OUR WAY WITH WORDS - On being aware

How do you know who you are?

This handprint on the wall of a deep ill-lit cave must be one of the earliest explicit marks of self-awareness, and have been made by a person with some language, however rudimentary. It suggests the 'tag' of present day graffiti artists. It is surprising that we all have an instinctive ability to learn, with a remarkable facility in childhood, any one, or more of the 7000 or so languages still being used in the world; a facility that does not usually persist into maturity. Language is far more than a means of conveying factual information, or the vehicle for gossip. It is the tool with which we each create a personal world; the very basis of consciousness, or self-awareness. It is not possible to harbour a belief in anything, be it a god, patriotism, beauty or art, without it. If sufficient evidence can be presented to support this proposition, then It might even provide a new platform from which to better understand the very nature of personality, and the way in which human thought appears to have become strangely polarised into, what we call, science and art.

Other instincts

There has never been a culture without music, graphic art and language and the 'confluence' of these, in human nature, must prompt us to ask just how intimately they might be related. The pre-science period of human evolution, over hundreds of thousands of years, was so vastly longer than the time that scientific thought has existed, that the way we normally think is seriously skewed towards, for the lack of better words, 'liberal humanism', and all its values and a rather romantic love of metaphor, and the 'soul'. Science, with its demand for more tangible evidence about the world, introduced a stronger tendency towards 'reality', or 'what is'. Both art and science are concerned with the information we receive from the outer world, through our senses, but with the difference that one weaves patterns of metaphor, whilst the other aims at a lack of ambiguity and at achieving consensus. Both are, in principle, concerned with the creation of personal 'worlds', and both have a positive need for 'imagination', as we normally understand it.

The fact that occasionally individuals- savants - exhibit extraordinary natural mental ability in certain areas such as music, arithmetic or drawing, demands that we acknowledge that the potential 'power' of the human brain far exceeds that which most of us exhibit. We shall also have to accept that there are aspects of the human brain about which, as yet, we know nothing, such as why prodigious ability is not more common? It is obviously possible, so why can we not all exhibit such unusual skills?

Nadia, about 5 years of age produced this spirited drawing on the left. Stephen Wiltshire, as a young boy, also showed astonishing feats of visual memory in drawing 5 metre panoramic pictures after flying once over cities such as Rome and Tokio. This picture shows Canary Wharf. In later life he also showed outstanding musical ability. Similar feats of memory were also achieved by Kim Peek, who inspired the film Rain Main and who, at over 50 years of age, remembered about 98% of all he had ever read. It has also been said that he could read two books at the same time - one with each eye. What startling differences in these brains can allow such phenomenal feats? The remarkable musical prodigy, Derek Paravicini, blind from birth, played a keyboard from the age of 2, and now travels the world giving recitals. Mozart was probably such a prodigy. Robin Dunbar in his recent book speculates on the possible relation of music to the origins of language, and also of the instinct of humour, that we will briefly refer to later.

Or is it that we all remember far more than we can ever access easily again, later in life? It is well known that under hypnosis the ability to speak in a language once used in childhood, but since apparently forgotten, does return.The ability to make music instinctively is far more common, as the vitality of the contemporary pop-music scene demonstrates, and the fairly common appearance of those who can 'play by ear', untaught, and without any learned theory. It is also a curious fact that musical prodigies do not usually exhibit problems with language as do prodigies in other fields, which can then be reflected in problems of personality But it is language that remains the most universal instinct, and we should ask why this might be and why other, obviously very useful abilities, are not so universal. Such prodigious ability should be seen more as saying something fairly profound about brains in general, rather than something 'freakish'. It is the unusual patterns of behaviour that pose the questions, generating possible new insight.

The primacy of language

Karl Popper and Daniel Dennett have both offered tentative support for the idea of primacy of language as a source of self-awareness, but generally speaking the rest of the philosophical world has been, almost conspiratorially, silent, with the certain contemporary exceptions of John Searle and Alva Noe. Early in the last century Linguistic Determinism appeared, and the so-called Sapir-Whorf hypothesis was proposed stating that language was the source of thought. This work came mainly from those interested in anthropology and linguistics and is often couched in abstruse language itself, but an extensive literature did result. Wittengenstein, as is well known, was also much concerned with the nature of language and thought, but he too is far from easy reading. Linguistic Determinism generated much debate but interest had wained by the mid-1900s, although it does remain partially related to some later work of Derrida and Foucault. However, this site is firmly centred on common experience shared by readers, and endeavours, wherever possible, to avoid difficult specialist terminology and concepts.

Dennett, a contemporary philosopher of evolution, has said that he believes, but cannot yet prove, that acquiring a human language (normal or signed) is a necessary pre-condition for consciousness' in the strong sense of there being a subject, an 'I', a 'something it is like something to be'. Human subjectivity is, he says, a remarkable by-product of human language. Earlier Popper had said 'What I call 'full consciousness of self' may be conjectured to be specifically human and to depend on language, and that it was a mistake to even consider Descartes statement without assuming the existence of language. He continued, significantly, that this idea seemed to him to be of little importance until he developed, what he calls, the notion of 'The Third World', or 'World 3' , which is basically the world of ideas, as opposed to that of material, physical objects. It was only then that it dawned on him that the body-mind problem might be completely transformed by this approach. It is the spirit of that revelation that is endorsed here. However, it is surprising that neither Dennett or Popper continued to examine further the possible implications of their nascent ideas, although Dennett is still writing.

Helen Keller

The primacy of language to self is certainly supported by the very personal story of Helen Keller, who when 18 months old became completely blind and deaf due to illness, and therefore functionally mute. By the time she was about seven years old she had become violent and uncontrollable, and her parents employed a remarkable young lady, Anne Sullivan, herself partially blind, as a carer. She struggled to convey the idea of signing to Helen. It is recorded that, standing at her side one day, Anne Sullivan steadily pumped cool water into one of her hands while repeatedly tapping out an alphabetic code of five letters in the other - first slowly, then rapidly. The scene was repeated again and again as the young Helen painstakingly struggled to break through her world of silence. Quite suddenly, the signals crossed her consciousness with a meaning. She knew that "w-a-t-e-r" meant the cool something flowing over her hand, and the darkness began to melt from her mind, and she said later that 'When I learned the meaning of 'I' and 'me' and found that 'I was something, I begun to think'. She eventually graduated at university.

Joseph

Another human story is that told by Oliver Sacks in his book Seeing Voices. He writes of an 11 year old boy who, born deaf, never having heard spoken language or having seen fluent sign language, had, as a result, no ability to develop or hold abstract images in his mind. Sacks reports:

Joseph saw, distinguished, used; and had no problems with perceptual categorisation or generalisation, but he could not, it seemed, go much beyond that; or hold abstract ideas in mind, reflect, play, plan. He seemed completely literal, unable to juggle images or hypotheses or possibilities, unable to enter an imaginative or figurative realm, he seemed like an animal or an infant, to be stuck in the present, to be confined to literal and immediate perception

Sign Language

The instinct of language also embraces manual signing for those born deaf. The prevalence of us all to support our speech by signing with our hands, even when speaking on the telephone, is probably a vestige of the fact that signing can replace normal speech completely, even to the extent of exhibiting local dialects. It is well-known that mute children together will soon learn to communicate by signs and that each time this happens naturally a new 'language' evolves. It was certainly recorded that slaves, drawn from different tribes, would learn to communicate in this way, much to the annoyance of the slave masters who could not understand their conversation.

Two Philosophical Points

These interesting facts do raise philosophical points of some importance, and, contrary to the general spirit of this site of not invoking traditional philosophical wisdom, I would like to make a 'connection' which could have some relevance to our eventual understanding. It has been claimed by Bryan Magee that the greatest single achievement in the history of philosophy could be Kant's distinction between phenomenal and the noumenal. These two words are used by philosophers to distinguish those things apprehended by the senses, and those which are not (i.e abstract notions). Clearly, this distinction is reflected in the central underlying assumption being made here that without language no abstract concepts are possible, and therefore no noumenal knowledge can be acquired. It is, in a sense, the difference between 'knowing from the outside' and 'knowing from the inside'.

Also, the possession of language would appear essential to another central human concept; that of time itself. Without words we would be trapped in the present, and this fact would support the existence of time as a subjective phenomenon as Einstein insisted, although Popper disagreed. The casual way in which we talk about looking forward to the future , or back to the past is an interesting example of how the possession of language quite naturally provides new concepts - in this case an elemental concept of the passage of time. Although in some languages one goes 'up' to the future and 'down' to the past. Returning to the subject of humour, mentioned earlier, it is possible that it could be linked to this instinctive idea of time. Physics tells us that the world naturally evolves in the direction of increasing disorder - expressed as an ever increasing entropy. In the early days of home movies to show a film in reverse created far more amusement than projecting it forwards. The 'structure' of any joke depends on some form of 'punch-line' that suddenly brings unexpected order to the confusing preamble - a sudden decrease of entropy - contrary to the normal laws of physics. So it is an interesting question to ask if this could the basis for humour and comedy?

The possible role of language in any discussion of these very fundamental issues has been strangely neglected in most traditional philosophical thinking.

Memes

Interestingly also , Susan Blackmore claims in her book The Meme Machine that the main purpose of language is the propagation of memes, first proposed by Richard Dawkins as cultural replicators, as opposed to genes the biological replicators. If we replace the word 'meme' by 'abstract concept', then her thesis conforms largely to that being proposed here. We could consider aspects of fashion or religious belief, say, to be examples of memes.

We use language instinctively, taking much for granted, especially how it is, by convention, interpreted, and the hidden metaphors that exist. We rarely think about the assumptions embedded in vernacular or idiomatic speech, for example, or the role of values in everyday use of language, and these questions will now be considered in the next section.