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Comment by stillpointlab | Hacker News Reader

Right, but the question is what came first, minds or language? That is, is language a product of mind or is mind a product of language? Of course another position is that they co-arise and the question of order is ill-formed.

But these ideas have to be placed with respect to the modern and typical materialist/physicalist view of reality. If we trace back time, there was a time before our solar system existed, before our Earth existed, before any kind of physical lifeform existing on the Earth's surface that we could associate with a mind. And we might be tempted in this view to draw a line or identify a point in time where we say "before" and "after". We might say "before this point no minds of any kind existed" and "before this point no language of any kind existed". And if we are to do so then we can talk about how those two points relate to each other.

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How does one consistently define "language" and "mind"? I present the following in genuine good faith:

A good case study may be the octopus. They are highly intelligent organisms and a strong argument could be made they have "mind". A quick search [0] shows some evidence they communicate via "posturing and changing color"--is this language? How does one prove an individual has mind?

Regarding the definition of "mind" the mirror test seems very relevant but does "mind exist without the sense of self"? What about emergent phenomena amongst highly social animal groupings...?

Edit: I must be in the "mind" came first camp but in this case mind === consciousness but mind != consciousness

[0] https://www.livescience.com/53514-octopuses-lead-social-live...

As I mentioned in my earlier post, what I mean is closer to semiotics [1], precisely because "language" is too fuzzy a concept and leads to the wrong conclusion. In that view, communication using posturing and changing color is obviously signalling.

As for minds vs. consciousness, etc. we'll just end up in a language game there which isn't productive. Personally, I am more interested in a more abstract conception of "attention" which I see as preceding "awareness" (which may or may not precede self-awareness). But again, how people use these words in different circumstances makes any discussion of the topics nearly impossible unless they are rigorously defined so as to avoid confusion.

But in a "food for thought" kind of diversion, not an argument or even really a point, consider you are walking through a forest and you see some berries and your mouth starts to water. There is some relationship between your attention, your awareness and some kind of information being communicated between nature and you. The berry is signalling something to you and your attention is drawn to it.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiotics

I've been slowly getting through the entirety of the original article but it's written out well:

> What I mean here is that art did not serve to express a humanity that already existed. Rather, it acted as the mirror we needed to catch sight of our own image in the flux of nature. The question of when humans invented art leads us to imagine early humans much like ourselves, deciding one day to express themselves through symbols and figures. The assumption hidden in the question is that they already had minds like ours and simply chose, out of all the things they might have done on a frigid day in the Ice Age, to pick up ochre and make animal pictures. But the evidence, it seems to me, points the other way: it was the practice of making images, repeated over hundreds of generations, that occasioned the emergence of those minds we take for granted. We are putting the cart before the horse when we understand ourselves as the source of sense and meaning. In reality, we are participants in something that exceeds us, and the aesthetic, poetic dimension of great art reconnects us with that excess as a matter of course.

It's interesting to think about iterating over "drawing pictures of animals" before starting to "draw pictures of humans"

Yes, that is close to what I was gesturing at with the walk in the woods and the berries. Before humans had a word for berries or hunger we had a latent relationship with nature, in the ability for nature to draw our attention to objects and effect our nervous system. And the first expression of that relationship may well have been externalized in the pictorial representation of animals, or maybe in gestures, or grunts - we can't know it was too long ago.

A larger point that could be drawn from the article is that we then gained a new kind of relationship, not just with nature but with the very expressions it elicited. Instead of our mouth watering at berries, suddenly our nervous system was reacting to the art we created. It is this indirect relationship, with the symbol itself, that the author is arguing created what we think of as the human mind. So nature creates the grounds for expression creates the grounds for minds. My original point was that "drawing animals" is only one kind of possible expression, and it is possible to broaden our idea of "expressions worth contemplating" well beyond paintings on cave walls, all the way down to how a flower attracts the attention of a bee.

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