This is a bizarre question to ask and frame as an unknown. Anyone who has held or had to watch after a baby can tell you that, although there is plenty of "autopilot" software running the show, there are moments of complete lucidity.
The complete disconnect between journalism and literally the most fundamental of basic human experiences is astounding.
If babies were not conscious then killing them would be no problem. It is their capacity for consciousness (however nascent) that makes them human, and therefore, sacred.
Yes, it's good that the science exists. But framing an obviously true fact - one which underpins so much of our morality - as up for debate (as the headline does), is caustic.
> For decades, surgery was performed on infants without anesthesia
What hasn't yet been processed is the horror and barbarity of having done so. To this day, when it's mentioned, we can't take in what it means.
When the practice was discontinued (around 1984 IIRC), the NYT reported on the change much as if a style guide for medical reports had just been revised. (Sorry I don't have the link handy.)
Edit: I found https://web.archive.org/web/20090410072646/https://www.nytim... from 1987, but that one is an op-ed that actually does express some feeling (despite its obligatory "They did so for the purest of reasons" at the start). The report I was remembering, or perhaps misremembering, was more heartless.
> If babies were not conscious then killing them would be no problem.
Say what? No. Killing them would be a problem because they're human. With that comes the capability to become conscious, whether or not they are at the time they are babies.
> It is their capacity for consciousness (however nascent) that makes them human, and therefore, sacred.
There is no one gene for humanness. Never the less, human DNA (the sum of the DNA carried by any one human) is distinctly human, rather than chimp or canine or lizard. That's why the organism becomes a human body, not a chimp or a canine or a lizard.
> The genetic differences between Neanderthals and all modern humans (amounting to about 30,000) are far less than the differences between two random human beings alive today – around 3 million [1].
Clearly Neanderthals aren't more human compared to you than a randomly selected person.
The sun will become a red star in 5 billion years. We have voids in our universe which are not crossable.
From my pure nihilistic view, it doesn't matter, never has, never will. From an idealistic view: we are humans, i value the uniqueness of mine and the complexity and uniqueness of everyone else being part of my experience.
I think we agree. Humans are conscious, intelligent, remember their past, plan and dream their future, suffer and hope, have friends and family and partners they care deeply about. And are each a fundamental part of the lives of others around them. That's why I feel that statements like "human beings should be protected because they have human DNA" are inadequate as they focus on something that is neither necessary nor sufficient.
By saying "becomes", I was intending to leave open the possibility that, by somebody's definition, a baby might not be conscious. But they aren't going to stay a baby forever.
The universe is dense with people that could have been but never was. For example all the children that would have been conceived in replacement to a previous aborted pregnancy. It becomes a problem for us only when we make a picture of that possible person in our head (starting, for example, from a fetus). But it's our imagination, not something that ever existed.
> If babies were not conscious then killing them would be no problem. It is their capacity for consciousness (however nascent) that makes them human, and therefore, sacred
Once you have a neural network as sophisticated as a baby’s will it be immoral to turn it off?
The article says "newborns", not generically babies. Newborns don't have language, memory or plans, and can't really see or control their bodies. I'm not sure how you would prove that they're conscious.
Yes please. Send me links that prove that newborns speak and can relate their past, make plans about the future, walk and manipulate objects to achieve goals, and see beyond a few cm. I'll wait.
I could go on for each of your claims but this should suffice to make a curious person want to revisit their assumptions. Each one touches not only on speech but memory.
You moved the goalpost in your second comment, so I am not going to consider you worth engaging beyond that - you're clearly a bad faith arguer.
The articles you linked say that newborns hear and learn speech sounds, not that they have a language. Their brains are primed to absorb it and they will eventually develop it, they're not born with it.
By most cognitive measures, an adult mouse is probably more conscious than a newborn.
Your own reaction shows a certain level of thinking / quality of thinking or depth of thinking.
Its hard to describe or explain this to you because you will only realize this when you look back after you thought more.
Babies are not sacred. You and me are not sacred. Humans are not sacred.
Our biological programming / priming gives us this 'feeling'.
And consiousness alone is not the thing which makes us not kill most humans, after all we still kill babies and humans daily.
Alone the word sacred is weird in this context. A lot more of questioning the level of consciousness.
Btw. the lucidity you mentioned, might be a conscious experience in development. it might be the same as what you do, it might be not. You point it out because for you its the quality of a human
I've thought about it plenty in depth. Consciousness studies is a field of interest of mine. You're projecting, and also, it's pretty crazy to say babies are not sacred. That's a value held by basically every culture.
You've misunderstood if you think I am making a religious argument. I am simply pointing to the religion as evidence that the belief in the sacredness of infant life is universal.
You are the outlier with your misanthropic belief.
And you don't understand that my point of discusison is not a point of the masses but a logical one.
It doesn't matter if religion also sees this as sacred because religion and religous people stoped thinking and moved their goal post to "the bible says and god".
Alone having your goal post at this point is a strong indicator that the thinking is flawed.
Logic does not have any bearing on what is sacred; meaning arises from a domain of experience that lies outside logic. That is well known both ontologically and in the realm of neuroscience - not that someone with such a narrow view of the world as you would care. It's clear all you are trying to do is defend a view you hide behind. What is below that is despair, and below despair, fear, and below fear, feeble mindedness.
Nature is not inhernatly good and evoluitionary behaviours are also not. You have to separate yourself from this base and think through it holisticly.
You just don't break through through your indoctrinational thinking.
And while religious people see humans as 'sacred', religous people have very little issues of being on the wrong side, constantly.
You remember the pope of the christians? Ratzinger? The figure of moral and ethik of religion for a while? You know what he said regarding the abuse of children? I will tell you: They thought this wouldn't create a lasting impact and felt its more critical to keep the facade for the church than speaking up about the abuse.
How many religious people want humans dead?
I'm not hiding behind anything. I'm not a person who hurts people i'm a person who helps. At least in 2 situation were no one else was helping.
I'm happy to discuss this properly until we get a combined view or a better discussion.
You started with this statement: "It is their capacity for consciousness (however nascent) that makes them human, and therefore, sacred." without any real argument.
I criticie this directly because saying something is 'sacred' is not a conclusion. You are either going in the direction of anthropocentrism or spiritual humanism but thats it. The discussion has ended for you. You accepted in your thinking that humans are 'sacred'. Without an real logical argument.
Its the same thing a lot of people just do. They stop when they found something which looks satisfactory to them.
You state then in the next comment, that you also thinking through stuff like this for a while and argue that just because others came to the same conclusion than you, that this is correct / more correct than others.
You don't explain how 'sacred' is not just a goalpost and you argue that others have the same result makes it valuable.
I counter argue that just because historical people say this, doesn't mean anything.
"Logic does not have any bearing on what is sacred; meaning arises from a domain of experience that lies outside logic."
This is uterly ignorant in my opinion. If you believe this, you are BELIEVING but you are not arguing and its not logical. There is no way for us than to align because either we have the same 'experience' or not.
But logic is more and its narrow. The cognitive bias link to wikipedia i send, is the 'experience' part you speak of. We has humans need to surpass these 'experiences' and think more rational about them to fix them to understand when and why we make mistakes.
Thsi is the reason why someone might believe in a wonder vs. the other person questioning it and finding out that the tears of that one statue has a logical conclusion and has nothing to do with a wonder. We are fundamentaly flawed as a human.
I really try to understand you, i really try to convay my thinking.
I came to the logical conclusion of nihilism by 14. I'm not living as a nihilist but i fully accepted it. I do understand how people perceive this world including your viewpoint of sacred, this doesn't change the underlying principle of our being: We are fundamentaly a result of evolution, consciousness might just be an emerging feature of the complexity of our brain / neural network and can happen in a machine. We do not know how/why the universe was created in what space and why we exist. There is no conlusion to this and we just don't know.
Our uniqueness and everything which had to come together to form us, is special because I or you define it as special which is okay but thats a self defined property of some people. Biological speaking / evolutionary speaking, we do have patterns in our brain which support this due to very basic evolutionary things.
You broke the site guidelines repeatedly and badly in this thread as well. We ban accounts that do this, if you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules, we'd appreciate it.
Also, could you please stop creating accounts for every few comments you post? We also ban accounts that do that. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
You needn't use your real name, of course, but for HN to be a community, users need some identity for other users to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
I don’t know why this was downvoted. I have children and the first thing I questioned was whether the author has kids.
The intro to the article feels like the author asked a LLM to summarize journal papers about consciousness. It seems there is not a consensus around what it is.
Can anyone in this field provide a directional overview of what we think consciousness is in 2026?
People incorrectly think LLMs are conscious because they output language. Yet we question consciousness and intelligence and so on in dogs, cats and now babies.
It’s a ridiculous human bias. Nobody thinks an image generator is conscious. Nobody thinks a human image generated by an image generator is real. But LLMs generate text and so people mistakenly assume they are conscious. LLMs can deep fake personas and act like characters and people think that’s what they actually are. It’s all a deep fake. When you talk to an LLM you are “talking” to a deep fake of a person in the same manner as an image generator deep faking a human image.
An now a paper of record is questioning whether babies are conscious. Why? Just because they don’t use language or have access to memories we question this!? Ultimately that’s what it boils down to regardless of what this article says.
Its a fundamental question to us what consciousness is, who has it, what levels or qualities of it gets.
Only 50 years ago the nazis dehumanized mentally and bodily disabled people.
Other cultures to this day lock humans away with mental illness because they don't understand it.
The complexity of LLMs reached already dimensions that are not that far away from the complexity of human brains and we are only at the beginning of this journey potentially.
World models are getting developed and we havent even tried to build systems similiar to what our brains architecture with a default mode network would look like. We only throw massive amount of resources onto LLMs.
LLM's etc probably do have some part to play in it; but I would go further and say that the the hyper-fragmenting of what used to be social spheres with a shared sense of reality into a party-of-1 "recommended for you" algorithm has reduced the abiltiy to "mentalize" across the board for the perpetually-online generations (millennials onward). I think it's an epidemic of cognitive blindness that has traits similar to sociopathy as a byproduct.
The brain is still one organ? Unless in such situations where a person goes in and physically cuts the corpus callosum, the brain functions as one organ.
We recently got an article claiming the front and back of the brain grow from two different progenitor cells, which some scientific media reported as it being two organs, whereas others claim that's an exaggeration.
When he says brain does he mean the whole thing or 1 of these two parts?
He probably means both parts. Thats what people usually mean when they say brain. So it doesn’t really follow that if its from the “brain” it must be from one of two parts.
this is one of several seemingly inocuious (nyt) questions that then gives certain people licence to posit and discuss monsterous sociopathic aberations all cutsey like it's JUST intelectual and these things NEED to be determined, but of course there is NO need, or at least nothing that can be spoken out along with the subject itself.
such as a bunch of wackjobs who have SOLD the comodified and productivised undefined concept of consiousness, but they have no actual product and are going for ever wierder and harder excursions into the darkest wastelands of philosophy, science, useing intelectual academic gidderish and are nudging up on the occult.
maybe rent a particle accelerator and put the koolaid in that first.
54 comments
[ 0.25 ms ] story [ 28.7 ms ] threadInteresting. This increased my credence that newborns are conscious / sentient (which had been somewhat low).
The complete disconnect between journalism and literally the most fundamental of basic human experiences is astounding.
If babies were not conscious then killing them would be no problem. It is their capacity for consciousness (however nascent) that makes them human, and therefore, sacred.
What hasn't yet been processed is the horror and barbarity of having done so. To this day, when it's mentioned, we can't take in what it means.
When the practice was discontinued (around 1984 IIRC), the NYT reported on the change much as if a style guide for medical reports had just been revised. (Sorry I don't have the link handy.)
Edit: I found https://web.archive.org/web/20090410072646/https://www.nytim... from 1987, but that one is an op-ed that actually does express some feeling (despite its obligatory "They did so for the purest of reasons" at the start). The report I was remembering, or perhaps misremembering, was more heartless.
Say what? No. Killing them would be a problem because they're human. With that comes the capability to become conscious, whether or not they are at the time they are babies.
> It is their capacity for consciousness (however nascent) that makes them human, and therefore, sacred.
No, it's their DNA that makes them human.
> The genetic differences between Neanderthals and all modern humans (amounting to about 30,000) are far less than the differences between two random human beings alive today – around 3 million [1].
Clearly Neanderthals aren't more human compared to you than a randomly selected person.
1. https://www.theguardian.com/science/2023/jan/12/svante-paabo...
Anyway, personally I have a higher view of what a human being is and why it's deserving of protection than just a string of information.
The sun will become a red star in 5 billion years. We have voids in our universe which are not crossable.
From my pure nihilistic view, it doesn't matter, never has, never will. From an idealistic view: we are humans, i value the uniqueness of mine and the complexity and uniqueness of everyone else being part of my experience.
What is your "higher view"? whats your pedestal?
Once you have a neural network as sophisticated as a baby’s will it be immoral to turn it off?
https://theconversation.com/babies-can-learn-language-sounds...
https://www.monoglotanxiety.com/blog/sciene-of-language-newb...
https://www.aaas.org/news/babies-brains-are-primed-their-nat...
I could go on for each of your claims but this should suffice to make a curious person want to revisit their assumptions. Each one touches not only on speech but memory.
You moved the goalpost in your second comment, so I am not going to consider you worth engaging beyond that - you're clearly a bad faith arguer.
By most cognitive measures, an adult mouse is probably more conscious than a newborn.
Its hard to describe or explain this to you because you will only realize this when you look back after you thought more.
Babies are not sacred. You and me are not sacred. Humans are not sacred.
Our biological programming / priming gives us this 'feeling'.
And consiousness alone is not the thing which makes us not kill most humans, after all we still kill babies and humans daily.
Alone the word sacred is weird in this context. A lot more of questioning the level of consciousness.
Btw. the lucidity you mentioned, might be a conscious experience in development. it might be the same as what you do, it might be not. You point it out because for you its the quality of a human
I can infer from this you do not have a child.
Its not about a believe its about thinking beyond.
Religious believes are not that deep. They provide a basic answer without depth to questions we have.
'Sacred' is just a very basic answer to a complex topic. Its like 'where is my goal post? Oh its over there by 'Sacred''.
You are the outlier with your misanthropic belief.
It doesn't matter if religion also sees this as sacred because religion and religous people stoped thinking and moved their goal post to "the bible says and god".
Alone having your goal post at this point is a strong indicator that the thinking is flawed.
Nature is not inhernatly good and evoluitionary behaviours are also not. You have to separate yourself from this base and think through it holisticly.
You just don't break through through your indoctrinational thinking.
And while religious people see humans as 'sacred', religous people have very little issues of being on the wrong side, constantly.
You remember the pope of the christians? Ratzinger? The figure of moral and ethik of religion for a while? You know what he said regarding the abuse of children? I will tell you: They thought this wouldn't create a lasting impact and felt its more critical to keep the facade for the church than speaking up about the abuse.
How many religious people want humans dead?
I'm not hiding behind anything. I'm not a person who hurts people i'm a person who helps. At least in 2 situation were no one else was helping.
You started with this statement: "It is their capacity for consciousness (however nascent) that makes them human, and therefore, sacred." without any real argument.
I criticie this directly because saying something is 'sacred' is not a conclusion. You are either going in the direction of anthropocentrism or spiritual humanism but thats it. The discussion has ended for you. You accepted in your thinking that humans are 'sacred'. Without an real logical argument.
Its the same thing a lot of people just do. They stop when they found something which looks satisfactory to them.
You state then in the next comment, that you also thinking through stuff like this for a while and argue that just because others came to the same conclusion than you, that this is correct / more correct than others.
You don't explain how 'sacred' is not just a goalpost and you argue that others have the same result makes it valuable.
I counter argue that just because historical people say this, doesn't mean anything.
"Logic does not have any bearing on what is sacred; meaning arises from a domain of experience that lies outside logic."
This is uterly ignorant in my opinion. If you believe this, you are BELIEVING but you are not arguing and its not logical. There is no way for us than to align because either we have the same 'experience' or not.
But logic is more and its narrow. The cognitive bias link to wikipedia i send, is the 'experience' part you speak of. We has humans need to surpass these 'experiences' and think more rational about them to fix them to understand when and why we make mistakes.
Thsi is the reason why someone might believe in a wonder vs. the other person questioning it and finding out that the tears of that one statue has a logical conclusion and has nothing to do with a wonder. We are fundamentaly flawed as a human.
I really try to understand you, i really try to convay my thinking.
I came to the logical conclusion of nihilism by 14. I'm not living as a nihilist but i fully accepted it. I do understand how people perceive this world including your viewpoint of sacred, this doesn't change the underlying principle of our being: We are fundamentaly a result of evolution, consciousness might just be an emerging feature of the complexity of our brain / neural network and can happen in a machine. We do not know how/why the universe was created in what space and why we exist. There is no conlusion to this and we just don't know.
Our uniqueness and everything which had to come together to form us, is special because I or you define it as special which is okay but thats a self defined property of some people. Biological speaking / evolutionary speaking, we do have patterns in our brain which support this due to very basic evolutionary things.
Also, could you please stop creating accounts for every few comments you post? We also ban accounts that do that. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
You needn't use your real name, of course, but for HN to be a community, users need some identity for other users to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
That's why the EMTs and paramedics all cluster around car accident victims, asking whether they are conscious, so they can kill them already
"911, what is your emergency? ... Oh, your grandmother is unconscious? We'll send out our firing squad right away!"
The intro to the article feels like the author asked a LLM to summarize journal papers about consciousness. It seems there is not a consensus around what it is.
Can anyone in this field provide a directional overview of what we think consciousness is in 2026?
People incorrectly think LLMs are conscious because they output language. Yet we question consciousness and intelligence and so on in dogs, cats and now babies.
It’s a ridiculous human bias. Nobody thinks an image generator is conscious. Nobody thinks a human image generated by an image generator is real. But LLMs generate text and so people mistakenly assume they are conscious. LLMs can deep fake personas and act like characters and people think that’s what they actually are. It’s all a deep fake. When you talk to an LLM you are “talking” to a deep fake of a person in the same manner as an image generator deep faking a human image.
An now a paper of record is questioning whether babies are conscious. Why? Just because they don’t use language or have access to memories we question this!? Ultimately that’s what it boils down to regardless of what this article says.
Plenty of arguments on HN that LLMs are conscious. They are, of course, wrong, but plenty of people seem to believe it-Lord know why.
You can’t say LLMs are missing the thing that causes consciousness, because we don’t know what that is.
Only 50 years ago the nazis dehumanized mentally and bodily disabled people.
Other cultures to this day lock humans away with mental illness because they don't understand it.
The complexity of LLMs reached already dimensions that are not that far away from the complexity of human brains and we are only at the beginning of this journey potentially.
World models are getting developed and we havent even tried to build systems similiar to what our brains architecture with a default mode network would look like. We only throw massive amount of resources onto LLMs.
It is slightly interesting question. There is unlikely to be too many good outcomes from answers. But it might be something to think about...
When he says brain does he mean the whole thing or 1 of these two parts?
He probably means both parts. Thats what people usually mean when they say brain. So it doesn’t really follow that if its from the “brain” it must be from one of two parts.
https://x.com/Austen/status/2106408006216814862