I don’t know what you mean by “consciousness.” The kinds of things people usually claim that there is such a thing as “consciousness” is pretty vague, and often conflates various sorts of phenomena.
I don’t think language is a precondition for consciousness. (And there aren’t any languages that lack language-like components.) I think that while language probably has an effect on consciousness, it is not the causal antecedent of consciousness, and the two may not even be in the same causal chain.
That’s a really good point actually — I think even defining what consciousness *is* is really hard, let alone trying to explain it. And definitely agree that there are different phenomena get lumped under “consciousness,” and different people may be thinking of somewhat different things.
I guess there are two phenomena I tend to think of as “consciousness” — one, having an internal subjective experience / phenomenology, and two (this one is more squishy and meta), being “aware” of oneself as an entity with subjective experience. If that makes any sense?
It is sort of “hard” to explain what it means to be a conscious person, and I think this is at least as much a fact about the nature of consciousness as it is about the nature of language. It’s difficult to explain consciousness on the basis of the words we use for it.
I guess one of my ideas here is that consciousness and language (and other language-like things, really) are not really distinct categories — they are (or can be) intertwined. It’s not that language causes consciousness, but rather that the two are linked: it’s hard to describe a conscious being without referring to language (e.g. “a human being who speaks English”), and there are things that are conscious that we can talk about only in terms of the words we use for consciousness (e.g. a single “I”). (If you know something about the nature of consciousness and not much about language, this may sound very hard to believe, but in practice a lot of things we claim about language seem to apply to consciousness, and vice versa — the things we claim about consciousness are also things we claim about language, etc.)
Another thing I’ve wondered is, can the two be separated? Consciousness may be a complex phenomenon, but if you get all the parts and recombine them (which is a standard approach to explaining stuff like consciousness), can you get a system that’s fully conscious and also entirely non-language-like? I doubt it, but it’d be really cool if there were such a thing.
It’s definitely an interesting question — but I’d have to take a page from your book and ask you what you mean by “language.” Like, what would make a system “entirely non-language like”? Is any symbolic or representational process “language-like,” as you’re thinking of it?
The answer I’m giving here is just a very vague answer. It’s also a bad answer, and I don’t think it’s a very productive one.
There’s no good way to draw a line between things that are “linguistic” and things that aren’t, because there are so many ways to draw the line, and a lot of them don’t seem very informative.
There are certainly linguistic things that are non-symbolic and non-representational. For example, if you are reading this post, it might not be “about” anything at all, it could be some purely internal process without external referents. If you were reading this post, you would not be consciously aware of the words on this page, but rather you would be conscious of something else, the internal processing of information.
In general, I think language is much more of a process of internalization and abstraction than people normally think. It’s an important source of abstraction in both our internal experience and our external environment, but it’s not the only source of abstraction. You can abstract information from the outside in a non-language-like way — this is what, e.g., “pattern recognition” does. You can also have things that are internally abstract, without even using the words “symbols” or “semantics” to describe them. In this case, the abstraction is not driven by linguistic information alone.
You ask a fair question, but I don’t have a good answer — this is what I meant by “vague.”
There are certainly linguistic things that are non-symbolic and non-representational. For example, if you are reading this post, it might not be “about” anything at all, it could be some purely internal process without external referents.
You’re more right than you can possibly know, Frank
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#Rob’s comment is exactly what I was thinking #computer generated text #philosophy #oh my god
Ok, so theres like 14 tugboats working on the Ever Given now and the tide is coming in. They MIGHT be able to refloat her today.
As a hilarious side note, THIS apparently happened on a highway in china this morning, which SEEMS like a joke but is apparently real:
in the spirit realm, an evergreen tree has fallen and blocked the River of Life; the material realm will be forced to echo and reenact this higher reality in various ways until the problem is rectified at the source
#Ever Given #oh my god #(I looked it up and this is apparently a real thing that really happened at that real timestamp) #(also: they’ve made *some* progress on unsticking the Ever Given but they’ve still got a ways to go)
By contrast, I’ve been getting the same number of sniffles that I do every year even though there’s no one to catch them from, which is how I learned this year that I’m not prone to minor colds; I’m prone to hayfever.
Huh, you’re still getting hayfever with a mask? I started wearing a mask in 2017 *specifically* to avoid pollen, and it’s been working wonderfully for me.
Have you been keeping the mask on outside, and when near front doors that people are opening a lot? Does it have a well-fitted nosepiece?
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I also had no colds in the calendar year 2020. It used to be fairly normal for me to go entire years without getting sick (after I adjusted to my current microbial milieu, that is; I got sick a *lot* the first couple years I lived in Canada), but then I started working a customer-facing job where nobody else ever took sick leave and staff members were forbidden from wearing masks, and I went from a cold every 1 – 2 years to a cold every few months. Getting rid of that damned fast-food cold rate wasn’t worth what it’s cost, but it’s a very nice silver lining.
(for anyone who finds my rate of colds bogglingly low: I’m guessing the two big components are “trained myself out of touching my face in public when I was a pre-teen, and always wash my hands upon returning home” and “rarely travel”, in that order)
I didn’t even used to do any anti-airborne measures†, just anti-fomite. I plan to start wearing a mask in indoor public spaces from October – March or so each year and on public transit year-round, and it’ll be very interesting to see what that does to my baseline cold rate.
(also, on a broader scale, it will be interesting to see if COVID-19 vaccines grant any cross-protection against cold-type coronaviruses)
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†Except in extreme situations like “on an airplane two seats away from a coughing dude”. Guess who didn’t get sick until an incubation period *after* the rest of her family? (unfortunately there’s only so much you can isolate from people you’re sharing a hotel room with)
I very rarely wear a mask. I hardly leave the house and when I do, almost nobody wears masks here because there’s no covid in my state outside of the quarantined medi-hotels for infected international arrivals; we just sanitise, social distance, keep records of where we go and get tested any time symptoms show up so that when it does show up, we can respond before it’s got more than a couple of people. The distancing and group size limits are enough that basically nobody’s getting colds.
My probably-hayfever is very mild and isn’t debilitating at all (which is probably why it took me so long to notice); I just get a sniffly, runny nose so I haven’t bothered with any pollen precautions. They’d be more annoying than just living with it.
When I started wearing pollen masks, my only symptom was mild sore throats. The main problem I was having was that pollen attacks felt exactly like…well, the onset of a cold. *Physically* the sore throats per se weren’t a big deal, but I hated never being sure whether or not I was coming down with something.
I’ve started getting runny noses too now, which I found even worse in that they’re impairing in their own right. Maybe I’m just more bothered by having a runny nose than you are.
My allergies are for animals and dust. I have pets and am far too disorganized to dust. So yeah, I’m actually just as miserable this year as I am every year, but I definitely have noticed, no colds. Runny nose and sneezing and occasional sore throat and cough… but at my age, the biggest symptom of a cold is a draining and horrible fatigue. All my fatigue this year comes from diabetes and depression.
I do think I’m going to keep using masks during the winter every year.
At your age? Are you implying you *didn’t* get horrible draining fatigue from colds when you were younger?
When I saw that one of the DSM rules is that in order to qualify as having clinical depression it has to be at least two weeks, I thought “ah, of course, they’re thinking of self-limiting diseases”. The last week of December, 2017, I had a cold that *didn’t* come with a transient depressive episode, and it was amazing how much less it sucked. Turns out that while sore throats and stuffy noses and coughing fits *are* pretty annoying, *most* of the badness of colds is from direct inducement of misery.
…if there are people who *normally* don’t get depression from colds, that would explain a lot about how blase they are about disease prevention.
(…“people with enough depression at baseline that colds are just background noise” would also explain a lot but in a much more horrifying way. you indicate that in at least some cases they can be distinguished, though.)
@rustingbridges replied: “no, I don’t feel that way. identifying a cold mostly consists of ruling out allergies and guessing”
holy fuck
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#this explains so much #oh my god #replies #illness tw #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #depression
Brinens and Things 