A general theory of consciousness II: The language problem

Abstract

It is generally assumed that what we hear in our head is what we think and that, when we tell a thought to somebody else, the other person understands what our thought has been. This paper analyzes how we think and what happens when we communicate our thoughts verbally to others and to ourselves. The assumption that we become conscious in language is erroneous: verbal communication is only an intermediary. The conscious experience of verbal communication is a sensory phenomenon. We think through sensory images (see Part I). This natural way of thinking, is a very refined and accurate method of translating thought into consciousness. It expresses our essentially unconscious neural cognitive activity in conscious sensory images: visual thinkers ‘see’ what they have thought. Why humans use verbal communication to express their thoughts to themselves is difficult to understand as the verbal way is extremely limited. The complex parallel cognitive activity has to be encoded into language tokens which are positioned sequentially as a string of symbols which somehow must express something comparable. Talking to oneself is directed to an imaginary person who is assumed to be the talking person himself. This imaginary person develops with the inner voice in infants and when the child grows up, that imaginary person remains there, somebody he talks to when he thinks and to which he attributes his feelings and his actions. The imaginary person is experienced as the human Self, but actually verbalizes the thoughts of the natural – animal – Self.

A general theory of consciousness III: The human catastrophe

“…To understand how and why that change occurred, it is important to realize what the consequences of verbal communication were and still are for human behavior, and especially how the use of human language deforms the thought process. In order to make these effects clear, I will recapitulate the essence of my previous papers on language and consciousness [ 1 , 2 ], supplemented with new considerations and understanding of verbal communication and the effects of language especially relevant to the present discussion.…”

“…Fundamental to any understanding of what happened when language started to influence human life is insight into the phenomenon of human language itself: its deficiencies and its troublesome relationship with the thought processes in the brain. As was discussed extensively in my earlier research [ 2 ], verbal communication as a method of exchanging information is fundamentally flawed; any communication by language is inaccurate and questionable. The sense of consciousness about our own ideas expressed in spoken language suggests that we know what we were thinking.…”

“…For all practical purposes, consciousness is what the senses incite when they make their efforts known to the living organism they are part of. This paper holds that consciousness is a function of the senses; it is the result of what senses do, down to cell level [ 1 , 2 , 12–16 ].…”

“…My theory is based on what consciousness does and what the effects of thinking are, where thinking is the way an organism solves a problem through a neural process [ 1 ]. The phenomenon of sensory consciousness makes the outcome of that process known: the neural information is translated into conscious sensory images [ 1 , 2 , 17–22 ].…”

“…In actuality, this method has many flaws and restrictions, as pointed out in my previous paper. Fatal for the method of verbal communication is that the sensory images of the sender and those of the receiver are personal, and therefore fundamentally different [ 2 ]. The words used in verbal communication will thus always be differently interpreted by the sender and the receiver.…”