The Linguistic Roots of Consciousness

So far no satisfactory solution to the so-called ‘hard’ problem of consciousness has been brought to light.  This paper offers an explanation of the emergence of consciousness as being rooted in the internal systems of meaning-sound relations that underlie all natural (i.e. human) languages.  

Prior to the 1950s languages were regarded almost exclusively as external objects to be described and categorized by their external output.  Noam Chomsky, along with several other graduate students at Harvard in the 1950s, shattered this univalent paradigm with the recognition that languages must also, as a biological imperative, comprise a software program capable of determining the relationship of sound to meaning in linguistic utterances. This insight created two very different concepts of language: one based on the externalized forms of a language, with its outward pattern of sounds, words, and grammatical structure; and another system, or matrix of meaning-sound relations, internal to the mind/brain.

Despite significant interdisciplinary research in the last twenty years, cognitive science has failed to recognize the crucial role this inner dimension of languages plays in the emergence of consciousness.  As a result languages have often been ruled out as a plausible seat of consciousness.  However, this perspective betrays a flawed understanding of the true nature of languages, one that harks back to the model that sees them as external objects. It takes a paradigm shift to integrate the inner dimension of meaning into the overall gestalt of what a language is, and to recognize how the internal meaning system underlying a language is able to give rise to the phenomenon of consciousness. 

My investigation of the matrix of meaning-sound relations in the English language reveals it is the architecture of this inner domain that separates the experiential reality of an individual into two streams or channels — namely, self (the ‘inner eye’ or ‘I’) and ‘Other’.  As Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Carl Jung observed in his book Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self, first published in 1951, this separation and resulting relation between the differentiated channels is the sine qua non of consciousness.  According to Jung: “Union of opposites is equivalent to unconsciousness, so far as human logic goes, for consciousness presupposes a differentiation into subject and object and a relation between them.  Where there is no ‘other’, or it does not yet exist, all possibility of consciousness ceases.”(1)

In this paper I discuss the architecture of the inner dimension of meaning in English and, by extension, of other languages too.  I highlight in particular the discovery of ‘polarity of meaning’ as the dominant characteristic building block of this inner domain.  This is the aspect of the internal architecture of languages that serves to differentiate the realm of ‘Other’ into distinct categories, and ultimately gives rise to consciousness by separating out our internal subjective experience from what is perceived to be the objective reality of the mind-external world.  It is also what sets Homo sapiens apart from the rest of the animal kingdom.

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(1)  Princeton University Press, 2nd Edition, at p. 193.