Sentience: What Does a Fetus Know?

There is a paper inNature, The Emergence of Human Consciousness: From Fetal to Neonatal Life, where the abstract stated that, "A simple definition of consciousness is sensory awareness of the body, the self, and the world. The fetus may be aware of the body, for example by perceiving pain. It reacts to touch, smell, and sound, and shows facial expressions responding to external stimuli. However, these reactions are probably preprogrammed and have a subcortical nonconscious origin. Furthermore, the fetus is almost continuously asleep and unconscious partially due to endogenous sedation."

"Conversely, the newborn infant can be awake, exhibit sensory awareness, and process memorized mental representations. It is also able to differentiate between self and nonself touch, express emotions, and show signs of shared feelings. Yet, it is unreflective, present-oriented, and makes little reference to the concept of him/herself. Newborn infants display features characteristic of what may be referred to as basic consciousness and they still have to undergo considerable maturation to reach the level of adult consciousness."

There is a recent article on Big Think, When do humans become conscious — in the womb or after birth?, stating that, "There is little consensus about when consciousness might first emerge. Some endorse a late onset account, holding that consciousness isn’t in place until late infancy, or even toddlerhood. For example, the psychologists, Joseph Perner and Zoltan Dienes, have argued that consciousness is probably not in place before age 1, while the philosopher Peter Carruthers has defended an even more radical view, arguing that consciousness does not emerge until age 3."

"Late onset views are typically motivated by the thought that consciousness requires heavy duty cognitive resources. On Carruthers’ account, the child must be able to grasp the distinction between how the world is and how it appears or seems in order to have any kind of awareness. The claim that consciousness requires significant cognitive capacities is controversial. Those who reject it typically endorse an “early onset” account of consciousness, according to which consciousness is in place by early infancy, if not prior to birth."

Awareness, experience, perception, model of the world, and so forth can be basically summarized with one question, what does a fetus know, or what does a child know? What is the difference between children stating the first few elements of the periodic table they rote memorized from school, with no understanding at all of what they are or mean, and AI text generator doing the same?

What does an infant know?

What does an embryo know?

What do gametes know?

What does a toddler know?

Knowing encompasses memory, feelings, emotions, awareness, attention, perception, sensation, reaction, direction, motion, internal senses, and so forth. They are all aspects of knowing. Pain is known, even though pain is mostly called a feeling. This is the same for thirst, worries, fear, and so forth. All that is known per stage for a specie has a total.

Knowing is mostly labeled as memory, but knowing exceeds the constituents [intelligence, creativity, reasoning, aptitude] of that label. The mind is what helps to know. Whatever biological element can know has a form of mind—or at minimum a form of memory. A flying insect seeking a way out of the room from the window knows something about that direction and its possible exit route.

Consciousness is not directly from the brain, like for its vessels, tissues, folds, hemispheres, or lobes, but consciousness is from the mind. The mind holds all that is known, including versions, equivalents, or representatives of the body. The cells and molecules of the brain can be said to organize, construct, structure, or build the components of the mind, whose interactions are for knowing, within or below awareness.

Conceptually, the components of the mind are quantities and properties. Quantities acquire properties to degrees across mind locations, to determine what is known in any instance. The components of the mind do not have different mechanisms for emotions, memory, or feelings, they work similarly.

Quantities and properties have their features, optimized for the efficiency of knowing, for interoception and exteroception. Consciousness can simply be defined as the rate of knowing. Knowing occurs across all states. Knowing occurs in the mind with its regular mechanism, sometimes by choice [free will] or alternatively in situations. Consciousness has a total for species and their stages of development. There may also be a possible sentience for AI, with rudimentary mirroring of human intelligence, since intelligence is about known things and their application, even if not properly understood.

Whatever can be described as consciousness can be described as knowing. The dead is not conscious but still has the brain almost intact in the aftermath, but the mind, used to know, is gone.

Knowing is how sentience can be rated, measured or extrapolated. Whatever any specie at any point in a life cycle can know—or an object, with weak imitation—to a comparable level to adult humans, defines its consciousness.