Humans seem to have much higher degrees of consciousness and agency than other animals, and this may have emerged from our capacities for language. Helen Keller (who was deaf and blind since infancy, and only started learning language when she was 6) gave an autobiographical account of how she was driven by blind impetuses until she learned the meanings of the words “I” and “me”
This is fascinating, but there’s a bit of a potential confounder in that she was six years old. I’m anecdotally aware of several people who feel they weren’t really conscious before a certain age.
Compare Helen Keller with Ildefonso who was deaf and mute, and didn’t learn language until age 27:
″ But the interesting thing that he said is that he can’t even think that way anymore. (Music.) He said he can’t think the way he used to think and when I pushed him to ask about what it was like to be languageless, the closest he ever came to any kind of an answer was exactly that. I don’t know, I don’t remember. I think differently now. ”—Radiolab episode on words
Hmm, I’m not sure I understand what point you think I was trying to make. The only case I was trying to make here was that much of our subjective experience which may appear uniquely human might stem from our langauge abilites, which seems consistent with Helen Keller undergoing a phase transition in her subjective experience upon learning a single abstract concept. I’m not getting what age has to do with this.
I just want to share another reason I find this n=1 anecdote so interesting—I have a highly speculative inside view that the abstract concept of self provides a cognitive affordance for intertemporal coordination, resulting in a phase transition in agentiness only known to be accessible to humans.
This is fascinating, but there’s a bit of a potential confounder in that she was six years old. I’m anecdotally aware of several people who feel they weren’t really conscious before a certain age.
Compare Helen Keller with Ildefonso who was deaf and mute, and didn’t learn language until age 27:
″ But the interesting thing that he said is that he can’t even think that way anymore. (Music.) He said he can’t think the way he used to think and when I pushed him to ask about what it was like to be languageless, the closest he ever came to any kind of an answer was exactly that. I don’t know, I don’t remember. I think differently now. ”—Radiolab episode on words
Hmm, I’m not sure I understand what point you think I was trying to make. The only case I was trying to make here was that much of our subjective experience which may appear uniquely human might stem from our langauge abilites, which seems consistent with Helen Keller undergoing a phase transition in her subjective experience upon learning a single abstract concept. I’m not getting what age has to do with this.
I just want to share another reason I find this n=1 anecdote so interesting—I have a highly speculative inside view that the abstract concept of self provides a cognitive affordance for intertemporal coordination, resulting in a phase transition in agentiness only known to be accessible to humans.
+1. It feels like this argument is surprisingly prominent in the post given that it’s a n=1 anecdote, with potential confounders as mentioned above.