Consciousness and the Fetus

Consciousness and the Fetus

The brain grows gradually in the fetus, going through various stages of development. This development is now well mapped out embryologically. But nothing is known about the inner consciousness that accompanies this brain growth. It is reasonable to believe that it goes from simple to complex, primitive to sophisticated—how could it not? It has often been supposed, on good evidence, that the fetus itself passes through stages resembling its prehistoric ancestors—the fish is often mentioned. Could it then be that the ontogeny of consciousness recapitulates the phylogeny of consciousness? Could the earliest stages of fetal brain development resemble the earliest stages of ancestral brain development? Might the consciousness of the fetus in its early life be like the consciousness of the first organism on earth to develop consciousness? We don’t know what this consciousness was like, or what the fetus’s early consciousness is like; but it is not unreasonable to surmise some homology (perhaps a feeling of comfort or discomfort). Then, as consciousness develops in the fetus, there is a mapping onto the evolutionary development of consciousness in ancestral species, leading up to the consciousness of species close to the human. The old forms of consciousness are preserved in the genes and have their moment in the sun as the fetus develops. Thus, the fetus lives through millions of years of phenomenological evolution, getting a taste of what things used to be like long ago. All this is forgotten as the adult human brain takes shape, but it was there nonetheless. The fetus in effect knows the consciousness of our earliest ancestors. Yet this knowledge is not preserved, memory being what it is. If only it could be recorded and then uploaded into the adult brain! We would learn a lot about the evolution of consciousness from the inside. The fetus knows more about the evolution of consciousness than we adults will ever know.[1]

[1] The human fetus doesn’t know what it is like to be a bat, since echolocation was not a feature of our ancestral line, but it might know what it is like to be a fish or lizard.