The speaker claims that without the onset of consciousness in an infant, directed attention, learning, world-model formation, and later language learning will not occur.

“And what we observe is that consciousness happens very early in our development. We are conscious as infants already, and if infants don't wake up, if this ignition of consciousness doesn't happen, if the lights don't go on, then we will not observe directed attention and learning and the formation of a world model in the infant and learning of language at some p- at some point.”