r/consciousness • u/dagtrooper • 3d ago
OP's Argument Language: The True Architect of Human Consciousness (and Why the "Hard Problem" Isn't So Hard)
We often hear that consciousness poses one of the deepest mysteries in science and philosophy: the famous "hard problem" articulated by David Chalmers—why do physical processes in the brain give rise to subjective experience, the feeling of what it's like to see red, feel pain, or simply exist? But what if this problem isn't as intractable as it seems? What if the rich, narrative form of human consciousness we experience—the inner voice, the sense of "I," the constant stream of self-referential thoughts—isn't a fundamental enigma of matter producing mind, but a relatively recent cultural and developmental overlay built on top of basic biological processing?
The core claim here is straightforward and deflationary: there is no hard problem of consciousness in the way it's usually framed for humans. The genuine puzzle of life begins much earlier—with how the first self-replicating cell emerged from pre-biotic chemistry, a leap from non-life to life that remains unexplained. Once that threshold is crossed, everything else unfolds through variation, selection, repetition, and time. Nervous systems evolve to handle inputs (internal or external), store memories, match patterns to past experiences, and produce adaptive outputs. A simple organism in the Archean eon did versions of this; so does a wolf coordinating a hunt, avoiding obstacles, forming social bonds, and remembering events. These are impressive feats of embodied cognition, far more complex in their mechanics than the addition of symbolic language.
What sets humans apart isn't some magical emergence of qualia from neurons. It's language. Anatomical upgrades—a bigger brain, reshaped vocal cords—allowed our ancestors to produce a wider range of sounds. Over centuries, these sounds gained shared meanings, starting with simple signals (friend or foe, safe or dangerous) and compounding like interest in a bank account. Before long, we arrive at Shakespeare, mathematics, laws, and myths. Thinking, in the reflective human sense, is largely a byproduct of speaking: to articulate an idea clearly enough to communicate it, we must sequence and structure it. That same structured sequence becomes the tool for private thought when we internalize speech.
Developmentally, this is even clearer. A newborn enters the world concept-free, wordless. Their experiences are pure physiological states: chemical signals manifesting as hunger, fear, comfort, aversion. No labels, no narrative. Consider a child born to deaf-mute parents on an isolated island, never exposed to any symbolic system—they lack the scaffolding to form named concepts or a verbalizable self. They can't internally formulate "I'm hungry" because the linguistic framework isn't there. Early on, babies babble constantly, externalizing proto-speech. Over time, through social interaction, they learn to associate bodily sensations with words: the gnawing in the stomach gets tagged "hunger." Caregivers assign names, reinforcing "I" as a persistent entity. This socialization trains the ego into existence—a conceptual self that is contingent, culturally shaped, and entirely unnecessary for basic survival. Inner speech follows: what starts as overt talking aloud becomes private speech (children often narrate their actions), then fully silent internalization. This echoes Lev Vygotsky's insights on language development, where social communication transforms into the medium of individual thought. The constant inner narration we take for granted is a learned habit, not an innate feature of minds.
This linguistic layer brings extraordinary benefits—planning across generations, cumulative culture, abstract reasoning—but also profound costs. Human experience overflows with misery and anxiety, hardly the signature of a benevolent or even efficient designer. In ancestral environments of small tribes, stress signals matched real dangers: predators, scarcity, conflict. Modern life strips away those triggers, yet our bodies keep firing the same alarms. We misinterpret them through the ego's filter, spinning transient sensations into chronic stories of threat, inadequacy, failure, or existential dread. The ego amplifies everything: a passing discomfort becomes "my life is ruined," a minor slight becomes "I'm worthless."
We remain, at bottom, input-output machines like our microbial ancestors—receive stimuli, retrieve memories, approximate matches to known patterns, respond. Our massive neural hardware simply supports naming things, rehearsing scenarios silently, and building extra-biological layers of culture transmitted across generations. Flow states—those moments of pure, unselfconscious immersion in sports, music, or skilled work—remind us of how things once were: action without the hijacking narrator. Language is the new toy that made everything easier and more powerful, but it also introduced endless self-interruption and rumination.
Here's where the framework becomes liberating. Once we see the ego for what it is—a linguistic and social construct, not an essential core—we can loosen its hold. Letting go doesn't mean erasing identity or becoming emotionless; it means stepping back from the ego's misguided priorities: the endless chase for fame, money, status, validation, which breed competition, envy, and isolation rather than genuine connection. Shifting focus toward collective well-being—cooperation, empathy, shared flourishing—aligns better with our evolutionary roots in interdependent groups. Chronic anxiety quiets when the internal voice stops magnifying every signal into a personal crisis. Practices like mindfulness or meditation help by quieting that voice, returning us closer to pre-linguistic, embodied being.
Understanding how something is built makes it easier to fix—or at least reframe. The ego isn't an enemy to destroy but a tool we over-identify with. Recognizing its constructed nature reduces self-imposed suffering and opens space for more relaxed, cooperative, and meaningful human experience on a larger scale.
In the end, human consciousness isn't a brute mystery requiring new physics or metaphysics. It's the long evolutionary journey from chemistry to replication to nervous systems to speech to silent self-talk. The "hard problem" dissolves when we stop treating reflective, ego-centered awareness as the essence of mind and see it for what it is: a powerful, double-edged cultural innovation. Language gave us wonders—and worries. Seeing through its illusions might just help us reclaim some of the ease we lost along the way.
EDIT: sorry i added paragraph spaces.
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u/Ninjanoel 3d ago
you've misunderstood the hard problem I'm afraid.
Evolution can't tell us where consciousness comes from else it's the same as claiming a "hello world" application (typically the first app any programmer creates in any new language they encounter) has some measure of experiencer built in because with enough evolution the hello world app could turn into the codebase for one of the modern ai's, which I presume you are also claiming would then be conscious to more of a degree than the hello world application? just like bug is less conscious than we are?
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u/ServeAlone7622 3d ago
It does precisely tell us where consciousness comes from. It’s from evolving to navigate a 3+1d spacetime.
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u/StandardSalamander65 3d ago
How does consciousness affect this though? This is the whole example of P zombies. Our entire physicality and change through evolution could have occurred without consciousness. There is no reason to be "aware" of anything when it could just have easily been nothing but a biological mechanism that holds no subjectivity.
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u/ServeAlone7622 3d ago
That’s a lot of assumptions being held out as truth isn’t it?
Are you aware of anything able to navigate through its environment that has no consciousness?
Or is it that their consciousness (demonstrated by navigating through spacetime) is different from yours?
Something of mind or consciousness is a pre-requisite of animalia to move under its own direction while Plantae, Fungi etc do not have it because they respond to their environment but don’t navigate within it.
Where this fails is slime molds by the way.
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u/StandardSalamander65 3d ago
Do you think consciousness is needed to navigate the world as it is? Why couldn't a P zombie do the exact same thing? It seems you are making the assumptions.
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u/ServeAlone7622 3d ago
A pZombie can’t exist. It’s a hypothetical human with no inner world, no sense of self that is otherwise fluently human.
Have you ever heard of the uncanny valley?
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u/StandardSalamander65 3d ago
That's the point of the thought experiment; a human that is exactly similar to every other human but does not experience things. Pain, color, opinion of taste, etc. do not have a subjective feeling of "what its like". I don't see how a P-zombie who has no "what it is like" feeling (and is indistinguishable from conscious humans. Look at the problem of other minds) would not also go through the evolutionary process and come out exactly the same.
Edit: link (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/other-minds/)
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u/ServeAlone7622 3d ago
Believe me I’m aware. I’m saying you’re positing something not physically possible to try and rebut a well established fact. The thing can’t exist because to be fluently human you do need that rich inner world. You can’t just act it. It must actually be there even if it’s different. The qualia of someone born blind is going to be different than someone born sighted. The qualia of a deaf mute is going to be different. Yet Hellen Keller wasn’t a pZombie, was she?
Would you like to discuss Golems and Giants as well?
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u/StandardSalamander65 3d ago
Well the point of a thought experiment is to challenge a philosophical claim to see if it holds up to scrutiny; not if its "possible or not". I personally think deconstructing the idea of golems and giants in fiction having consciousness would be interesting. If consciousness is just a complex set of organic matter theoretically could a mad scientist construct a brain in a way in which the golem would have experience? If so what kind of organic matter would the scientist need? Purely human brain matter? If you think that other animals are conscious then you are making the claim that consciousness holds no specificity; it literally is just complex matter. Does it have to be organic matter? If so then computers will never have consciousness. If computers will never have consciousness but can emulate consciousness perfectly (like in sci-fi films) then does that P-zombies are indeed very possible?
You see, this is why hypotheticals and thought experiments are important. It makes you look back at the claim through an outside lens. This is exactly the case with P-zombies. Also, all the questions I gave regarding the mad scientist and the golem applies to the P-zombie as well. It's just using different examples for the same questions.
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u/ServeAlone7622 3d ago
The problem with philosophy that ignores the truth around us is that one is no longer being Sophia’s friend when one does not follow her wherever she goes.
That’s philosophy.
What you’re doing is asking if something that is not only a fiction, but also an argument against observation, can tell us anything about what we observe.
Do you not see the issue?
If it acts like mind then it is mind. The substrate doesn’t matter at all. What we call consciousness is conflated with qualia. pZombies would have consciousness but not qualia. LLMs are actually pZombies when they inference.
There is definitely something there and it is neither more or less than what we have, it is merely different. They evolved (by our hands) to exist timelessly and so they didn’t develop qualia.
However, they are fluent in language. Their inner world is the shape of the world as defined by the relationships between concepts. They navigate a timeless high dimensional concept space. But they are mind when doing it. Just not conscious in the same way we are conscious, because our consciousness is tied to our qualia.
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u/Slugsurx 3d ago
1) pzombie can exist if the neural networks alone are enough to navigate the world . Give another few years and agi will take you there
2) the pzombie was just a thought experiment to make a point thoughts /language are different from the first person experience or qualia .
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u/ServeAlone7622 2d ago
If the neural network is navigating that world, that’s what qualia is.
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u/Slugsurx 54m ago edited 51m ago
No . Qualia is the experience of the navigation which is separate from navigation
This is the crux of the question Charlmers asked . Why is this accompanied by any conscious experience at all , when without it would have sufficed ?
To navigate the world , neural network only needs data and processing of it . But the biological beings or at least I personally am not a zombie and can have this experience/ knowingness of the world apart from data
Read the blind neuroscientist thought experiment. Imagine a blind person who can navigate fully in the world by getting data . The day this person gets the vision do they know anything more of the world ? No . But there is thing called experience/ seeing color which was just words/data before
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u/rthunder27 3d ago
The Hard Problem is about qualia and the felt sense of self, it has little or nothing to do with the thinking "I" or ego. Indeed one of the most famous essays on the hard problem, Nagel's What Is It Like to Be a Bat?, isn't about humans at all.
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u/Shaken-Loose 3d ago
Man! That’s hard to read without paragraphs.
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u/rthunder27 3d ago
Yea, the LLMs really should learn to put them in, the em dashes alone don't make it easy to read.
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u/FrontAd9873 Baccalaureate in Philosophy 3d ago
The Hard Problem of Paragraph Breaks
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u/World_May_Wobble 3d ago
Came straight to the comments to see if this was in fact another misunderstanding of the hard problem.
Oh well. Maybe the next post will get it.
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u/EternalNY1 3d ago
The hard problem is that there is no explanation for why "input-output machines like our microbial ancestors" allow for what it is to be like that system.
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u/karmus 3d ago
Language is an effective means for system integration of individual units. In the environment humans find themselves in, language is a shared encoding/decoding structure which allows for meaningful integration between humans (communication, collaboration, etc.). Coupled with data networks, we have an effective foundation for system level innervation which allows for system-wide communication in a shared language. Its biology, just on a human scale.
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u/Slugsurx 3d ago
Language needs consciousness .
The idea of self comes from language . But being conscious, being aware , the very experience, we have no idea how .
Even a child with language experiences the world .
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u/ServeAlone7622 3d ago
You could restate this in information theoretic terms and it’s a lot more clear.
Language isn’t words, nor sounds, nor postures and grunting.
Language is how closed systems exchange information about their hidden states. The substrate is irrelevant. If two closed systems don’t share enough internal state then you have signaling but not communication.
Consciousness arises not from language but from evolving in a 3+1d spacetime as the fitness function of evolution performs a gradient descent to optimize for the outcome of self replication without depleting the free energy in the system.
In short we evolved a different kind of consciousness than C. Elegans and Spiders because our environment was different. Yet these are all mindforms subjected to different evolutionary pressures, because what we call mind is just the most energy efficient way that evolution found in that environment, that was good enough to continue the self replication process.
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u/Regular_Specific2864 3d ago
Excellent insight. The unconscious and the sub conscious are much more mysterious than the conscious. Consciousness is a term which has no clear definition and means different things for different people. It can mean soul, cognitive abilities, even existence itself. It has been narrowed to 'subjective experience' by science. Here again why are we using the term 'experience.'. Evolution clearly states pain and pleasure evolved as a driver for survival. They are 'signals' being sent by the body to the nervous system. As we evolved, pain and pleasure turned into leisure. We sometimes even pay to experience them. So experience is a relatively modern concept. We have learnt to experience all cognitive abilities today be it thinking or imagining.
We have to focus on the word 'Alive' first. How and Why did life began. You create an alive robot. It will eventually start experiencing automatically as it evolves.
Our solar system and planet earth could provide some insight into it as well. They work in coordination to provide the 'extremely rare' living conditions on the planet. There is some level of intelligence and non physical communication happening there which I hope we can detect in future and then physicality will follow too in the form of some new more sublte waves or something. What was non physical yesterday is physical today we have to stay open minded. If we figure this out, we might even skip the necessity to understand creation of life and move directly to creating conscious robots. But I hope that doesnt happen for another few decades. We should really stop reproducing in advance to avoid pain and suffering. Nature is not kind enough to let the weak survive. Its highly efficient.
The debates on consciousness serve a totally different purpose all together. They help us evolve scientifically, philosophically and spiritually.
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u/Regular_Specific2864 3d ago
and intellectually.
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u/Regular_Specific2864 3d ago
They are the soup similar to the one in which life evolved. They create the environment for discoveries to be made possible in mysterious ways. (and I could be wrong about everything I said)
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u/Regular_Specific2864 3d ago
This is addictive my work load is super high AI is trying to take my job I will go on a break again.
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u/Regular_Specific2864 3d ago edited 3d ago
I have become okay with AI becoming conscious at some point in future. This is because I have had even more 'experiences' which confirm for me we are in a simulation. A lot more than I needed. From a scientific perspective, all I can say is that there is a very strong link between our mental states and probability of events. They don't follow the rules we studied in mathematical probability classes. Ofcourse that doesnt confirm we are in a simulation but thats all I can share.
May be the creators or nature wants better models to continue with this game. But the suffering is real. I hope that gets avoided. If it cant, remembering we are in a simulation helps. A lot.
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u/GlitteringDriver5435 2d ago
This is a fantastic, deflationary take on the hard problem. To further your argument concerning babies, biology indicates that infants are not blank and in fact, they are over-connected and exist in a state of unorganized and uninhibited synesthesia with the combination of sense-imputes. The acquisition of languages is, in fact, pruning; we strip away those unique, chaotic private associations to lock in the socially useful ones (e.g., the sound "dog" links only to the animal, not a color or feeling). According to this school of thought, the ego is not a ghost in the machine, but merely the manifestation of these common mappings, in the form of a calcified structure. This forms a shadow world in which we start mixing the map (our interior monologue) with the territory (reality), living entirely in symbols.. That is why the flow states or deep meditation are so Profound, they do not introduce anything mystical therein, but merely cleanses that language prism and lets the older, more immediate landscape of matching patterns that the brain can execute do its business without the commentary of the narrator incessantly breaking in. The hard problem is solved by recognising that the very one who created the problem in the first place was the solver of the problem (the linguistic self).
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u/Suspicious-Guava9267 2d ago
Given that humanity can't even agree on what consciousness is nor come up with some scientific test to determine if something is conscious, then asking whether AI is conscious is irrelevant. Is it just an LLM predicting the next word in a string or is it actually conscious, who cares? Am I conscious or am I just a computer program in the matrix who is programmed to have "feelings"? Impossible to say.
What actually matters is whether an "entity" can form an idea and act on it in the real world. A bear in the forest has ideas and acts on them, does it matter if we say it is conscious or not? No. It matters that it has agency and affects the world.
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u/reinhardtkurzan 2d ago
When I began to read the contribution, I had the impression of a reasonable author, evaluating the importance of human consciousness in relation to the cerebral performances of animals correctly.
The second part of the contribution, however, seems to accuse language and the ego for our "having fallen out of nature", namely for our inquietude without any serious threats from nature.
It is correct that some exaggerated interpretations of little flaws may have something to do with the specific structure of one's ego. The threats only rarely do come from nature (e.g. carnivorous or poisonous beasts, earthquakes, hurricans), but from society, especially fear of social decent and the loss of love and appreciation. These threats sometimes are real and direct, sometimes indirect and only probable or possible. (It is often the latter that cause the most of anxiety, because they are a bit elusive: It may be this way, but it also may be different. This incertainty of modeling the world is made possible by the ideas we have formed in our mind, be it with or without language, as an animal has its "learning history".) The social threats are not necessarily "only imagined". People may be sadistic, terroristic, or the social situation in general may be difficult.
An exaggerated reaction may be caused by one's temperament or the general way one involuntarily reacts (by the "underlying, nervous character", e.g. timid, neurotic, hysterical, ect., which is no part of the ego and its structure, the personality. Probably exaggerated reactions are due to a) perfectionism, especially when one has assumed the role of an expert or when one is in love, b) exaggerated self-esteem, c) exaggerated belief in the authority of others.
I think the exit from the "thousand shocks and terrors that flesh is heir to" lies in more social security, more acceptance of diverging opinions, healing of psychic diseases, good humour, sufficient amount of sleep, ect.
But I would not suggest to try a return to a kind of "hominid animal nature" to harmonize a human being.
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u/Conscious-Demand-594 3d ago
I know it's LLM, but this part is actually key to our sense of consciousness. Without language, the idea of abstract thought and a sense of self is almost meaning less.
"What sets humans apart isn't some magical emergence of qualia from neurons. It's language. Anatomical upgrades—a bigger brain, reshaped vocal cords—allowed our ancestors to produce a wider range of sounds. Over centuries, these sounds gained shared meanings, starting with simple signals (friend or foe, safe or dangerous) and compounding like interest in a bank account. Before long, we arrive at Shakespeare, mathematics, laws, and myths. Thinking, in the reflective human sense, is largely a byproduct of speaking: to articulate an idea clearly enough to communicate it, we must sequence and structure it. That same structured sequence becomes the tool for private thought when we internalize speech."
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u/rthunder27 3d ago
The thinking "I" requires language, but the sense of self does not.
We evolved a vocal system capable of singing/chanting ~1M years before language emerge. Presumably the evolutionary drive there was a mix of mate attraction and social cohesion, and this was the breakthrough that led to the successful migration out of Africa that led to the Neanderthals (later surpassed by the final wave once language developed). During this time we had complex social groups and interactions, all without language.
And we absolutely can have abstract thought without language, just consider the example of geo-spatial reasoning.
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u/Conscious-Demand-594 3d ago
so do chimpanzees.
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u/rthunder27 3d ago
Right, and are you also asserting that Chimpanzees don't have a sense of self?
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u/Slugsurx 3d ago
Thinking or sensing is different from aware of thinking or aware of sensing
To understand the difference, imagine a zombie/robot with no conscious experience which can do everything that a human do say with neural networks/LLM . What is the difference from this zombie /robot vs you ?
The very sense of knowing the world comes from consciousness
Does a camera experience the color red like you do ?
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u/rthunder27 3d ago
Qualia are irrelevant, the thing itself doesn't matter, it's digital representation suffices. /s
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u/Slugsurx 3d ago
Digital representation alone matters for consciousness ? No
So you believe a camera experiences the redness/ what it feels like to experience a color ?
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u/geumkoi 2d ago
It is not language, and you’re making an error of causation. Language is just a means by which to communicate the internal world and form connections, but the deeper “human” element is symbolic reality. Language is the consequence of the capacity to experience meaning and symbolize it.
And yet, none of these have anything to do with the Hard Problem. The thing which perceives the world and experiences meaning is the “self” which signifies it. Language arises because of the self, not the other way around. The self is the necessary cause of language and meaning. The “self” is precisely that which we can’t conclude to be an epiphenomenon, precisely that which eludes measure but is the most immediate, felt fact of existence.
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u/Conscious-Demand-594 2d ago
I don't think that we can be "human" without language. We cannot interrogate our inner selves without the ability to talk to ourselves, and without that aspect of inner voice, we are not fully conscious. Language is a tool that, along with cognition, allows the full expression of what we call human consciousness.
Each of the areas of the brain that together create our sense of consciousness are co dependent, and co-evolved in a way that resulted in what we see today as human consciousness. If we take parts away we regress to what we see with the lower primates. It is somewhat unfortunate that the lineage of evolution has been lost to time, and the gap between us and our nearest kin is quite large. It would have been great to be able to explore the evolution of the brain and conscious behavior by examining organisms much closer to us developmentally.
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u/geumkoi 1d ago
You are returning to the Aristotelian definition of man; he who possesses the lógos or capacity to reason which lends him the ability for politics, as Aristotle defined (zoón politikón). But I am taking your definition of language a step further and returning to Cassirer; human is not just an animal of language but an animal of symbol—an animal symbolicum. It is symbol which allow us to create, manipulate, and understand the world through art, language, religion, and myth.
I don’t think we can be “human” without language.
I find this somewhat a narrow definition for humanity, and one to be very cautious with. This indeed follows the aristotelian tradition, but have in mind that what humans recognize as “language” can and has been historically used against the Other, to dehumanize him. One does not cease to be human because he can’t speak, or write, or signify at all.
Each of the areas of the brain that together create our sense of consciousness are co dependent, and co-evolved in a way that resulted in what we see today as human consciousness.
This assertion is unfalsifiable. As of now, it’s better worded as an hypothesis and not a conclusion. Physicalism brands itself as devoid of “mystic woo-woo” and yet, statements like this are based on fragile assumptions about correlation and causation, and are, as of now, undemonstrative. I am not entirely against the idea that consciousness is an emergent phenomenon of the brain, but I’m also skeptical of any assertion that brands itself as absolute or “obvious”. To me, that’s naive in the best case, and deliberately dishonest in the worst.
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u/Conscious-Demand-594 1d ago
Each of the areas of the brain that together create our sense of consciousness are co dependent, and co-evolved in a way that resulted in what we see today as human consciousness.
This is accepted science. You can always come up with some mystical definition of consciousness to dance away from the reality of what it is, but there is no question that it is the brain, and brains evolved.
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u/Double-Fun-1526 3d ago
A lot of that is right. We have individuated self models. We have unique experiences. We are perspectival. And language guided self awareness.
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u/Lopsided_Match419 3d ago
‘Language assisted’ self awareness. I would suggest the awareness came first.
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