consciousness

I cannot give you a week of development at which a fetus DOES have a conscousness, but we can say at which point it COULD have a consciousness -- and not before. Consciousness depends on our neurons being able to communicate with each other; all the medical evidence and understanding we have in medicine and neuroscience points to consciousness and awareness arising out of cell interactions. This being the case, several criteria must be met: 1. The neurons must be sufficiently mature to develop an action potential, that is, the electrical inequality from one end of the cell to the other which allows a charge to pass through the cell. 2. It helps if the myelin sheaths of nerves have developed. Without that insulation, nerve cells cannot transmit the charge from one end of the nerve cell to the other without it being attenuated, interfered with, or lost. This is why demyelinization diseases are so devastating. 3. The body must be producing neurotransmitters; these chemicals allow the charge from one neuron to be transmitted across the interstitial spaces between cells. Without the presence of neurotransmitters, each neuron is isolated. And we know roughly when these things start to happen in the developing fetus, although it varies slightly from one to the next. But based on that, we can say that there is definitely NOT anything like a fully working nervous system before week 20, although spontaneous, disconnected neural activity can be observed starting about week 17 -- but spontaneous, disconnected neural activity of precisely the same sort can be observed in people in a mostly brain-dead, vegetative state, so I do not think that can count as "consciousness" in a logically consistent system. A fetus will start responding to sound about week 21-22, so at that point we know that perception at some basic level is hooked up. And by week 36, there is certainly some rudimentary consciousness, although even the consciousness of a full term newborn is pretty primitive in terms of processing stimuli and making any sense of what is going on around it. So your best bet for pinpointing "beginning of consciousness" would probably be, somewhere in the weeks 21-36, as vague as that is. But there is no reason to think that consciousness is like flipping a switch, first it isn't there and then suddenly it is! It's far more likely that it is like tuning in an analog radio; lots of static, and then, as you slowly rotate the dial, more and more snippets of coherence, finally becoming enough of a coherent signal to say that you have something. Function will just "fade in" as the systems supporting that function mature.