The Forgotten Body: Subjective Experiences in Early Life

Bayne’s and colleagues’ review overlooks a significant body of previous work already calling for endorsing a developmental perspective in understanding conscious experiences (Delafield-Butt & Gangopadhyay 2013; Atzil et al. 2018; Quintero & De Jaegher 2020; Ciaunica et al. 2021a).Looking back at the emergence of consciousness in early life, one may distinguish between the ‘easy’ and the ‘hard problem’, to paraphrase Chalmers (1996). The easy problem is when consciousness sets on in early development. By contrast, the hard problem is how conscious experiences get off the ground. Bayne et al. addresses the easy problem while tacitly endorsing the traditional neuro-centric perspective stipulating that neural activity in the human cortex is the necessary and sufficient condition for consciousness (Seth & Bayne 2022). Perhaps paradoxically, in order to solve the easy problem of developmental consciousness, one must start with the hard problem, namely how consciousness emerges? Here I propose that one overlooked, yet promising approach to this hard problem is to look at the relationship between the emerging human being with another human being, i.e. the pregnant person. The key idea is that human conscious experiences are primarily and fundamentally co-embodied and social across the lifespan (Atzil et al. 2018; Ciaunica et al. 2023). Importantly, the pregnant person body is not an ‘external environment’ within which the foetus is solitary and ‘confined’, waiting for the ‘lightbulb’ of consciousness to be switched on at a given timepoint when the neurogenesis is completed. Here I propose that both the easy and hard problem of developmental consciousness cannot be addressed without putting the forgotten body back into the picture. This includes importantly the necessary presence of the other body (i.e. the pregnant person) too, without which the fascinating journey of conscious life wouldn’t be possible tout court.