My belief is that consciousness develops alongside improving language. — Tim3003

This is correct. Self-awareness is a linguistic habit that evolves culturally. We are socially constructed as individual beings. Check out Vygotskian psychology or symbolic interactionism for the arguments.

So this is something that is not widely believed or appreciated. Yet within social psychology, it just pretty obvious.

Is a new-born baby conscious? — Tim3003

Daniel Stern in his book The Interpersonal World of the Infant proposed a theory of emerging Self and related states of developing consciousness -
he denoted the sequence of consecutive stages as the Senses of the Self. They include the Sense of an Emergent Self (birth‐2 months of age); Sense of Core Self (2–6 months); Sense of Subjective Self (7–15 months); Sense of a Verbal Self (15 months on). Each stage has been composed by the unique combination of a child’s cognitive, emotional, affective and kinetic attitudes.

without language that is the limit of our capabilities. — Tim3003

There are different states of consciousness, where individuals are able to do well without
language: when one attends a concert of symphonic music, her mind deeply immerses into a nonverbal aesthetic experience. Or, when Napoleon observed the field of Austerlitz, he immediately grasped the winning strategy of the battle.

This is correct. Self-awareness is a linguistic habit that evolves culturally. We are socially constructed as individual beings. Check out Vygotskian psychology or symbolic interactionism for the arguments.

So this is something that is not widely believed or appreciated. Yet within social psychology, it just pretty obvious. — apokrisis

If self-awareness is a linguistic habit, people that speak the same language would have the same sense of self, but that isn't the case. People that learn other languages don't have a different sense of self than they used to have - other than that they can speak more than one language.

If self-awareness is a linguistic habit, then at what point in our learning a language do we become self-aware? What words or grammar rules trigger this self-awareness? Does one's degree of knowledge in their native language dictate their level of self-awareness? Learning a language takes years. At what point (which words or grammatical rules are learned) does self-awareness emerge?

It seems to me that we use language to point to what is already there. "Consciousness" and "awareness" are just scribbles that refer to these things that exist prior to our labeling them for communicating. Babies are discovering their bodies and how to control them after just a couple of months - well before any linguistic abilities arise.

It also seems to me that in order to learn a language, one must already be self-aware, for what use is a language (what use is communicating) if you don't already understand that you are an individual with different thoughts and needs than others and that those others don't know what your thoughts and needs are unless you communicate them?

Dogs don't run from their own bark, or jump at feeling themselves bite their itch. They can distinguish between their own bodies and actions and others. Self-awareness is an instinctive understanding that all animals have. In order to survive, the brain must make those distinctions at the subconscious level. There are just different levels, or degrees, of self-awareness that result from differences in brain structure, not from differences in language.

Tim 3003, this is a very interesting concept to think about and it is hard for me to imagine my life without any language in it. To better understand your points, I have attempted to put your argument in a regimented form. I believe that your argument looks like this:

1. If one does not use language, you have no knowledge, opinions, future plans of any complexity, any means of logical communication, or a ‘self’.
2. Without knowledge, opinions, future plans of any complexity, any means of logical communication, or a ‘self’, then there is not consciousness
3. Therefore, without language, there is not consciousness (1,2 HS)

Susan Schaller is an Sign Language teacher and author. Schaller wrote a book, Man Without Words, on a man named Ildefonso, a Mexican immigrant who was deaf and without a language of any kind. Ildefonso grew up in a house with parents who could not teach him sign language of any kind. All his life, Ildefonso was studying people and studying mouths wondering, ‘what is happening?’ Ildefonso grew up thinking knowing that people communicated somehow with their facial movements, but was never able to understand anything. However, it was apparent that Ildefonso was intelligent and discerning in his own actions as well as the actions around him. In this way, even without language, there was have no doubt that Ildefonso was able to acquire knowledge, form opinions, create future plans, and have a mean of logical communication. Even though he might not have been able to convey these ideas, plans, and opinions to other people, he nonetheless had them himself. In addition, it was apparent that he was aware that he existed and that others around him existed as well. My argument is against premise 1, saying that even without having any idea of language, a person can still be intelligent and self-aware. These qualities would make it seem illogical to say that Ildefonso was either unconscious or did not have a consciousness.
I agree with @Harry Hindu in that language is just ascribed to what we already believe and know.
Language is just a way to express the ideas and conceptions that you already have. It is not that a person learns the words ‘I’ and ‘You’ and then suddenly knows that he/she exists. The awareness of self and existence is not reliant upon the knowledge of arbitrary sounds and symbols.

https://vimeo.com/72072873

I have used The Man Without Words as evidence that people are conscious without language many times on these forums and it is ignored. People just want to believe what they want and ignore all evidence to the contrary. It is nice to see that at least someone else has seen the same thing and understand what that means for the relationship between consciousness and language.

"I agree with @Harry Hindu in that language is just ascribed to what we already believe and know.
Language is just a way to express the ideas and conceptions that you already have. It is not that a person learns the words ‘I’ and ‘You’ and then suddenly knows that he/she exists. The awareness of self and existence is not reliant upon the knowledge of arbitrary sounds and symbols."

I can't agree with the premise that language simply labels what we already know from experience. It does do that, but my point is that in developing a sophisticated vocabulary we become able to go far beyond this simple labelling. And the limit of the experiential labelling falls below what I am calling consciousness. Going back to my dog. She knows that there is a 'me', ruled by survival instincts, and that there are 'others' who may be threats or (hopefully) in my case allies in her quest to survive. She may even understand being 'alive' rather than dead having reference to other animals. Granted she has no words for these concepts, but with such basic concepts words are unnecessary - or maybe she has specific barks? But does she have a self?
Perhaps your boy Ildefonso brought up without learning language developed his own inner form of language to handle complex concepts? He sounds bright enough to have done that. Surely most human languages share most of their concepts, so the self created via 'I am', can be functionally the same as that coming from 'Je suis'.. If they didn't it would be far more difficult for us to learn and use several at once. And Ildefonso's inner language probaly mapped quite well onto what he wa later taught.
Does language only express concepts we already have? I think few could learn and hold subtle concepts from philosophy, maths and physics in their head - indeed any concepts not readily imaginable - before learning the words to describe them. Perhaps those few are the geniuses who first invented them.

understand what that means for the relationship between consciousness and language. — Harry Hindu

Could you expand? How do you understand the relationship between consciousness and language?

If self-awareness is a linguistic habit, people that speak the same language would have the same sense of self, but that isn't the case. — Harry Hindu

Not so. The claim would be that it is sharing the same culture which results in sharing the same style of selfhood. Language in a general fashion allows culture to even exist. But simply speaking English doesn't mean there aren't then many national and regional styles of selfhood and self-regulation.

So the point is that language enables that leap - the one to a cultural level of semiotic organisation. Individuals can now learn to take the collective social view of the psychological fact of their own existence as "conscious beings". Awareness of self is awareness of self as an individual actor within a collective social setting.

But every language serves that purpose. And every culture can then write its own version of the script. A Japanese sense of self can be quite different from an American one - or at least to the degree that American culture hasn't overtaken the traditional Japanese mindset.

If self-awareness is a linguistic habit, then at what point in our learning a language do we become self-aware? What words or grammar rules trigger this self-awareness? — Harry Hindu

There is plenty of research on the development of self-regulation in children if you are interested in the characteristic stages. But you are pushing for a simplistic reading of the argument. If a self-aware style of cognition is something learnt, then there is no fixed moment when it clicks into place. It is always something that is developing.

Words and grammar just give access to this new world of possibility.

And long before infants have any mastery of speech, they are already embedded in a world where they are being treated as psychological individuals - especially if they are middle-class and Western. A social demand is being placed on them. So the learning of the way to think is already begun.

It seems to me that we use language to point to what is already there. "Consciousness" and "awareness" are just scribbles that refer to these things that exist prior to our labeling them for communicating. — Harry Hindu

Sure, our sensations are already there. And even our intentions and reactions. But then self-awareness - the metacognitive level where we see our selves as selves - is the unbiological thing of learning to see all that through the eyes of a detached spectator. We say, there "I" go, experiencing certain qualia, having certain thoughts, feeling certain things.

Our mentality shifts up to a sociocultural level where everything is happening to a spectating self - a self that is understood as a contrast to the collective. We now see ourselves living in a world of the like-minded, and so see ourselves as "one of that kind of thing".

Clearly there was a huge evolutionary advantage in developing that language-enabled detached understanding of the self as a "self", and hence a free actor within a socially-constrained setting. It set up a whole private vs public dynamic. We could become self-regulating in the service of larger cultural goals once we learnt the trick.

Babies are discovering their bodies and how to control them after just a couple of months - well before any linguistic abilities arise. — Harry Hindu

Yes of course. It is basic to cognition that organisms must reach that first semiotic level of being able to distinguish self from world. We must have a habitual sense of where "we" start and where "the world" ends. Language is not required to learn how not to chew your tongue instead of your food.

So there is a sense of self that is part of biological level consciousness. And social creatures - dogs, chimps, dolphins - will also have a social sense of self. That understanding of being part of a collective will shape "their world" and so their notion of being the kind of "self" that makes sense in that world.

However, the question is what makes humans so different, such a sudden and rapid departure. And the evolution of symbolic/grammatical speech explains that. Why it was important is because it opened the door to the new thing of abstract and transmissible culture. Rather than merely being just selves in a world, we became "selves" seeing that we are selves in a world. Selfhood became a central fact of our psychological being - and hence, all our actions and experiences became filtered through that new culturally evolving lens.

We became self-anthropologists.

Dogs don't run from their own bark, or jump at feeling themselves bite their itch. They can distinguish between their own bodies and actions and others. — Harry Hindu

Well when it comes to dogs and cats, their tails often seem to have a mind of their own. And also get chased and attacked like a foreign object. :)

But again, this is about grades of biosemiosis. The self~world distinction is basic to life itself. An organism is defined by know what is self, what is not self. So the argument here is that humans achieved a huge jump via the evolution of linguistic structure. Selfhood could now become a cultural level thing. We could now look at ourselves abstractly as social players always having to make individual choices. Our "world" expanded to include a rich overlay of taboo, memory and custom that only abstracting language could grant access to.

There are just different levels, or degrees, of self-awareness that result from differences in brain structure, not from differences in language. — Harry Hindu

If that were so, you would be able to point to the vast differences between chimp and human brains.

There are vast differences between chimp and human vocal tracts. So yes, something had to evolve biologically. And there are some subtle neuroanatomical differences too. The hominid brain was being reorganised for a good million years for a culture of skillful tool use - a pre-adaptation for the trick of grammatically-organised symbolic speech when that kicked in with reasonable suddenness, judging by the abrupt appearance of symbolic culture about 40,000 years ago.

So the story would be the usual case of both slow gradual change and then also sudden rapid advance. There is no need to be either a lumper or a splitter in some absolute sense. However, it is crucial - when it comes to an understanding of "consciousness" - to accept that the evolution of language was transformative of what we would understand as mentality. We can't just think of humans as being bigger-brained animals. We were also the first of the creatures to be organised by the symbolic structure of language and the world of abstracted cultural development that allowed.

As a child gains language skills and begins to master the application of word labels to everyday concepts, the technique of conceptualisation in the mind grows and develops. It is only when a child knows what ‘I’ means, plus what ‘you’ means, and what ‘am’ means that Descartes’ words: ‘I think, therefore I am’ become meaningful. Or: ‘I think, therefore I realise I am’ in this context. With this realisation consciousness is born, and the self can start to be constructed around the kernel. The improving ability to reason and communicate using the constructs of language is what allows its birth and growth. — Tim3003

I agree with you, except that I would say that self-consciousness is born with language. But this is just a preference with respect to the use of 'consciousness.' I do like the idea of the self as a castle built with bricks of concepts. All I would add is the extreme interdependence of concepts. In my view, there mere fact that we build sentences from single words encourages us to infer that meanings are built from concepts as molecules are built from atoms. Why do I resist this view? If we examine a concept and try to define it, we are immediately dragging other concepts to be defined with still other concepts. In a specific sense there is only one concept (which we might call a concept system). And I think this system is softer and more liquid than it is crystalline or web-like. The system as a whole processes not only sentences as a whole or paragraphs as a whole but personalities and lifetimes of communication as a whole.

Not so. The claim would be that it is sharing the same culture which results in sharing the same style of selfhood. Language in a general fashion allows culture to even exist. But simply speaking English doesn't mean there aren't then many national and regional styles of selfhood and self-regulation.

So the point is that language enables that leap - the one to a cultural level of semiotic organisation. Individuals can now learn to take the collective social view of the psychological fact of their own existence as "conscious beings". Awareness of self is awareness of self as an individual actor within a collective social setting.

But every language serves that purpose. And every culture can then write its own version of the script. A Japanese sense of self can be quite different from an American one - or at least to the degree that American culture hasn't overtaken the traditional Japanese mindset. — apokrisis

If I was the only person to exist, I would still have self-awareness because I can make the distinction between environment and my body, just like every other animal.

There is plenty of research on the development of self-regulation in children if you are interested in the characteristic stages. But you are pushing for a simplistic reading of the argument. If a self-aware style of cognition is something learnt, then there is no fixed moment when it clicks into place. It is always something that is developing.

Words and grammar just give access to this new world of possibility.

And long before infants have any mastery of speech, they are already embedded in a world where they are being treated as psychological individuals - especially if they are middle-class and Western. A social demand is being placed on them. So the learning of the way to think is already begun. — apokrisis

It seems to me, that in the last two sections here, you have admitted that it isn't language that triggers selfhood. Now you are saying it is culture. You are admitting that we have selfhood prior to learning a language. Words and grammar simply allow us to use shared symbols to refer to what is already there.

Infants discovering their arms and legs and how to control them has nothing to do with culture. It is biological.

If anything, culture diminishes our self as it makes us adopt a cultural norm and become more like those around us.

Well when it comes to dogs and cats, their tails often seem to have a mind of their own. And also get chased and attacked like a foreign object. :) — apokrisis

And they react to their image in the mirror as if it were another dog or cat. This is because their sense of vision is not as keen as their sense of smell or hearing. Could you be aware of yourself by smell alone? Could you be aware of yourself without any sensations at all except for having a language? Are computers self-aware as they know languages?

If that were so, you would be able to point to the vast differences between chimp and human brains. — apokrisis

There are vast differences between chimp and human brains, however chimps communicate in their own way. They still have a sense of self without a language. It just isn't on the level of human self-awareness because of brain structure, not because of their vocal tract.

According to this:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3398142/
Humans' ability to use language developed from precursors to distinguish vocalizations that exist in chimps' and humans' ancestors.

https://vimeo.com/72072873

I have used The Man Without Words as evidence that people are conscious without language many times on these forums and it is ignored. People just want to believe what they want and ignore all evidence to the contrary. It is nice to see that at least someone else has seen the same thing and understand what that means for the relationship between consciousness and language. — Harry Hindu

Still no reaction to this, eh? Idefonso wasn't surprised that he had a self when he learned a language. He was surprised that there are shared symbols that he can use to communicate his self's ideas, wants and needs.

My dog is awake, sentient and able to respond to environmental stimuli, plus her own urges, however she is not conscious as I mean it here. — Tim3003

I don't see how we could possibly know this.

Language doesn't make us self aware. It allows us to express what is already there. It allows us to express ourselves in greater detail and with better efficiency than simply using hand signals and noises.

I'm generally in agreement with Harry here. I also agree with the sense of self evaporating the more you spend socializing instead of the opposite.
Take something as simple as walking through a wood and stepping on a branch. There is a knowing it is you and not someone else in the wood without having to be told or even hearing an inner monologue.

Individuals can now learn to take the collective social view of the psychological fact of their own existence as "conscious beings". Awareness of self is awareness of self as an individual actor within a collective social setting.
But every language serves that purpose. — apokrisis

It looks like you try to represent one particular moment in human history as the universal one. In the vast majority of known cultures “awareness of self as an individual actor” never existed. It is a relatively new Western invention.
Individuals knew themselves as members of different communities, so their awareness was rather collective than individual. Accordingly, language had not functioned as an individuating and personalizing tool.
.

We say, there "I" go, experiencing certain qualia, having certain thoughts, feeling certain things.
Our mentality shifts up to a sociocultural level where everything is happening to a spectating self - a self that is understood as a contrast to the collective. We now see ourselves living in a world of the like-minded, and so see ourselves as "one of that kind of thing". — apokrisis

Even in our individualistic culture, acquiring language and saying I do not necessarily mean that self automatically begin possessing mirroring – spectating qualities. No doubt, that “I” is socially generated and effectuated, but the equation “I am the other” should never be taken for granted.

Language doesn't make us self aware. It allows us to express what is already there. It allows us to express ourselves in greater detail and with better efficiency than simply using hand signals and noises. — Harry Hindu

we have selfhood prior to learning a language. Words and grammar simply allow us to use shared symbols to refer to what is already there. — Harry Hindu

Definitely, babies have kind of selfhood before learning a language. Psychologists even differentiate few different selves, acquired by a preverbal child. Accordingly, we can propose the existence of various kinds of self-awareness. Yet, it would be a mistake to underestimate
the importance of the emergence of a verbal self. Vygotsky showed that the appearance of a verbal -social self profoundly changed the performance of the child's leading psychological faculties – will, memory, attention, and thinking. So, taking Idefonso for conducting psychological tests would probably demonstrate the difference in completing even simple tasks. Your main argument is that Idefonso was able to fulfill essential human social functions. But what about more complicated ones? Could he successfully orient and perform in our digital society?

It looks like you try to represent one particular moment in human history as the universal one. In the vast majority of known cultures “awareness of self as an individual actor” never existed. It is a relatively new Western invention. — Number2018

Sure. Socratic philosophy secured the modern Western cultural image of what it is to be a self-actualising individual. The culture of human selfhood has continually evolved.

But you are missing the point if you don't look for the change that made the difference. At some moment, we became a species with a symbolic culture. And the paleoanthropological record says that was a fairly abrupt transition. Suddenly folk were wearing beads, painting caves and setting out their camps with ritualistic order.

The lens through which I look at this transition is biosemiotic. The major transitions underpinning life and mind are down to the evolution of serial coding mechanisms that can be used, in abstract fashion, to regulate material dynamics. In the words of Howard Pattee, this is the epistemic cut. Life depends on being able to step back from itself - using a syntactical/informational machinery like genes, neurons or words, in particular - so as to be able to regulate the entropic flows that constitute that self.

So this is why language is the key. It opened up a new level of semiosis that simply did not exist before. There is no point fluffing around with other things. Language is core, just as the discovery of DNA, and the discovery of neural signalling, have been core to making sense of biological life and animal-level mind.

Before there were neurons, sure there were hormones. Chemical messaging was taking place. But what was transformational was the development of a spiking neuron as a generalised, universal, form of information representation. A message wasn't coded by some particular chemical lock-and-key signalling. A neuron's spiking rate could become a means of representing any kind of abstract event - the sight of something, the smell of something, the sound of something.

Brains developed because there was an epistemic cut in which the world was modelled in terms of a standard symbolic code. You could point to the fact there were always precursors to that, and also always continuing elaboration once the first most primitive nervous systems emerged, but the rubicon was crossed when the neuron evolved as a universal means of encoding regulatory information. Just as life began when there were genes that allowed for the displaced regulation of cellular metabolisms.

So the evolutionary continuity we seek is a biosemiotic one. It is obvious that something happened to turn a smart social ape into a modern encultured human being. You could speculate that it was just a general biggering of the brain - but the paleo evidence is against that. And once you have framed the question as a semiotic one - once you see how a new level of coding machinery would have to make a difference - then it just becomes obvious that is the core story. Language underpins the crucial mental shift. The rest is culture studies.

My dog is awake... is not conscious as I mean it here. — Tim3003

I have had some remarkably aware pets, dogs and cats - and a friend has a parrot. I'm persuaded that any statement as to the reduced capacity of any animal is suspect on the face of it. Perhaps animals have specialized concepts and understandings, like Eskimos with snow, that most of us have no inking of, and they think we're stupid. Granted I can read a book. But I cannot read a forest through my nose.

Still no reaction to this, eh? — Harry Hindu

The thesis I'm defending is that we can grant consciousness to neurology. And that involves a fundamental self~world distinction. However humans have the further thing of a metacognitive awareness of that lived self~world distinction. Language allows us to see that is the case - that we are individuals, or actors in a larger social context. We fit our own existence into a running narrative. And that is a metacognitive habit of self-consciousness that makes all the difference in the world.

So if you take the case of Idefonso, what does it really tell.

First off, he was raised in a linguistic context. Even lacking speech himself, that context would have shaped a set of expectations that couldn't otherwise have been the case. Even our pet cats and dogs, with their much tinier brains, learn they need to scratch at doors and find other ways to communicate with us in our highly structured human environments.

So as this blog notes, Idefonso was...

...a profoundly deaf Mexican immigrant who grew up in a house with hearing parents who could not teach him sign language

Schaller found herself in a class for ‘Reading skills’ that was little more than a warehouse for all the deaf students...

"I went to the door to walk out and was actually turning the handle to leave, when I see this man who looked so frightened. He was holding himself as if he were wearing a straightjacket. He was backed up in a corner, protecting himself. I saw that he was studying mouths, he was studying people. Even though he was frightened, he was still watching: what is happening, what is happening?"

...One problem for Schaller’s efforts was that Ildefonso’s survival strategy, imitation, actually got in the way of him learning how to sign because it short-circuited the possibility of conversation. As she puts it, Ildefonso acted as if he had a kind of visual echolalia (we sometimes call it ‘echopraxia’), simply copying the actions he saw:

"He’d just try to form signs and copy what I was doing. But his facial expression was always, is this what I’m supposed to do?"

Then eventually the teaching clicks and we have that sudden biosemiotic realisation that changes everything...

All of a sudden, this twenty-seven-year-old man-who, of course, had seen a wall and a door and a window before-started pointing to everything. He pointed to the table. He wanted me to sign table. He wanted the symbol. He wanted the name for table. And he wanted the symbol, the sign, for window.

The amazing thing is that the look on his face was as if he had never seen a window before. The window became a different thing with a symbol attached to it. [emphasis added, GD] But it’s not just a symbol. It’s a shared symbol. He can say “window” to someone else tomorrow who he hasn’t even met yet! And they will know what a window is. There’s something magical that happens between humans and symbols and the sharing of symbols.

That was his first “Aha!” He just went crazy for a few seconds, pointing to everything in the room and signing whatever I signed. Then he collapsed and started crying, and I don’t mean just a few tears. He cradled his head in his arms on the table and the table was shaking loudly from his sobbing.

And then the really interesting question. Looking back, what was his consciousness like before he had the means to fit it into a running, linguistically structured, narrative?....

"It’s another frustration that Ildefonso doesn’t want to talk about it. For him, that was the dark time. Whenever I ask him, and I’ve asked him many, many times over the years, he always starts out with the visual representation of an imbecile: his mouth drops, his lower lip drops, and he looks stupid. He does something nonsensical with his hands like, “I don’t know what’s going on.” He always goes back to “I was stupid.”

It doesn’t matter how many times I tell him, no, you weren’t exposed to language and… The closest I’ve ever gotten is he’ll say, “Why does anyone want to know about this? This is the bad time.” What he wants to talk about is learning language."

Hmm. Telling, hey?

Hmm. Telling, hey? — apokrisis

It is very telling. Thanks for the reference to this blog. Thanks also to @Harry Hindu for the reference to the documentary. I hadn't heard of Ildefonso's story before. I was also struck by this comment from his teacher in the Vimeo documentary: "...And to me, it was as if he was seeing things for the first time. And that's when I realized language changes human beings. And it's one of the reasons why he can't talk about being languageless. He told me once: 'I don't know what it was like to be languageless because language changed me.'"

When I heard this I was immediately reminded of a similarly striking commentary by Helen Keller about her own languageless past:

"Before my teacher came to me, I did not know that I am. I lived in a world that was a no-world. I cannot hope to describe adequately that unconscious, yet conscious time of nothingness. I did not know that I knew aught, or that I lived or acted or desired. I had neither will nor intellect. I was carried along to objects and acts by a certain blind natural impetus. I had a mind which caused me to feel anger, satisfaction, desire. These two facts led those about me to suppose that I willed and thought. I can remember all this, not because I knew that it was so, but because I have tactual memory. It enables me to remember that I never contracted my forehead in the act of thinking. I never viewed anything beforehand or chose it. I also recall tactually the fact that never in a start of the body or a heart-beat did I feel that I loved or cared for anything. My inner life, then, was a blank without past, present, or future, without hope or anticipation, without wonder or joy or faith."

Quoted from this blog: 'Ms. Keller describes that famous moment when she realized that the finger-movements in her hand meant “water” in this way:

"That word startled my soul, and it awoke, full of the spirit of the morning, full of joyous, exultant song. Until that day my mind had been like a darkened chamber, waiting for words to enter and light the lamp, which is thought."'

Your main argument is that Idefonso was able to fulfill essential human social functions. But what about more complicated ones? Could he successfully orient and perform in our digital society? — Number2018

Would a person from the 19 century be able to orient and perform in our digital society? This has nothing to do with self awareness. It is more to do with adapting to, or responding to, the environment you find your self in.

You can only find a language useful if you already are aware of your self as seperate from others and that others have seperate minds need to be informed of something that you know but they don't. When we realize that other people have minds too, we find language useful.

My aim for this discussion was the genesis of consciousness: And clearly one of the problems with discussing consciousness is in defining what exactly it is. We all have our own slightly different shade of grey here. I am going to state my definition: it is the understanding and acceptance of the concept 'I think, therefore I am'.

As I see it, this concept is impossible to grasp without the language via which it is stated. I mean, that without the 5-word phrase (or another similar phrase) the concept is ungraspable. Try it: I think it is impossible to differentiate between the 'I-subject' who is speaking the words, and the 'I-object' who 'is' - ie my 'self'. I can imagine 'me' - the 'I-subject'. But the 'I-object' - ie my 'self' as separate from the 'I-subject' - is meaningless and ungraspable without a language label to differentiate it from the 'I-subject'.

So, I submit, language does not simply label ideas we already have, it allows us to construct abstract ideas and thus meta-ideas, which without it are impossible. As another example: before Einstein, the concept of a black hole did not exist, it was not 'there' in our minds and awaiting a label. Once he had proposed the concept he demonstrated it could be understood using existing language and physics, so the rest of us could add it to our concept lists.

Hmm. Telling, hey? — apokrisis

What is telling is that in your entire post you never quote him saying that he discovered that he was seperate and different from others.

He says that "I" changed and "I" was stupid. Which shows that he had an "I" before language that was different. We all change when we learn something new. I could say the same thing Idefonso said when I went from theism to atheism. All he is describing is a change in himself, not that the change was that he discovered himself.

All he is describing is a change in himself, not that the change was that he discovered himself. — Harry Hindu

However, you've been consistently arguing that the acquisition of linguistic abilities doesn't change "what is already there" regarding the structure and nature of the self but rather merely enables the subject to communicate it or express herself with words. But both Ildefonso and Keller seem to be making the point that they were changed. The acquisition of language changed what was already there, in a fairly radical way, and went far beyond the mere enabling of the communication of it. It changed what was there to be communicated.

He says that "I" changed and "I" was stupid. Which shows that he had an "I" before language that was different. — Harry Hindu

He can say that now .... retrospectively. Equipped with a language that is suitably tensed.

And the surprising thing about his reply was how indescribable that language-less and unnarrated past state was to him.

But then that is not so surprising. Our own autobiographical memories only start to form about the time we really begin to master the habit of self-narrative talk and self-regulatory thought. So before the age of about three, we don't have a narrative style of memory. We weren't able to organise our experience so it was telling a running story about our "self".

You can only find a language useful if you already are aware of your self as seperate from others and that others have seperate minds need to be informed of something that you know but they don't. When we realize that other people have minds too, we find language useful. — Harry Hindu

It would be a mistake to represent acquiring language by babies as the result of fulfilling a recognized need. (Does a child grows up because she wants to become an adult?) And, in the first stages, the acquired language is too weak to serve as a simple mean of communication. So, your point is just a simplifying presentation of the real process of acquiring language as well as the use of language by adults. Yet, you are right that the existence of preverbal self is an absolutely necessary condition. The preverbal self possesses self-awareness and means of communicating with others. A non-verbal child or adult can be aware of her inner states and differentiate them from other minds, as well as inform them through gestures, facial expressions, etc. So, what is the main difference between a non-verbal awareness and mediated by language consciousness? Verbalized thinking, or so-called inner speech does not necessary have explicated grammatical and syntactic structure.
In most cases, it uses not even words, but amalgamated mixture of symbols, quite often not translatable, a creation and possession of a particular individual mind.
Nevertheless, an inner speech is the result of a process of internalization of an external language. The inner speech has become an important component of thinking, will, memory, and attention. Mediated by language, conscious psychological processes and acts have become voluntary and non-compulsory, in contrast to impulsive ones.

My aim for this discussion was the genesis of consciousness: And clearly one of the problems with discussing consciousness is in defining what exactly it is. We all have our own slightly different shade of grey here. I am going to state my definition: it is the understanding and acceptance of the concept 'I think, therefore I am'. — Tim3003

Self is not an actuality which is located:
1) Within a body, or body part (e.g., a head, or brain).
2) Within a mind, producing behaviour.

Self is:
1) Individuality, reflexively considered (i.e., a subject and object having the same referent). So, in English, it is a noun, or personal pronoun suffix.
2) Reflexive. So, in English, it is an adjective, or combining form.

Myself is me thinking about me.

"When I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never catch myself at any time without a perception, and can never observe anything but the perception...If anyone upon serious and unprejudiced reflection, thinks he has a different notion of himself, I must confess I can reason no longer with him...He may, perhaps, perceive something simple and continued, which he calls himself; though I am certain there is no such principle in me." (Hume, Treatise of Human Nature, I.iv.6.)

So, it would be inappropriate to define consciousness or experience in terms of a self, instead of in terms of a whole individual organism (body and mind).

"The subject of experience is not an owner of experience or a 'self', but a human being." (Bennett & Hacker, Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience, 12.4,333)

My current working definitions:
1) Human Consciousness: a conscious (sensitive and actively aware) mind-body condition.
2) Sensation: the organic ability to respond to stimuli through sense function.
3) Sense: the reception and transduction of exogenous and/or endogenous stimuli, resulting in the propagation of action potentials in excitable cells.
4) Aware: perceptive and/or cognisant.
5) Experience: transitive consciousness.

By these definitions, Ildefonso and Helen Keller (having sensory limitations, yet having sensations) could be conscious (e.g., awake) or semi-conscious (e.g., asleep, or daydreaming) without recourse to a linguistic "I" or "self".

However, you've been consistently arguing that the acquisition of linguistic abilities doesn't change "what is already there" regarding the structure and nature of the self but rather merely enables the subject to communicate it or express herself with words. — Pierre-Normand

Wrong. That isn't what I said. Every time I used the string of symbols, "what is already there" in this thread, I was saying that we use language to refer to what is already there - the self. I never said that the self doesn't ever change. That would be absurd.

What I'm rejecting is the claim that language brings the self into existence, or that the self becomes aware of itself through language.

The acquisition of language changed what was already there, in a fairly radical way, and went far beyond the mere enabling of the communication of it. It changed what was there to be communicated. — Pierre-Normand

Again, if you go back and re-read my previous post, you will see that I made the argument that learning a language is just another experience we have that changes us. Every time we acquire knowledge of some sort it changes us (our selves), and if we have a complex system of communication then we can create new words to refer to those new things, just like how languages have evolved to reflect our new knowledge. Think about the change humanity went through in how it viewed itself when we realized the Earth wasn't the center of the universe and that we weren't separate from animals.

Let me ask you PN, what is the thing that was there that changed?

He can say that now .... retrospectively. Equipped with a language that is suitably tensed. — apokrisis

Language is a tool. Tools are only useful to you when you are aware of the problem the tool is used for. The problem for Iledefonso wasn't that he couldn't communicate. It's just that he couldn't use language to communicate. Language makes more complex ideas communicable.

And the surprising thing about his reply was how indescribable that language-less and unnarrated past state was to him.

But then that is not so surprising. Our own autobiographical memories only start to form about the time we really begin to master the habit of self-narrative talk and self-regulatory thought. So before the age of about three, we don't have a narrative style of memory. We weren't able to organise our experience so it was telling a running story about our "self". — apokrisis

Yet he describes himself and shows that he already had a narrative before language.

If you go back and look at the video between about 14:00 and 18:00, you'll see that had ideas about himself and even goes about describing his gardening at a hospital and his relationship with his boss. He knew what doctors were, but thought that he was too unintelligent to be one. What he lacked wasn't intelligence. What he lacked was language, but that isn't to say that he lacked an awareness of himself as a social being. Watch the video.

"It’s another frustration that Ildefonso doesn’t want to talk about it. For him, that was the dark time. Whenever I ask him, and I’ve asked him many, many times over the years, he always starts out with the visual representation of an imbecile: his mouth drops, his lower lip drops, and he looks stupid. He does something nonsensical with his hands like, “I don’t know what’s going on.” He always goes back to “I was stupid.”

If he can use facial expressions and hand gestures to communicate "I was stupid.", then obviously one can communicate this state of affairs without language. Language is just agreed-upon visual scribbles and sounds (and braille for the blind). We could use any assortment of visuals, sounds, or tactile sensations to represent some thing or state of affairs. We can create a narrative with any kind of symbol system, not just language.

It would be a mistake to represent acquiring language by babies as the result of fulfilling a recognized need. (Does a child grows up because she wants to become an adult?) And, in the first stages, the acquired language is too weak to serve as a simple mean of communication. — Number2018

A child does grow up because she wants to become an adult. You're separating the will of the body from the will of the mind. They are one and the same.

Learning one word means that you communicate that one idea to others. Language takes years to learn because there are so many things to have names for and you have to learn them all if you want to be able to communicate them all. You can learn of the existence of some thing or event by reading or hearing about it, or you could be there yourself prior and then learn the word that refers to it after the fact. Words mean nothing unless you know
1) that they are symbols (this was Idefonso's problem)
and
2) what they symbolize (this is a problem when seeing a word for the first time)

Language is a tool. — Harry Hindu

I can see you are emotionally attached to your dismissive position. But think about it. Genes, neurons, words (and numbers) are all examples of something similar - syntactical machinery. A way to accumulate regulatory information in a hot and messy world.

So as "a tool", language wasn't any old tool. It was another of those epochal developments in the story of the evolution of life and mind. There is a good reason why humans suddenly became so explosively different from other large brained, highly social, animals.

Language makes more complex ideas communicable. — Harry Hindu

It makes that complexity possible as those ideas can now develop at a cultural level. There is a cultural-level means to accumulate them in an evolutionarily ratcheting fashion. We can inherit the memes of our grandparents, and indeed a thousand generations of our ancestors.

Why would you resist this obvious fact?

Language is a tool.
— Harry Hindu

I can see you are emotionally attached to your dismissive position. — apokrisis

I dont see how that follows.

The rest of your post doesn't reject anything I've said. I have already talked about discoveries that have changed the way we see ourselves, and language is one of those things.

I guess you're not going to watch the video that I posted the link for that shows that contradicts your previous post, and pretty much everything else you've said, but that's your problem, not mine.

The rest of your post doesn't reject anything I've said — Harry Hindu

I've shown that language ain't "just a tool" as you claim. If we are looking for something that explains the mental chasm between social animal and encultured human, then language accounts for that. If you can offer some alternative causal mechanism, go for it. If you believe that "complex thought" pre-exists language, where is the evidence for some radical neurobiological-level change?

If you go back and look at the video between about 14:00 and 18:00, you'll see that had ideas about himself and even goes about describing his gardening at a hospital and his relationship with his boss. — Harry Hindu

Yeah. After he learnt language. So proves my point.