Tags
animal communication, communication, conscious experience, non-conscious experience, non-verbal communication, speech
There is a certain parallel between non-verbal communication, which is how animals communicate (and humans also to a considerable extent), and non-conscious experience. Coincidence? Not!
[This post is a stub, a sketch of an idea to be developed later. If you find it interesting or intriguing please Like it, leave a comment, or send me a note and I will be happy to flesh it out more fully.]
In the realm of experience that takes place non-consciously (nonhuman), it is doubtful that any communication is intentional, i.e., “assertive” (though in rare cases of trained intelligent animals, like Kanzi, this “rule” seems to be violated). Before humans could speak but after they had learned to somewhat objectify the world and, in the process, somewhat recognize their own subjective agency (if not their “selves”), some assertive communication must have taken place to plan for communal hunts, to organize camp life, determine relationships, to pass on the templates for constructing the rough tools & weapons that were reproduced with little change over nearly a million years, and, at some point, fire. The era of communicating via gesture (especially pointing) and very likely by nominative vocal sounds (names for things in the here & now) has been called *protolanguage* by Derek Bickerton and others, and I think it is well-named. This would be a period of, I suppose, semi-conscious or occasionally conscious experience.
To my mind, nothing worthy of the name speech appears in the archeological record until the appearance of images and artifacts that reveal symbolic thinking. Probably the earliest widely accepted indication of this is the Blombos Cave findings that are now dated to about 80 kya, well after H. sapiens first appeared. However, this and other such crude findings (red ochre, vague scratchings) may be but islands of symbolic activity that neither spread nor carried on afterwards (at least there is no record of such). Ostrich eggshell beads may indicate that a sense of tribal belonging or status was being symbolized and these are found very early as well. However, there is no indubitable sign of intersubjective speech and abstract (symbolic) expression until the recent findings of crude cave drawings and artifacts in France that date to possible 40 kya. After that, the sites spread and progress is evident until it “explodes” in the extraordinary early Aurignacian Chauvet Cave paintings, ca. 35 kya.
All this is to indicate a likely “no-man’s land”, a boundary between animal or plant non-cs exp and Upper Stone Age conscious experience, in which humanity spent most of its existence. Still episodic, tied to the here & now, that existence used agile hand to manipulate its environment and to communicate methods (how) and names or situations (what) to each other.
My papers generally owe a great debt to Professor Dewart and, to help pay that debt, I did a good deal of reading & commenting on his first draughts. He also came to me for updates on what was current in consciousness studies (little of which he found actually “new”).
My papers and books can be found on my websty:
http://www3.telus.net/public/doknyx/
and here:
http://unbc.academia.edu/GregoryNixon/
My paper on the origins of the human mind, i.e,. conscious experience, in the mythic world of the prehistoric is here (a long paper):
http://unbc.academia.edu/GregoryNixon/Papers/245882/_Myth_and_Mind_The_Origin_of_Consciousness_in_the_Discovery_of_the_Sacred_
My paper on how speech made us human and (self) conscious is here (even longer):
http://unbc.academia.edu/GregoryNixon/Papers/245894/_Hollows_of_Experience_
What follows is more germane to Dewart studies (and probably more fun):
My own paper on non-conscious experience, first published on the Karl Jaspers Forum, should be found here. (I’ll leave out the “http://” since that may not be acceptable to a blog):
www3.telus.net/public/doknyx/pubs/panexperientialism.pdf
or here:
unbc.academia.edu/GregoryNixon/Papers/246038/_From_Panexperientialism_to_Conscious_Experience_The_Continuum_of_Experience_
Leslie Dewart’s response to that paper is here:
http://www.kjf.ca/95-C5DEW.htm
My reply to Professor Dewart’s response is here:
http://www.kjf.ca/95-R5DEW.htm
In return, Monsieur Tarver, I wish to express my excitement and appreciation for your starting this blog. I hope Richard Sawa gets aboard too. I am just loving the chance to review my memories of Dewart’s *Evolution and Consciousness* by the two summaries you have posted. I already see that I have elided several detailed steps into one on more than one occasion. Furthermore, I have never been precisely clear what is meant by Dewart’s use of the term absentmindedness (maybe because I am an absentminded professor myself?), so I will take the opportunity to explore what you have to say.
Respects!
Greg Nixon
UNBC
Prince George, BC
http://www3.telus.net/public/doknyx/pubs/panexperientialism.pdf
For my “From Panexperientialism to Conscious Experience”.
I like the turn of phrase “experience-in-waiting”; that is evocative. Shinzen was also recently talking about how poets “see in the dark”. I especially like the collation of examples of non-conscious experiences in your paper. Thank you!
Objectification presupposes without question the differentiation between the experience and the object of experience. Objectification requires consciousness.
One of the major implications of the appearance of speech would be that whatever pre-conscious vocal language our ancestors did have, acquired assertiveness. Moreover, through this speech mechanism, assertiveness found its way into all of the human experiential modalities, and coloured them “conscious” too.
At this point, however, we should distinguish between speech that is “immediate” of reality (“Fire! Food! Danger! Run!), and speech that has turned back on itself over time and enables us to talk about talking, or thematic speech. There are the strictly correlative concepts of pre-thematic and thematic consciousness.
Those cave drawers, tool makers, communal organizers are thematic human beings. Of that I have no doubt. Those people had to have a well developed and identifiable culture sustaining those activities, whatever that culture would have looked like at that time. So too did the herders, hunter gatherers, etc.
What indicators anthropological findings would have to be that would enable us to differentiate between thematic and non-thematic speakers, I am not competent to say. But I speculate that the move from pre-thematic speech to thematic required potentially a great amount of history as humans came to learn how to take advantage of assertiveness. I’m game to go with your million years suggestion.
Geez, if history didn’t take so much time, think how much easier it would all be… :-) ..
Interjections are a good example of “speech that is immediate”, Rick, but I would suggest that a protolanguage (gestural pre-speech & certainly non-thematic) could also be mainly indicative — pointing, gesturing, posturing, *chosen* facial expressions, even using certain sounds to indicate certain objects or activities. I have said elsewhere that such proto-speech could have been mainly nominative, but I see now that calling it nominative probably goes too far, as that implies a subject naming objects, which I doubt proto-speech could do. However, indicating, expostulating, gesturing, communicating know-how, would require some differentiation of the sign from the signified and this would be the fertile gap from which speech later emerged. I agree that thematic speech (in Dewart’s terms) would have had to be present by the time of obvious symbolism, say in the most ancient cave art or sculpting, but I would still agree with Merlin Donald and differentiate the mythic mind (speech only) from technological mind or thematic mind (interesting parallel!), which Donald calls the third stage (after mimetic and mythic) of culture and consciousness that involves writing and the external storage of memory (*Origins of the Modern Mind: Three Stages in the Evolution of Culture and Cognition*). Would a mythic mind be a non-thematic speaker?
Absentmindedness:
“Absent-mindedness is a culturally perpetuated inability to grok the assertive act, a predisposition to be dazzled by the object, a pan-cultural getting-stuck-in-content. Once you know where to look, this becomes obvious everywhere right down to the way we think about what we are doing when we communicate in words and in writing. It leads to staggering ethnocentrism. It leads to a predisposition to violence, confusion, and misery. It leads to the conclusion that life is essentially characterized by suffering, and that human existence is a problem that needs to be solved, transcended somehow. It also leads to science and philosophy as we know it today, the perpetual quest for that elusive solution.” (Tarver)
Helpful indeed, but, again, Dewart seems to avoid anything smacking of imagination or speculation or non-empirical experience. Is the “Hellenism” he abjures? Life *is* suffering, or at least a big part of it, so is joy and the more daily experience of enduring, i.e., the “courage to be”. There was nothing mystical about Leslie Dewart, who was an overwhelmingly brilliant thinker but a very down-to-earth meat-loving hominid, who expected nothing more from life than its daily living. He stuck to the idea that consciousness gives us “reality” in face of all sorts of evidence that much of this reality was in fact projected onto world, as opposed to being derived from it.