My friend and I were having a discussion last night and he had an interesting idea. He posited that human consciousness had its origins in the development of language. For example, two hunters are going after some deer and one hunter happens to form some guttural sound that he associates with while hunting this particular animal. He attempts to communicate this sound to the other hunter so that both of them can more effectively organize their hunting strategies and thus have a better chance of catching the deer. These hunters then begin to use this same sound whenever they hunt deer and soon, this sound catches on with the other hunters of the tribe and the “word” for deer has been formed. The hunters have thus taken an object in reality and attached a subjectively formed sound to it. Now, they can store it in their memory in pictorial representation and be able to communicate it to others. But my question is: is this the beginnings of consciousness?
Consciousness requires the formation of a mental model of the world, and in particular the formation of a representation of self in that mental model of the world.
I’m not convinced that language is required for this sort of representation. Merely enough cognitive capacity to predict and respond to natural phenomena in ways other than by way of reflex. The rest just follows.
The ability to acquire language in the first damn place requires cognitive processes.
You may not categorize them as “thinking”, especially since nearly all of what we do consider to be “thinking” when we do it as adults is stuff that can be recalled in language-symbolized memory forms – as per your example with the deer hunters, it would appear that sophisticated memory storage and recall depends on language.
But cognitive nonetheless. And therefore consciousness. Heck, my kitty cat is conscious and unless I miss my guess it doesn’t think in language.
I agree that consciousness predated language. I would say that language and brain power had a kind of positive feedback effect (e.g., mutation which gave greater brain power allowed for more language capabilities…which had natural/sexual selection benefits…which propogated the mutation throughout the population and raised the bar for the next beneficial mutation and/or selection event).
To say the least. The book was ridiculed by many members of the psychological community and resulted something of an exile from the field for Jaynes. Archeologists were bitter that a man with no formal training in archaeology was so vain as to think he was competent in interpreting data from ancient societies.
Jaynes didn’t secure proper peer review, which is the sign of a crackpot in most cases.
Self-awareness, as distinquished from rote reaction to biological and environmental stimuli, is obviously pre-verbal.
Look at your cat, your dog. They exist in a state of individual identity. Consciousness, on the other hand, envolves selecting entities from available perceptions and incorporatimg them into patterns that have, at minimum, some dim idea of conituity.
Depends on what we count as language. AHunter, I don’t think your cat would think in English, but the ability to learn responses and train animals to act in a certain way to acheive a certain thing seems very close to a form of communication to me. True, the level of sophistication is set quite low, but you know when your cat is hungry and when it is mewling for some other reason, no? Isn’t that a form of communication? I suppose we are still largely at a point where brains are relatively black boxes, so perhaps it is hard to categorize this sort of behavior as the cat’s meowing having meaning, but I think it is not quite right to say that it is meaningless.
Consciousness is one thing, self-consciousness another. From tests of looking in a mirror*, only humans, chimps and dolphins are self-conscious.
Chimps don’t have much for language, ‘tho’ they do communicate using sounds & gestures. Dolphins use sounds (but not a large vocabulary, AFAIK). Humans–well…you be the judge.
*Knock the subject out. Paint a big splotch of color on the subject’s head (out of the subject’s field of vision). Show the subject a mirror, or video feed. Does the subject touch his/her own head, or does he/she make fun of the “other” in the mirror (video) for bad hair?
Fascinating topic! I have no cites to bring, nor authorities to quote, but I do have an opinion based on my own thoughts and the aggregation of inputs from early childhood till now.
I don’t remember the point where I became conscious. Nor do I recall when I was conscious of being conscious. There are at least those two levels of consciousness and they don’t automatically happen to all human beings in the same periods of development. In fact, it could be argued that for some developmentally challenged types, that second phase may never kick in.
I do recall language arriving for me very early. I have it on good authority (my parents’ anecdotes) that I spoke in full sentences as early as one year. I learned my alphabet (with help) by age two. The point is that language was an early and conscious activity for me.
Extrapolating from my own experience to that of primitive mankind is a leap I don’t feel competent (nor confident) to do.
My gut feeling is that language was a must for individual human beings to “develop” the notion of consciousness, but that consciousness itself was there all along, guiding the advent and development of language. The two are interconnected, in other words. It may even be the chicken and egg situation.
The other opinions expressed before mine have convinced me that I want to do some reading on the issue.
Can human consciousness be sabotaged with language?
I remember the nun telling us Europe was a continent in grammar school. I stared at the map and thought. This woman is lying to us. She’s showing us the evidence that she is lying to us and she expects us to believe her anyway. These people are insane!!
We are bombarded with garbage information constantly. Television commercials that gisve the impression a product is GREAT but actually contains no factual or rational information.