The New York Times has decided the open question in science this week is whether a baby is conscious. Not a cluster of cells. Not a theoretical model. An actual newborn baby.
Carl Zimmer’s 5 October piece, “Are Babies Conscious?” (yes that’s a real headline) walks readers through a lab test and then informs them that a “squirming, gurgling infant” does not seem conscious, “at least not in the way adults are.”
Zimmer’s setup is the oddball-sound test. A subject hears three low tones and a high one, over and over, then a run of four low tones. Adult brains throw a brief, distinctive blip at the break. People in a coma do not. People who are asleep do not. The Times then puts a newborn in the same frame and asks whether the blip will be there.
Are Babies Conscious? As scientists map the birth of consciousness, they hope to gain a better understanding of how it evolved in humans in the first place. https://t.co/g1D5A4wRtF— Patrick Emerton (@egregiousknave) October 5, 2026
Er what? https://t.co/ZqhoAq4dJk— m o d e r n i t y (@ModernityNews) October 6, 2026
The paper calls it an active scientific debate. Dr Topun Austin, a neonatologist at the University of Cambridge, is quoted defining the thing under study: “Consciousness is a process of being receptive to the outside world and mixing that with our own internal world, to create the feeling of who we are and where we are.“
A caption under the piece states that there was a time when our brains were too rudimentary to support consciousness. Zimmer’s own promo line said he had found scientists “on a mission to find out when consciousness begins in babies.”
The reaction online was immediate, and it was not about neuroscience. It was about where the line moves next.
@ModernityNews Ever get the feeling we’re living inside a cautionary tale?
Like we’re all just trapped in a dystopian ’70s sci-fi movie, while Charlton Heston screams about the sanctity of human life? pic.twitter.com/oxA1EaZhXJ— Alpha Of The Betas (@AlphaOfTheBetas) October 6, 2026
“Are Babies Conscious?”
Give this a few more years and they’ll claim consciousness doesn’t begin until the baby is one years old, so abortion should be legal up to that point. pic.twitter.com/hLxMdTzZzC— Arthur in California (@ArthurReturnss) October 5, 2026
@JackPosobiec This is setting to push for post-birth abortion down the line.— Emmanuel Gonzalez (@Emm_Gonzalez38) October 6, 2026
@JackPosobiec They want abortion legality to extend into early childhood— Paul Joseph Tinkle (@PTinkleIndy) October 5, 2026
@JackPosobiec Anyone who has had a child knows that babies are conscious. Only the childless hacks at the NYT are confused.— Andrew McCann (@andymccann) October 5, 2026
All this is going on while we’re debating whether ‘machines can be conscious’, a disturbing irony.
Incredible that we’re debating whether “machines can be conscious” while Democrats still haven’t acknowledged that babies in a mother’s womb have consciousness.— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) October 3, 2026
Of course, there are countless studies that indicate infants, even unborn infants have consciousness as we understand it.
In January, neonatologist Carlo Bellieni of the University of Siena published “A Rudimentary Consciousness Appears in the Late Fetal Period” in EC Gynaecology, reviewing 31 clinical trials from the last decade on fetal anatomy, perception and memory. His conclusion: the early appearance of memory is a sign of rudimental consciousness, and it does not depend on whether the fetus is inside or outside the womb, only on the grade of brain development.
