Consciousness and culture

Two vast topics that are closely related.

The problem with these topics is not just that they're vast, it's that they're vague, but at the same time central, directly or indirectly, to so many other themes. In this way, they underlie a good deal of the confusion and even anxiety that infects attempts to grapple with issues that may seem at first far removed -- as, for example, the encroachment of the machine on the human, or the question of "free will".

An illustration of the confusion involved here is the frequent identification of consciousness as such with human consciousness, mixing in all the complexities of language with the simpler but notoriously "hard" problem of phenomenal experience by itself. A big first step in introducing some kind of clarity to these knotty matters, then, would just to be clear from the start that not all consciousness involves issues of language, or the self -- in particular, the whole matter of what it's "like" to be something (thank you, Thomas Nagel) is larger, and harder, than matters involving self-reflection.

So to make a start at both clarification and simplification, here are some broad assertions:

• First, consciousness is a phenomenon, and like all such is an aspect or part of the natural, physical, material world.
• Second, we commonly attribute this phenomenon, in the sense of non-verbal phenomenal experience, to most animals -- meaning we accept that it likely feels like something to be them -- but we don't attribute it to plants, or rocks, or oceans, etc.
• Third, the development of language, as a means of communicating across such conscious entities, involves a further layer or structure on top of phenomenal experience, but made out of such experience, and this layer too, like everything else in the natural, physical, material world, is an aspect or part of such a world.
• And fourth, the communication that language/speech represents, arising from a structure inherent in individual phenomenal experience, forms the basis of very extensive and complex social formations.

To be a bit more specific, it makes sense to say that consciousness in the basic or primary sense is a neurally-based control structure evolved in complex mobile organisms; and human consciousness in particular is a further development that adds an additional neurally-based structure called language, on the basis of which come all the phenomena called culture.

The important point throughout is that, given that this world is a material or physical world, and is the only world, consciousness, of whatever kind or level, is a) real, b) entirely natural or material, and c) functional. (The last point is less obvious, and will need some expansion, but later.) In general, the nature of the neural structures underlying phenomenal experience and language are of course not known in any detail at this point. But the many conceptual difficulties surrounding the subject arise more from the very nature of how we think of "explanation" as such, than from its real bases. This too, clearly, will need further expansion.