When/how does consciousness begin?

When does consciousness begin? My theory is that it begins with the formation of memories, or the biochemical encoding of faster sensory input into slower gamma waves in the hippocampus. At the beginning of life, we lack consciousness because we don’t have memory of what happened. The memory of the past can be used to predict the future of what will happen. Turn off memory, and there is no weighted mechanism to determine where and when sensory input is most likely occurring to generate future predictions of where it will happen again.

The best option is to assume that memory tracks timing through repeated weighting, which makes us more sensitive or tuned into sensory stimuli as they may happen again with higher probability. Turn memory off, and one may go into a coma. Interestingly, there is also the consideration of how memory adapts to changing sensory input, or how it minimizes error within its predictions. This may arise from a loop between the output intensity of a weighted prediction coupled to the input phase of memory, re-weighting it and changing the predictive output. This may be the basis for imagination and a way to recall memories through altering amplitude–phase–modulated weighting, redistributing the representation of memories, which may further be looped in lucid dream states for access to past memories internally. All in all, consciousness may be heavily supported by memory encoding and subsequent re-weighting through prediction.