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Comment by bumby | Hacker News Reader

What would the implications be for our understanding of consciousness in other species of this hypothesis was true?

The theory states that our consciousness is a linguistic phenomenon, produced by culturally given ideas like the metaphorical I. Maybe other mental configurations could give rise to consciousness but if an animal was to possess the type of consciousness described in this book, it would need the ability to symbolically represent pretty much everything and the ability to share those symbolic representations with others.

Sounds ridiculous that our pre-linguistic ancestors would not have conscious experiences of colors, sounds, dreams, etc just because they couldn't put them into symbolic form. Seems like a case of putting the cart before the horse. Language is relatively recent. The parts of the brain correlated with consciousness are older.

Yeah the theory seems to only explain interiority of our consciousness. But if I recall the author does seem to cover critiques like this in the first chapter where he explains what he sees as erroneous ideas about what consciousness is.

He give the example of automatized actions and the lack of conscious recognition of what would normally be experiences with conscious perceptions. For example driving, you often do not consciously feel the petals, or see a lot of the road you are obviously responding too.

I definitely do not buy the theory totally explains consciousness but the book makes a convincing enough case to not dismiss.

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