The importance of human language (Animals)

by xeno6696 , Sonoran Desert, Thursday, June 27, 2024, 23:54 (147 days ago) @ xeno6696

I ran out of space, but I wanted to sum up:

The most important part of Jaynes' observations here is when he treats the Iliad as an archaeological record of language and then traces the development of words like psuche which throughout the entire Iliad only carries the meaning of blood or inner organs--so that by the time of Antigone we now have the same word, psuche being used now as descriptions of inner states... that process has a history, and the practical consideration is this: if the language lacks words for describing our dynamic inner states--it's reasonable to conclude that we were incapable of reasoning about those things. You *have* to have the words to be able to effectively reason about it. All known languages exhibit this tendency away from inner thinking the further back in time we go.*

Part of the problem is that we learn words like "psyche" and "consciousness" and then take for granted that these things are relatively new and open up new avenues of exploration that didn't exist prior. We extrapolate our present backwards and assume that ancients "thought like we do" and this is false. Would we still have an inner life? Of course. But without an ability to reason about that inner life, we lose--in my opinion--that bit that makes us fully human.

Jaynes opened me up to some vast arrays of possibilities, and even if I'm not utterly convinced of his main argument, putting a section of ancient texts under the microscope like that has convinced me that language is central to the development of the kinds of rich and varied societies that we have today. Why I downgrade the intellect here is because all of that language was created by that combination of analogy and metaphor--very simple processes. Yes, eventually we reached a point where words could be invented from scratch--John Locke invented "consciousness" because English lacked a word to describe it, so he went to latin and created the word using the roots "con" (together) and "scio" (to know). I state this only to suggest that our natural instinct is always to create from what is already there.

*A criticism I myself have about this language theory of consciousness is that written records began as a way to record inventories and transactions, and because societies at that time had rich oral traditions, its entirely plausible that these ancients just didn't think to use writing to record things like inner emotional states. However, for me this is overshadowed by the simple fact that particular words we use to discuss inner states patently did not exist and that they are themselves historically contingent.

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\"Why is it, Master, that ascetics fight with ascetics?\"

\"It is, brahmin, because of attachment to views, adherence to views, fixation on views, addiction to views, obsession with views, holding firmly to views that ascetics fight with ascetics.\"