The Loneliest Animal

Once upon a time, there lived a band of ordinary people. They moved from place to place, gathering and hunting to feed themselves. They lived and loved and raised their children, teaching them as well as they could about how to survive in a difficult world. And their children laughed and played and learned from watching the adults. They felt love, fear, hatred, joy, sorrow, and pain, just like us. They experienced the world using senses identical to ours. Their brains were just as capable of learning and reasoning about the world as ours. They imagined and dreamed. But they had no words to express any of this, because they lived before language was invented.

               Who were these smart-but-silent people? Fossil evidence points to the existence of modern humans 200,000 years ago, but the oldest example of “behavioral modernity” appear to date to around 70,000 years ago. Behavioral modernity means that the people who lived then were taking part in activities that we think of as uniquely human. Some examples of such activities that leave a clear trace in the debris and artifacts of the time are complex toolmaking, burial of the dead, and art representing human and animal figures. What’s strange about this is that there is a gap of 130,000 years, during which humans who were biologically no different from us lived lives that were largely indistinguishable from the lives of our earlier ancestors.

It’s inconceivable that people would simply exist without trying anything new for 130,000 years, unless we’re missing some key difference between those early modern humans and ourselves. If there’s no biological difference, then there must be some technological innovation that suddenly unlocked our creativity. But what technology could be transformative enough to make such a huge difference in humans’ ability to create tools, religion, and culture?

I propose that none of these modern behaviors were possible without language, which would mean that for 130,000 years, modern humans went through their entire lives unable to communicate any of their thoughts to each other, but with the same desire to be understood as we have.[1] A human living in this silent era would have had the most complex brain ever yet seen on Earth, with the complexity of feeling and emotion that we see in our own friends, but with no way of expressing these feelings to any other being. Such a human would have been the loneliest animal ever to have lived.

               In order to understand what it means to live without language, consider how language functions in our daily lives. Without language, we wouldn’t be reading or writing. We wouldn’t be speaking to each other. Without language, there is no way for people to share their feelings and impressions and thoughts, no way to connect to another person on the intellectual level. Without language, no activity that involves using words as an abstraction for the universe is possible.  This means that formal logic is impossible. Arithmetic is impossible. Philosophy is impossible.

Without language, even thinking is impossible.

Isn’t it? 

Our inner voice, the thing we use when we “think”, would be impossible without a language to form its sentences. But not every task that requires our human intelligence makes use of the inner voice. For example, when I’m driving, my mind is building theories of the position and velocity of other vehicles, evaluating the opportunities and benefits of switching to a different lane, noticing debris in the road, and even appreciating the beauty of the morning sky, all without involving the inner voice to narrate these facts. In fact, it’s quite easy to think of entirely different subjects during the course of a long drive.

Similarly, any physical action clearly involves the planning and direction of the mind, but the inner voice is not involved. This is good news for our language-less ancestors, since waiting for language to be invented would not be a successful evolutionary strategy for a species that needs to eat, mate, and escape predators.

Any sensory experience is nonverbal first, and only occasionally enters your inner voice’s narration. So for example, when your alarm clock goes off in the morning, your mind doesn’t have to formulate the words “alarm clock”, in order for your body to react to the alarm, hit the snooze button, and go back to sleep. Or when you drink a cup of coffee while reading, you can enjoy and appreciate the taste and aroma of the coffee without your inner voice being sidetracked from narrating the words that you see on the page, and you can enjoy coffee without ever thinking the words “taste” or “aroma”.

Nonverbal experiences and thoughts are the norm for our lives. Only rarely do we focus on anything intensely enough for that thing to enter into our narrated stream-of-consciousness. Mostly, our inner voice is so busy with other tasks (such as playing commercial jingles that we last heard in childhood, or replaying old conversations to formulate what we should have said) that waiting for it to catch up with our activities would force us to live life at a crawl.

The disconnect between our experiential consciousness and our inner voice has a number of components, but the one is especially interesting is the fact that we are only able to formulate a tiny fraction of our experience into words. Quick: describe the taste of a persimmon to someone who has never had one before, or the smell of a rose, or the feeling of falling in love. But the words are only the narration and organization of the ideas. The ideas themselves are beneath, behind them, not in words, but something that can’t be put into words.

Another way of looking at the question of the function of the inner voice is suggested by the idea of “qualia”. The concept of qualia is that there are certain aspects of human experience that can never be communicated in words (they are “ineffable”), but which exist in consciousness. In philosophy of mind, the existence of qualia is controversial, with some philosophers arguing against the very existence of qualia, while others use qualia as support for a variety of philosophic stances.

However, if we begin with the idea that language is a human construct, and that consciousness arose before language was invented, and that consciousness is a prerequisite to being able to invent language in the first place, then the existence of qualia is completely understandable and expected. Before there was language, all experience was ineffable (since we had no words to communicate with), and therefore “qualia” would simply refer to “experience”. As we have developed language, we have learned how to communicate some fairly complex experiences, but our ability to describe our impressions with words can never begin to approach the immersive multisensory experience of the world as we perceive it.

Language is the first invention of humans to allow us to communicate our thoughts to each other, to touch the minds of others, and our languages have filled this role of communication medium fairly well. The ability to use language is a skill. It is not a skill that we are born with. Rather, it is a skill that we learn from our parents, our siblings, and the people we live with.

So how was language invented?

First, it's possible that some early human thinker, in a burst of genius that leaves Newton in the dust, came up with the idea on her own. Calling this “genius” is a reflection of the fact that language is a development that people were equipped to make for tens to hundreds of thousands of years, but it took all that time for someone to actually achieve. Humans had already had the intelligence needed to learn language—what was missing was the breakthrough of inventing a language to learn. Once the breakthrough was made, the idea of language spread to all humans who encountered it. It's akin to Newton's invention of calculus as a new mathematical language, where the invention was a work of genius, but any high school student can learn what Newton invented.

But the invention of language is a strange and unique occurrence, because it's not enough to simply to design and implement the idea. Inventing language is only really "done" if you can also teach it to someone else, and use the language to communicate with them, and they teach it to someone else, and so on. And keep in mind that “language” at this point was only spoken language, which means that only an invention of language that also included passing on the invention by directly and personally teaching others could possibly lead to the spread of language. This requirement, in my view, seems to point to a single inventor of language, maybe a mother who taught her invention to her young children, since children are the fastest learners of many new skills, particularly languages.

Language could also have evolved within a single social group over a long period of time, starting just as a collection of signals or words with no connections between them, slowly adding complexity and subtlety until it turns into something that can refer to itself, something that can loop back to become not just about particular concrete objects, but about the speaker's feelings and sensations and desires and needs and experiences and knowledge, and even about the words of others. Such an evolutionary view of language provides another possible pathway between the silent people discussed at the start of this essay and the rich history of art and language that sprang up after them.

               What’s the point of all this?

               First, consciousness does not require language. Conscious, social, learning, perceiving humans lived long before language was invented, and most of the events and perceptions of our daily lives are experienced without our crafting words to describe them. This means that research into consciousness that uses language as its starting point is looking in the wrong place, like trying to understand petroleum chemistry by examining automobiles.

               Second, qualia are not evidence for a separate plane of existence. Rather, they are evidence that language alone is not sufficient to communicate the fullness of human experience. Language is the first way that we’ve invented for communicating ideas between minds. We may be able to invent better ways to communicate, ways in which it is easy to express things that are inexpressible today, but currently our most effective way to touch another person’s mind is by putting together words into speech or writing.

               Finally, by understanding that language is a medium of communication between conscious minds, we can approach the problem of understanding consciousness without the confusion of attempting to also explain the tools invented by consciousness. Language is one such tool, as are logic, geometry, and mathematics. These tools are useful in the mind’s attempts to understand and be understood by other minds. However, these tools are not the mind itself, so representing the mind as a collection of logical states is also looking at the wrong level.

               Unlike those lonely humans who lived before language, modern humans are sometimes able to overcome the isolation described earlier. We can bring our minds into contact with each other through the mechanism of language, connecting with each other to express our thoughts, to teach our experiences, and to share our knowledge of the world.

12 February 2017

(Originally published on docs.com by me.)

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[1] Not to mention our Homo erectus ancestors, who lived for almost two million years without language, and with almost the same brains and senses as ours.