Consciousness and Language

 The Origin of Language

The whole essence of the human being, including his consciousness, is communicative by nature.1] People are constantly exposed to communication, and particularly language. They are eager to say something to each other, to learn or teach, to show or prove, to agree or argue, to ask or command, to console or show affection, and so on. Communication arose and developed with the rise of man and the formation of society, but why are human beings the only creatures with such advanced communication tools? The answer remains a mystery, but it is most likely a combination of necessity and luck. As humans evolved to be more intelligent, conscious and communicative creatures, there was a rising need for more advanced communicative capabilities. Symbolic language and the limited amount of sounds humans could produce were simply not efficient enough to develop further socially and intellectually. In her book The Seeds of Speech, Jean Aitchison says that the development of the human voice box was simply the result of a chain of random events, spread out over a long period of time, and therefore luck played a large role in developing our voices.[2]   

The main advantage of language is that it allows us to share our experiences with each other. A dog builds up its knowledge of the world from scratch, without help, and learns primarily from its own experience. Humans can learn from each other, gather knowledge and pass it on from one generation to another. This new ability has expanded our consciousness in several ways. Our experience of space expanded as we learnt of events beyond our immediate environment, and our experience of time expanded as we learnt of events that had happened in the past, before our own lives.

The Development of Thought

Language also allowed us to communicate with ourselves, inside our own minds. Because of language, we became much more capable of thinking in different ways. Using language, we could identify everything around and inside us, think logically, and understand things much more easily. This has probably been the most significant of developments that came from language. Thinking allows us to conjure up associations to past experiences. When we think of the word “cloud”, images of clouds immediately come to mind. When we think of a person’s name, their appearance may come to mind, or we might remember past experiences with that person. Of course, other animals, for we are animals, might recognize and remember things from the past, but their associations are determined by their immediate environment.[3] They can’t deliberately bring memories back to mind, regardless of what is happening in the present, the way that humans can. Thinking also allows us to think about the future. We can think about what may or may not happen, we can plan for the future, and we can think about what we want in life. It may sound bizarre, but without language we would have a far smaller influence over our own lives.

 Self-consciousness is also a result of thought. We are capable of understanding our lives, and we are capable of understanding ourselves, because of thought. We are aware not only of the many aspects of consciousness, but also of the faculty of consciousness. We are conscious of the fact that we are conscious.[4]

The Downside of Language

Language does, however, bring a disadvantage to consciousness. Obviously, without language, the world today would be completely different; in fact, human society and culture would probably never have arisen. And of course, thinking is an essential part to human life, and is extremely useful for analysing a situation, focusing our attention, making plans, and many other things. Yet the rest of our thinking is practically superfluous.[5] If I am paying attention to the voice in my head, I don’t notice what is happening around me. I am not using my senses to take in my environment, and I don’t notice how my body feels. I am really only half-conscious.[6] Therefore, we shouldn’t think in words all the time, just because we can. Many religions and spiritual teaching, such as Buddhism, have realized this. In Buddhism, students learn to meditate and experience the world without using language to name things, or put them into categories.[7] They are trained so that when they see a rose, they will see it as it is, without thinking about the words “rose”, “flower”, “red”, or “pretty”. They see it with their minds in their natural states, before language became a part of our consciousness.

Did you know:

According to Ethnologue, there are currently 6'909 distinct languages in the world, and that number is still growing despite the fact that increasingly more languages are becoming extinct. That is to say, the number of languages is actually declining, but our estimates are still increasing because we are still discovering more languages in remote parts of the world.