When Does Consciousness Show Up

When an egg is fertilized, a new cell is created with the combined genetic material of the father (me) and the mother (Mikaela). The newly formed zygote (from the Greek for "76 points in Scrabble" ) splits into many new yet identical cells until a small blackberry like glob of proto-human is floating it's way down to the uterus, inside its Zona Pellucida spaceship (marked one on the picture below.



-Image courtesy of the Swiss Virtual Campus

After five days of manufacturing genetically identical cells, differentiation begins at last. The cells on the outside of the blackberry, separate and form a globe (called the trophoblast). The inner-blackberry cells form a glob along one side of the dome (called the embryoblast)



-Image courtesy of the Swiss Virtual Campus

Those light blue cells become the placenta. The pea green cells the kid.

Of course biologists have shuffled the cells around right before segmentation, taking the inside cells destined for decades of greatness and shuffling them to the outside and taking the outside cells, destined for the brief and inglorious life of the placenta.

What happened to the potential for consciousness in those cells? Our existences are clearly contingent, from the very first moments when "your" sperm made it through "your" zona pellucida to this morning when you weren't creamed by MUNI on the way to work. One is the contingency of existence at all. The other is the contingency of existence continuing.

This is different from that familiar kind of contingency and I am fixated on it. The cells are identical in every way except their position relative to one another. Some become a human and some become an organ.

While the proto-human is a zygote, there is nothing we would call consciousness there, but potential is in every cell to create it. And when some of the cells drift one way and some of the cells drift another, there is still no consciousness. But there is a change.

In some cells there is still potential for consciousness while in others that door has closed. Actual consciousness is still many months away, but an irreversible, invisible and flip-of-the-coin lucky split in their fates sends one to life, the other to the mute darkness of a bladder or a fingernail.

This is a kind of contingency of potential. Coulda woulda shoulda, but wrong place, wrong time.

Next: So when does consciousness show up? Is it like a light switch or the lifting of fog?

And does the same thing happen in reverse as the work is undone? Do we diminish back into the fog, passing through the dimmer consciousness of the placenta before dissipating?