I lost the thread in the first two paragraphs. Can anyone explain to me why it's so obvious infants are conscious? THis seems to be taken as a given for the rest of the article. Couldn't they be in a state similar to sleepwalking which seems not conscious to me? Perhaps consciousness flashes on as you have your first few "flashbulb memories".
Consciousness does not have to mean being "mentally" (intellectually) aware of what's going on. It's about experiencing stuff, and having a _sensation_
I'll try to give an example:
Think of a complex modern art painting. It's much more difficult to perceive the colors used in the painting, as the boundaries between different parts and components of the painting are far less meaningful or distinguishable, compared to most objects we encounter.
When you look around your kitchen, the sensations of color are nearly instantaneously associated with rich semantic information about the various objects. E.g. that red object is the "top" of the "peanut butter" "jar" that "I" "bought" "last week" (this is the tip of the semantic iceberg). This makes it easy to hold onto that perception -- it is able to quickly take root in a rich semantic soil that the brain has been developing over our entire lives.
This doesn't happen with a messy, semantically-limited perception like looking at a modern art painting. Sure, we can focus very hard to isolate the different streaks and blurs and blobs of color, but it is noticeably more difficult.
With an infant, as their semantic soil is very shallow compared to an adults (or even a young child), I imagine that their perception of the world is perhaps more like a modern art painting. Slowly, the colorful blurs and blob and smells and sounds take on meaning as the infant learns about the world and builds up an understanding of the complex patterns in life.