he thought it meant Y, and responded with Z, which mom interpreted as A when that's not what he meant, and it made the fight worse, but if I was to explain to each of them what the other meant, that would fix this". With less labeling because I didn't have the concept of variables, this is a mental insight expressed here in words because that's what you have to do in a comment section, not a quotation of my inner monologue. As I recall, I did explain each person's mental state to the other, and it worked. So one of my key early memories involves the idea that sometimes people fight because they don't understand each other or something about a situation, and so more knowledge = less fighting.
This suggests to me that I was "conscious" by various definitions of this word, before the point of this memory. Meaning: there's a difference between "conscious" and "able to form long term memories", and the two shouldn't be conflated.
My theory, based on how long term memories seem to work for me, is that you need a certain amount of conceptual scaffolding for a long term memory to hang on to/a web of concepts within which the series of events within the memory makes sense.
Example: I'm bad at chess. Show me a chessboard, and I will 100% not be able to retain the position of the pieces accurately for any length of time. But a chessmaster will, at a glance. Let them watch a game, and they will be able to tell you who moved what where from beginning to end, where I will be like "there was a game of chess that happened". If I was a small child without an understanding that chess was a game people play, I could have been like "two people were at a table and there was something in the middle". Further back, I might have been able to recognize there are faces in the scene, but couldn't have even understood what was going on.
Example 2: Give me a scientific paper on a topic I understand well, and after reading it I'll be able to tell you what was in it long afterwards, and likely what figures were where in the paper. Give me a paper with lots of math I don't understand in a subfield I'm not at all familiar with, and I probably won't even retain the abstract, and after a while I won't even remember what field the paper claimed to be in, or that I read it at all, unless someone prompts me.
So my idea is, small children don't have the conceptual scaffolding to form long term episodic memories with, but they are nevertheless fully capable of having full-fledged conscious experiences, by whatever definition of consciousness you may like, at an age earlier than you might expect based on self-report of events that would require long term episodic memory to report.
As for when this early memory occurred, all of my early memories have been internally tagged with "around 3 or 4", but I'm not sure that's accurate. I do remember being very young, having a memory, asking mom when it happened, and she said "when you were 4", and doing this several times, and concluding I couldn't remember much before I was 3-4.
My first memory is a a-ha moment, but a physical one. I'm pretty sure I remember learning to walk. Just my parents standing at opposite ends of our hallway and me managing to run from one to the other as I finally figured out this whole balance thing. If true, it would be an unusually old memory.
Other stuff I remember is surely dated to when I was 3 or so, like one time I had pneumonia. And I learned to read before school, at 4 yo I think, and I remember distinctly going through the town in the back of the car and having a sudden moment of realisation at just how much information kept sweeping over me from every sign now, without even focusing on them on purpose, and asking my mom if it was always like this.