Yeah that's a pretty common experience actually. There are a lot of memes on tiktok and twitter joking about "gaining consciousness" as a child. I think a lot of people remember moments as young children where they first truly felt like real separate beings.
Re:We Are Beast Machines
by mtberatwork on Friday October 15, 2021 @12:35PM
(#28879690)
I think a lot discussion around consciousness focuses too much on the binary (e.g. either you have it or you don't), but I like to think of consciousness as a spectrum, with organisms falling into various points along that spectrum. Your take fits nicely into that picture I think.
This is precisely one of the reasons I prefer attention schema theory as an explanation of consciousness. It actually has a progressive build up, with each individual stage conferring an advantage while also leading to the next stage. Evolution does not like big-bang progression. And it's also very hard to explain big-bang progression in multiple, drastically-unrelated species -- such as humans and octopuses.
Attention schema instead builds gradually. It starts with selective signal processing, advancing to body schema, then to attention schema, then to social schema (modeling other's bodies and attention).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention_schema_theory
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/06/how-cons...
What I'm about to say might make no sense at all, but I seem to remember (or at least think I do, it might be a false memory arising from thinking too much about it) slowly gaining consciousness in early childhood.
I have a birthmark on the back of my hand and some of my earliest memories are triggered by noticing it and realizing I’m a separate being from other people and can influence my actions, stop being a mere observer of my body running on “autopilot”.
I have only passing knowledge of lucid dreaming, but from what I’ve read I’d say becoming a lucid dreamer is not at all dissimilar to developing consciousness in childhood. So maybe that’s a potential avenue for consciousness research.