Hoot Mon writes:
Do you think Helen Keller gained more consciousness after she was trained to use a symbolic language? Or was her human consciousness innate to her and fixed from birth?
There's a good case to be made that the development of consciousness (in the sense of "awareness") is concomitant with -- and ultimately equates to -- the development of language. There's an interesting (though not specifically scientific) discussion of the idea here:
Consciousness is Nothing but a Word (AbE: author of the cited article is Henry D. Schlinger -- the article actually begins a bit below the spot targeted by the url, so scroll down to find it).
Since the early 1960's, there has also been quite a bit of discussion (again, more philosophical than scientific, but firmly based on observable facts) about how language is something genetically "wired" into the human brain structure. Of course, an intriguing property of the human capacity for language is that it cannot develop if there is no human language being used around (and addressed to) the child.
Any linguistic input will do -- any infant, regardless of his/her genetic parentage, is able to acquire native fluency in any human language, provided that the language is used around the child, and the child is expected (and has the physical ability) to interact with others using the language. This applies to sign language as well, but with an interesting twist: because deafness is often the result of "environmental" factors as opposed to inherited traits, children who must learn it often do not encounter "native speakers", unless they gain access to an established community, such as a school for the deaf. Even in the absence of such access, the need and intent to communicate will drive the child and family members to invent at least a minimum essential set of expressions, "lexical" gestures and rules of syntax, and the language will increase in expressive power and complexity the more it is used. (Note that the development of language is not a matter of "design" -- the users do not plan out the symbols and rules they will use; language acquisition/creation is an opportunistic and imperfectly self-organizing process.)
Finally, there is a case to be made that the kind of consciousness/awareness that derives from interaction within a social group, and/or within a multi-species environment, is something that can be observed as a gradient across species: humans have a lot of it, and theirs is of a very complex, multi-layered nature. But other species have it as well: theirs may be extremely limited in comparison, but studies of animal behavior in the last few decades demonstrates that we are starting to figure out how to detect and understand it.
(Of course, a capacity for consciousness in all species was something our animist ancestors took for granted, and this mind-set may well have been a feature that was favored in natural selection: it entailed having an appropriate degree of respect for the other species around you, in relation to the threats or benefits they posed to your survival.)
Edited by Otto Tellick, : No reason given.
autotelic adj. (of an entity or event) having within itself the purpose of its existence or happening.
™ Version 4.2
