1 - Primordial sense of embodied self-unity

Summary

Primordial sense of embodied self-unity

Infancy research of the past forty years defies long-held ideas regarding the starting state of mental life. These ideas were justified by the fact that we do not have any explicit recollection of our own infancy. Infantile amnesia was symptomatic of an initial absence of experiential unity and self-awareness. Prior to language, children were regarded as some kind of larvae, eventually emerging from their blind chrysalides to find embodied selfhood, meta-cognition, and explicit self-identity in the light of symbolic functioning and conceptual representations. There is an abundance of evidence now showing that un-memorable infancy does not equate to mindless infants.

The long-held assumptions of mindless and self-less infants, devoid at birth of experiential unity (i.e. a unified embodied experience), can be explained by a lack of consideration of the variety of ways one can be aware, including levels of self-awareness that are more or less explicit and conceptual (Rochat, 2009). Infant studies call for a distinction between experiential and conceptual awareness: the awareness that accompanies being and acting in the world toward preferred goals, versus the awareness of a conceptualized and re-cognized world (a phenomenal consciousness that has, in addition, cognitive accessibility), following the recent discussion and distinction proposed by Ned Block (2007).