development of consciousness in children

As James W. noted, ‘Consciousness, however small, is an illegitimate birth in any philosophy that starts without it, and yet professes to explain all facts by continuous evolution.’ So if someone assumes that newborn babies are conscious in some sense at birth, then it is possible to account for subsequent changes of consciousness. Newborn babies experience minimal consciousness which is the simplest, but still conceptually coherent, type of consciousness that counts for the behavioral evidence. Argued elsewhere [Zelano, 1996], minimal consciousness must be characterized by intentionality in Brentano’s [Bretano, 1973] sense (i.e. if one is conscious in any sense then one must be conscious of something), and it motivates approach and avoidance behavior based on pleasure and pain. However, minimal consciousness is unreflective, present-oriented, and makes no reference to a concept of self. So in minimal consciousness, a person is conscious of what they are seeing (the object of experience), but not seeing what they saw, let alone that one’s ‘self ’ is seeing what one sees. Ultimately, one cannot recall seeing what one saw.
In adults, minimal consciousness underlies so-called implicit information processing, like when we drive a car without really thinking about it. Even in the simplest case, where behavioral routines are directed naturally and automatically, they are elicited as a function of consciousness of something. For example say, immediate environmental stimuli. Implicit processing does not happen in a zombie-like way; it is simply unreflective and unavailable for subsequent recollection.

Think about how minimal consciousness plays into in the production of behavior. An actual object in the environment triggers a ‘description’ from semantic long-term memory. This particular description then becomes an intentional object of minimal consciousness, which triggers an associated action program in procedural long-term memory. A rattle, for example, might be