[kelseyfrog]

Tend to agree. Consciousness is a social fact evidenced by it's plurality of grounding, single cultural origin, and memetic propagation. The idea itself is barely 500 years old. If it is a fundamental aspect of the human experience, why wouldn't it have origins stretching back to prehistory?

[simonh]

We have cultural artefacts of people reporting first person experiences going back as long as we have writing, and longer from oral traditions. These are in the form of narratives, poetry, songs, etc. What is the story of Narcissus about if not the immediate visceral stimulation of visual experience?

We can also infer it. I find it hard to see why cultures would produce representative art if they had no experience of seeing it. In a world without first person experience it’s hard for me to imagine what function representational art would have.

[kelseyfrog]

At the same time, we have philologists who agree that Descartes was the first to use "conscientia" in a way that doesn't match the historical use of conscientia and instead matches our use of the word "consciousness" and John Locke was the first to use of the word "consciousness" in the same way we use it today.

Additionally we can point to Jaynes' The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind as a theory that doesn't assume a historical consciousness (or at least in the same what).

Who's right then?

[simonh]

So it seems like the argument is that consciousness didn’t exist because we didn’t have a word for it and the guy wrote a book and built a career with that as a premise.

Honestly, can I even be bothered? Oh, alright then, just for fun.

Yes I know I simplify above, but honestly not by all that much. There’s a history of the development of styles of literature. Sure. But that doesn’t mean the world, or people, changed because ways of describing or creating narratives about them changed.

At the root of this seems to be the idea that we can’t have a thing such a consciousness without the idea of the thing, and other examples given in evidence are baseball and money. This is flat out wrong.

Nobody sits down with a blank piece of paper and invents a new ball game from scratch. All the ball games we have were developed by playing with balls. You just have done this. A bunch of kids get together and start messing with a ball, they appropriate objects in their environment into the game such as sticks and posts and such, make up rules as they go. Over time things happen in the game they didn’t expect and they invent new rules to cover those circumstances. Eventually they have a great game they love, they give it a name and then free inventing the game they write down the rules.

It’s the same with money, it started off as tokens representing goods, then they established the lowest value object as the basic rate of exchange such as a chicken or a bag of grain, then they work out exchange rates between different tokens such as 5 chickens equals one sheep, then they mark the tokens with symbols, etc, etc. Eventually you get money. Nobody looked at a market and deduced you know what, we need to invent money. The concept emerges from the practice.

My wife has Aphantasia, which means she doesn’t subvocalise. She doesn’t hear an inner voice when she reads, and can’t imagine what that’s like. She also cannot imagine visual images, yet she reports the same first person experience the rest of us have. So the idea that language creates consciousness seems to fail right there. We also have reports from people that don’t learn language until late in childhood of first person conscious experience from before they learned language.

So I’m sorry, it’s bunk. There never was any actual evidence for it, the chain of reasoning inserts conclusions that don’t follow from its arguments, and there’s clear evidence that contradicts its assumptions.

[kelseyfrog]

There's also things that don't exist until people have words for them, where the very act of speaking it brings about its existence. It seems equally likely that consciousness wouldn't have been self-evident without someone being primed to perceive it as a category.

[simonh]

Can you give an example?

Not being self-evident isn't at all the same thing as not existing. They're not even in the same category.