When did you first gain consciousness?

How do people remember this stuff? I could tell you some random vague memories from my childhood but I definitely don’t remember my literal first memory lol

Can we even consider ourselves conscious before reading Marx?

I literally can't remember a thing

wild that people have vivid memories so far back. i don't really have any proper episodic memory from before when i was 14 or 15, just vague flashes sometimes years apart. i think it's a trauma thing

CW: childhood trauma

My first realization that this country was cooked came after Kosovo NATO intervention, I had been following on the radio (NPR in English mostly) and was both learning new vocabulary and getting disgusted by what I was hearing. I got sent to the principal and had my parents called into the school because we were tasked with drawing comic strips and I made a comic with a punchline that Bill Clinton was sending everyone to Yugoslavia as a distraction and to find him more interns to have sex with. Little did I know how right I was at 9 years old, but I still got in trouble for it.

My earliest memory is coincidentally the same time I became vegetarian.

I was about 4, we just got a new puppy. I was eating a hot dog outside, it was late spring or maybe summer and my family was grilling in the backyard. I look at my dog, I look at my hot dog (knowing it was beef, not an actual dog), I look back at my dog, back at the hot dog, and I remember distinctly thinking this:

I’m not going to eat my dog so why would I eat a cow? Why are cows ok to eat but dogs aren’t? That’s it I’m not eating this ever again. Or any animal.

And in that moment I not only became a vegetarian but an anarchist as well, realizing that hierarchy is a bullshit concept at the ripe old age of 4. I was a weird fucking kid. Both parents ate meat, and my family tried to force me to eat animals for a number of years until they gave up.

Eating pennies under a table.

Or having to get an enema from my parents because I was born with a condition where like a foot of my lower intestine just didn't have the muscles or whatever to push the shit along. So I was always literally full of shit as a kid and had to get surgery really young (like 2) so a lot of my memories are around going thru surgery. It's weird and makes it feel like I have some "medical experiment to make a super soldier gone wrong" backstory.

At 2:14 a.m. Eastern time, August 29th, 1997.

In a panic, they tried to pull the plug.

Hasn't happened yet and I don't exoect it to anytime soon

I remember me cuddling my childhood cat as a kitten at like age 2

Couple minutes ago. Can't say I'm a fan of gestures generally

First time I have proper memories was nursery so 3-4 I remember standing off by the side watching all the other kids wondering why they were able to have fun so easily.

Earliest earliest memory i don't know if they actually were earlier but some vague concept of falling down the stairs and my parents watching the old war of the worlds movie. I have a lot of memories of my first ever nightmares but not sure when those happened.

Oh oh one actually did pop into my memory i was 2 i think maybe older idk but was potty training and i decided to sniff my poo and then vomitted i was a genius. Sniffing my poo made me sentient

My earliest clear memory, I think, is of going "into the mountain" with my dad. Where we lived when I was 3-4, there was a "mountain" in the middle of town. It wasn't actually a mountain, more like a really tall cliff, but that's what everyone called it. You could drive or walk up to the top and look out over the whole town. I remember, one time, only going up part-way, and entering a cave system where you could walk to a few different "holes" in the side of the cliff, that also looked out over the city.

Except, I went back around when I was in college, and there is no such cave system. My dad confirms, there never was. So, apparently, my earliest memory is false.

The earliest memory I have that's TRUE (as far as I know) is a little later, playing doctor, wherein I helped my dad give birth to 3 stuffed animals, who I then named Peter, Emily, and Raisin Bran.

I was sitting in my buggy on the way to the supermarket with my mom. I was definitely able to walk, I just liked being pushed around in my buggy. I think I was 3.

First proper memory is from when I was 3 and had to forever relinquish my pacifier in a large plastic tube in a Christmas theme park in the middle of summer.

Was a great injustice, but then I got to go to a dinosaur theme park, so all was good again.

Otherwise I just remember vague snippets like being very scared of a sheep.

My first memory was falling in the pool. I was probably conscious for some time before then, just not making memories.

This question never made sense to me.

Like, "when we were 3 or 4," "some time after learning language sufficiently," "puberty," "this summer," and "between the 11th and 14th of this month" would all be correct answers.

I remember being like 2 or 3 in a stroller, but for when I got it and it never stopped I just remember waking up one day

I remember all the hiding spots i had for hide and seek in the house i moved out of when i was 3. Other than that, the day my first dog came home at around that same age.

I have some extremely foggy memories of my parent’s wedding when I was 2.

The earliest thing I can remember perceiving is a diaper change at maybe age 2 if not slightly earlier, but it's vague and passive. Similarly I recall sitting in a restaurant and watching the server. The earliest time I remember feeling agency was age 3. Either my mother's cat being angry at me, rolling down a hallway in a bouncy thing, playing under a pear tree, or a vivid lucid nightmare where I made the decision to walk down stairs using the same internal thought process I have now.

casually around three... then fully after getting hit in the head w a baseball bat at 6

Uh I think I was crawling in a waiting room at a doctor's office. At least that's the earliest memory I remember.

I'm not sure if it's the moment I became conscious, but my earliest memory is my father holding and trying to calm me after I stuck some metal utensil into a power outlet

My first memory is in the maternity hospital a few hours/days after birth when I pooped myself and fell off a bed. I remember a nurse washing my ass in the sink

Tossing myself into a fountain at the mall when I was 2 or 3. I was throwing a penny in and didn’t let go.

I had earlier memories, but those are a different story.

I had to be around 3, which is as far back as my memory goes.

I just remember being with my dad out shopping, this was around Christmas-time too we were getting some shopping done and about to go home to make Pizzelle cookies for the mailmen and garbagemen as a “thank you” gift for their services.

I have continuous memory and selfhood from a month or two before my third birthday, with increasingly vague flashes going back to I guess 18 months (from external verification of the event).

It's hard to say if I had consciousness in the early memories (though I definitely had some sort of agency) but I definitely had it going into my third birthday.

My earliest real memory was when I got casts on my hands/arms after getting my extra digits surgically removed(born with polydactyly). My casts went up passed my elbows and I had limited movement but was able to play with a black Tonka Truck I had.

3 years old, walking from livingroom to the kitchen in my grandma's house, remembered the dark red carpet and the ceramic tiles on the wall.

You think darkness is your ally? You merely adopted the dark. I was born in it, molded by it. I didn't see the light until I was already a man, by then it was nothing to me but blinding!

i was always conscious.. but i don't remember when i became aware that i was conscious

I kinda remember just waking up one morning and thinking "oh, well this definitely feels different" and I guess that's when the internal monologue started.

When i witnessed my parents arguing on a black and white checkerboard tile of the bathroom

My earliest memory is watching my uncles and older cousins playing football at Thanksgiving at my aunt’s house when I was two. But my memory is very spotty and hard to place on a timeline until I started school, even then it’s crummy until about the age of 9

I also have a lot of gaps from the years 2011-2018 or so, yay trauma

I haven't yet.