Baby's First Self: Musings on the Origin of Consciousness
Our relationship with ourselves is at the core of self-experience.
Updated March 12, 2026 | Reviewed by Margaret Foley
Consciousness is not just experience—it is experience that can take itself as an object. The critical turn occurs when "happening" becomes "happening to me," and later becomes "me noticing myself noticing." William James formalized this as the I/Me split—the knower and the known. This dipole may be consciousness's core dynamic: self-as-observer and self-as-observed, never perfectly still, generating inner life through constant motion. When we start to self-reflect, developing a " theory of mind " about oneself within one's own mind through the eyes of others, as reflected by our own eyes making eye contact in the mirror, something quite remarkable takes place.
The mind—you know I am now talking about me-and-my-mind or you-and-your-mind—the mind is phenomenologically coterminous with consciousness; that is, so far as anything that you can observe or can get anyone else to observe about your mind or his mind, anything that can be sensed and perceived, will be of the same extent as the state of mind called consciousness; and the various ingredients, the contents of consciousness, which cover a wonderful bunch of alleged or real entities, are what one ordinarily means when he talks about his "mental life."
—Harry Stack Sullivan, The Illusion of Individual Personality
The Critical Mass of Self-Recognition
Around 15 to 18 months, children recognize their reflection and touch makeup on their own face rather than the mirror's surface (Keromnes et al., 2019). This isn't consciousness's birth—infants are conscious long before—marking when the system can map an image to its own body and treat it as self. The mind reaches a critical mass, a tipping point: "fissile material" accumulates through sensory integration , motor prediction, body maps, and social mirroring until the system sustains a recursive loop. This leads to a cascade of mental events, internal mirroring external, mind mirroring world, the hall of mirrors that makes up reality. A complex, adaptive system.
From then on, as long as the brain is healthy and intact, self becomes self-replicating, sustaining, and to an extent, self-prompting—a mechanistic, information-hungry engine agentially foraging for internal and external experiences. This process maintains coherence by continuously organizing, pruning, and revising a model of "me" in an unstable world. In complexity terms, we are dissipative systems, transforming energy into order and creating heat. Net-net, entropy increases as it must per the Second Law of Thermodynamics, even if local information is created.
The Consciousness Dipole
James describes the I/Me dyad. George Herbert Mead adds the developmental mechanism: We become objects to ourselves by taking the other's perspective—self is social recursion (Mead, 1934). Martin Buber distinguishes relational qualities: I-It versus I-Thou (Buber, 1937), highlighting a humanistic, warm, and compassionate view of relations among people. Harry Stack Sullivan operationalizes recurring interpersonal "dynamisms" and "personifications" that stabilize security and lay the groundwork for a more precise model of interpersonal relations (Sullivan, 1953).
The self is relationally experienced—a one-which-can-be-two. This relation can be tight, loose, brittle, playful, and in mature forms, capable of watching itself without collapsing. The observer changes the observed, which changes the observer—an endless loop possibly constitutive of consciousness, as suggested by Hofstadter in I Am A Strange Loop (2007).
The default mode network (DMN) may house this recursion—not containing consciousness, but repeatedly implicated in self-referential processing and autobiographical continuity. Luppi et al. (2025) describe the DMN as a nexus where diverse information converges/diverges, exactly what you'd expect if the brain builds and updates a self-model integrating body, memory , social meaning, and imagined futures.
Lifespan Turning Points: Five Epochs of Selfhood
Mousley et al. (2025) report four "topological turning points" across lifespans, based on brain MRI analysis of a few thousand people—epochs where network organization shifts. These might be seen as mapping onto changes in selfhood, speculatively:
Regenerative Brain Medicine? Reversing Entropy and Tuning Up the Engine of Mind
Calling consciousness an "entropic engine" points to something psychologically obvious: selfhood costs energy. Maintaining a stable "me" model across time, contexts, and internal contradictions requires work. Paradoxically, agency comes not only from deliberate choice but from surprise—what arrives unbidden and expands experience. The self is both decision-maker and curiosity machine that discovers itself through perturbation.
Emerging closed-loop neuromodulation with multimodal monitoring (TMS paired with EEG, fMRI, fNIRS) may let us sculpt network dynamics toward more flexible regimes, potentially restoring earlier-life plasticity aspects in specific circuits. We might learn to "service the engine"—reduce friction, stabilize output, and sometimes return the system to exploratory modes.
Conventional approaches work. Prevention is the best medicine. Exercise, good sleep, proper diet , rest and stress regulation, relationships, and avoiding dangerous loneliness . That is the way. However, though the evidence base and will to conduct proper research is in an awful state, there is intriguing work on exogenous means to enhance function and even roll back the brain clock, not just preventing decline but putatively reversing it.
Emerging evidence on lithium supplementation to lower the risk of cognitive decline and serve as a neuroprotective agent (though lithium can cause kidney damage, and adversely affect other organs systems), various drugs and naturally occuring molecules, and various other approaches to anti-aging medicine geared to unwind molecular clocks such as telomeres and restore function to energy drivers like mitochondria , are intriguing, yet again they're largely unregulated and untested. Readers should not avail themselves of such without appropriate professional consultation, as many supplements and anti-aging approaches more broadly can be dangerous, interacting with medications or causing or worsening pre-existing conditions, or even fatal.
The Dynamic Dipolar Engine of Awareness
Consciousness emerges as process, not thing: self-sustaining recursion feeding on experience and organizing it into "me." From first self-recognition through decades of experimentation and consolidation, awareness maintains itself by watching, revising, and meeting itself as more than object. At its core may be a dipole of self-states—me observing myself.
Over time, these self-experiences become entangled, even temporarily unified—not like quantum particles, but as complex coupled systems, in a literal sense. This happens in neurons, brain areas, and networks—mechanistic, wonderous, mystifying perhaps, but not mystical. Though our experience has ineffable felt qualities, this is fundamentally the brain sensing and interacting with itself.
There is no perpetual motion machine here—it requires input, costs energy, can become rigid or fragment, and can be modified through life experience, relationships, psychotherapy , and a range of emerging technologies. Between ignition and extinction, it generates a universe of meaning from a simple, persistently strange act: the self observing self.
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Hofstadter, D. R. (2007). I am a strange loop . Basic Books.
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Keromnes, G., Chokron, S., Celume, M.-P., Berthoz, A., Botbol, M., Canitano, R., … Tordjman, S. (2019). Exploring self-consciousness from self- and other-image recognition in the mirror: Concepts and evaluation. Frontiers in Psychology, 10 , 719.
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Luppi, A. I., Lyu, D., & Stamatakis, E. A. (2025). Core of consciousness: The default mode network as nexus of convergence and divergence in the human brain. Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences, 65 , Article 101545.
Mead, G. H. (1934). Mind, Self, and Society: From the Standpoint of a Social Behaviorist (C. W. Morris, Ed.). University of Chicago Press.
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Sullivan, H. S. (1953). The Interpersonal Theory of Psychiatry . W. W. Norton.
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Grant Hilary Brenner, M.D., a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, helps adults with mood and anxiety conditions, and works on many levels to help unleash their full capacities and live and love well.
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