A general theory of consciousness II: The language problem

ABSTRACT

It is generally assumed that what we hear in our head is what we think and that, when we tell a thought to somebody else, the other person understands what our thought has been. This paper analyzes how we think and what happens when we communicate our thoughts verbally to others and to ourselves. The assumption that we become conscious in language is erroneous: verbal communication is only an intermediary. The conscious experience of verbal communication is a sensory phenomenon. We think through sensory images (see Part I). This natural way of thinking, is a very refined and accurate method of translating thought into consciousness. It expresses our essentially unconscious neural cognitive activity in conscious sensory images: visual thinkers ‘see’ what they have thought. Why humans use verbal communication to express their thoughts to themselves is difficult to understand as the verbal way is extremely limited. The complex parallel cognitive activity has to be encoded into language tokens which are positioned sequentially as a string of symbols which somehow must express something comparable. Talking to oneself is directed to an imaginary person who is assumed to be the talking person himself. This imaginary person develops with the inner voice in infants and when the child grows up, that imaginary person remains there, somebody he talks to when he thinks and to which he attributes his feelings and his actions. The imaginary person is experienced as the human Self, but actually verbalizes the thoughts of the natural – animal – Self.

KEYWORDS:

• Language
• consciousness
• cognition
• adaptation
• sensory
• sensory images
• inner speech
• private speech
• the self
• visual thinking
• verbal communication

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Ivette Jans for her critical support and valuable suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

a Visual thinkers use visual language to express their thoughts. However, the term visual language is often also used to indicate a translation of verbal language into visual symbols (like the use of emoji). This is an unfortunate situation as the use of visual symbols in a text is not related to the way visual thinkers become conscious of their thoughts. Horn (2001) [37]. proposed denominating the verbal use of visual symbols as visual-verbal language”.

b Of course, not only do words in language evoke sensory images, the combination of words, like sentences, does that too, but I will not go into this subject as it is not essential for the theory developed here.

c Because sensory-based processes are significantly faster than verbal processes, sensory consciousness will appear with a much shorter delay than the 200 milliseconds usually associated with verbal consciousness.

d That using spoken language requires complex neural processes is not because it provides a complex outcome, but because the transformation of cognitive activity into reasonably usable verbal communication is such a difficult and complex process.

e Einstein is an exceptionally good example of a visual, or rather, sensory thinker, as his intelligence is beyond doubt while his way of thinking and his sometimes laborious use of verbal communication is well documented [38–41]. I will therefore refer to him regularly in this paper.

f A theoretical non-ambiguous language cannot exist for the following reason. Even if a different word were to be assigned to every meaning of any word, for instance by numbering them (meaning1, meaning2 etc.), the definition of these exact meanings would require the use of ambiguous language. Creating a dictionary with the correct text in non-ambiguous language would involve an almost infinite circular process.