I guess you're not going to watch the video that I posted the link for that shows that contradicts your previous post, and pretty much everything else you've said, but that's your problem, not mine. — Harry Hindu

It's very difficult having any sort of a meaningful discussion with you when you keep oscillating back and fort between the stances that your thesis does and doesn't contradict your interlocutor's thesis. So, whenever I or @apocrisis purportedly contradict something that you said, you reply that you never denied what it is that we are claiming, and that it always had been your own position all along. So, according to you, we ought to be in full agreement. And then, almost in the same breath, you proceed to claim that what your interlocutor argued for is false and that it had been refuted by the arguments and evidence that you already have presented. Which is it? Do you agree with what we are saying or do you take yourself to have refuted it? You can't have it both ways.

(Maybe if you would make a little more effort disentangling what it is that you are agreeing with from what it is that you are purportedly disagreeing with you would find that part of the confusion stems from some equivocations relating to the insufficiently analysed concept of personal identity.)

I've shown that language ain't "just a tool" as you claim. If we are looking for something that explains the mental chasm between social animal and encultured human, then language accounts for that. — apokrisis

Sure. I've never denied any of that. What I have denied is that you become self-aware, or conscious, after leraning language. That is what OP was asking.

Yeah. After he learnt language. So proves my point. — apokrisis

No, it proves that he can refer to his self in the past, before language, because his self existed prior to his learning language.

It's very difficult having any sort of a meaningful discussion with you when you keep oscillating back and fort between the stances that your thesis does and doesn't contradict your interlocutor's thesis — Pierre-Normand

No. It is impossible to have a meaningful conversation when I keep refering to avideo that you and Apo refuse to watch. You are ignoring the previous post to you where I askex you a question that you refuse to answer. That is what makes it impossible to have a meaningful conversation with you.

No. It is impossible to have a meaningful conversation when I keep refering to avideo that you and Apo refuse to watch. — Harry Hindu

I watched the whole video before posting my first comment in this thread, thanked you for the reference, and commented on it. I even transcribed a bit from the video in my first paragraph. I also acquired Susan Shaller's book A Man Without Words (2nd ed. University of California Press, 2012), which provides a much fuller account than the short documentary, and read about one third, so far. I also read the useful critical comments on Wikipedia (The talk page also is worth looking at). Apo also referenced a blog article discussing Ildefonso's case.

What I have denied is that you become self-aware, or conscious, after leraning language. — Harry Hindu

So are you saying animals aren’t conscious then? You can’t have it both ways.

No, it proves that he can refer to his self in the past, — Harry Hindu

But it is his post linguistic past which he refers to in that video segment. And I’ve already cited the telling way he describes his pre linguistic past.

I watched the whole video before posting my first comment in this thread, thanked you for the reference, and commented on it. I even transcribed a bit from the video in my first paragraph. I also acquired Susan Shaller's book A Man Without Words (2nd ed. University of California Press, 2012), which provides a much fuller account than the short documentary, and read about one third, so far. I also read the useful critical comments on Wikipedia (The talk page also is worth looking at). Apo also referenced a blog article discussing Ildefonso's case. — Pierre-Normand

Yet you can't even respond to a whole post or answer questions posed to you in posts.

So are you saying animals aren’t conscious then? You can’t have it both ways. — apokrisis

No. Didn't I say animals were conscious and that self-awareness comes in degrees that is the result of brain structure? For you, consciousness is either on or off and language is the switch.

But it is his post linguistic past which he refers to in that video segment. And I’ve already cited the telling way he describes his pre linguistic past. — apokrisis

He describes his pre-linguistic past as him being stupid. I already went over this. You can create a narrative when you realize that you have some idea that others don't (you realize that you are separate) AND you have a symbol system to relay that idea (language, hand gestures and facial expressions, etc.). Language is just a more complex form of symbol system.

He describes his pre-linguistic past as him being stupid. — Harry Hindu

So your own cite says the difference was like night and day. And yet you want to shrug your shoulders and say there's no big deal. Language is just a more complex form of symbol system.

Yet you can't even respond to a whole post or answer questions posed to you in posts. — Harry Hindu

It isn't bad practice to request clarifications before proceeding to respond "to a whole post", especially when your interlocutor seems to be contradicting himself or to be equivocating between two senses of a word. In any case, back to your question...

Again, if you go back and re-read my previous post, you will see that I made the argument that learning a language is just another experience we have that changes us. Every time we acquire knowledge of some sort it changes us (our selves), and if we have a complex system of communication then we can create new words to refer to those new things, just like how languages have evolved to reflect our new knowledge. Think about the change humanity went through in how it viewed itself when we realized the Earth wasn't the center of the universe and that we weren't separate from animals.

Let me ask you PN, what is the thing that was there that changed? — Harry Hindu

This is actually a quite difficult question. The answer varies somewhat accordingly whether we are looking at language acquisition on an ontogenetic or a phylogenetic time scale. When a young child (or someone like Ildefonso or Helen Keller) learns language, this process changes him/her. But when homo sapiens became a talking animal, it also changed what kind of an animal homo sapiens had become in a radical way, which @apokrisis described in general terms. It made homo sapiens into a different sort of social animal that henceforth could develop and pass on a symbolically mediated culture. This culture isn't merely a possession but also a way of being; and the inhabiting of a symbolically mediated culture is a very specific way of being. I think your question focuses primarily on "the thing that was there" prior to language learning on the ontogenetic time scale, in the case of a single individual. But the answer to this question must also look up to the change that occurred on the phylogenetic time scale since this later change has made homo sapiens into an animal that is, by its (new) nature, an essentially encultured animal.

Hence, a human child normally is an apprentice whose maturation process is deeply embedded into a scaffolding dynamics of connivance in its interactions with mature adults (and with elements of the preexisting surrounding material culture). Connivance here refers to the process, well illustrated by Ildefonso's initial attitude to his teacher, driven by a willingness to conform to social norms without prior understanding of their significance or justification. This understanding comes later, in the normal case. But in the case where a child is deprived from the opportunity to learn a symbolic language, the process of acculturation can nevertheless proceed albeit in a way that makes the individual more dependent on the ambient cultural scaffolding. Hence, Ildefonso, for instance, was very conformist and unable to autonomously endorse or question social norms. He could reason practically about the world since he had mastered varieties of means/ends connections but his modes of practical reasoning weren't articulated with modes of theoretical reasoning, as is the case with a language user, since theoretical reasoning requires abstraction and abstraction requires (or, at least, normally is grounded in) symbolic representation.

So, what it is that was "already there" prior to the formation of a self (and self-consciousness) that is specifically shaped by the acquisition of linguistic abilities (and of part of the symbolic cultural stock thereby mediated)? Well, the child, the animal, was already there. In the case of a modern human being, it's an immature child that was already there. The pre-linguistic child has an immature self that isn't very much different, in some respects, from the self of a mature chimp or gorilla. However, in other respects, as the case of (pre-linguistic and pre-tamed) Helen Keller illustrates, and the case of (pre-linguistic albeit tamed) Ildefonso illustrates to an even higher degree, the human child is quite different from non-human apes. This can be accounted for by the early effects of the scaffolding dynamics that serves as a necessary prelude to language acquisition.

The human child is first taught to conform to social norms and hence to distinguish the proper from the improper way to do things, and varieties of ways to successfully achieve varieties of ends. Soon thereafter, though, her abilities for practical reasoning outruns the merely conventional forms of behavior that she can emulate since she can reason autonomously about their propriety. In the case of the languageless Ildefonso, his socially scaffolded abilities for practical reasoning outgrew those of a normal pre-linguistic child but lagged behind those of normal children whose abilities develop explosively when practical reasoning and theoretical reasoning come to enrich each other through the mediation of abstract concepts.

the case of (pre-linguistic and pre-tamed) Helen Keller... — Pierre-Normand

I'd mention that Keller didn't lose her hearing and sight until she was two. So she started off with a normal development.

She also had a family language of sorts - some 60 signs. Shakes of the head meant yes or no, pushes and pulls meant go and come. Her father was mimed as putting on a pair of glasses, her mother by tying up hair. Ice cream was a shiver.

So the drama of her finger-spelling "awakening" was overplayed.

This culture isn't merely a possession but also a way of being; and the inhabiting of a symbolically mediated culture is a very specific way of being. — Pierre-Normand

A great way of putting it.

So the drama of her finger-spelling "awakening" was overplayed. — apokrisis

Good points. So, she may have been rather more like Ildefonso (and less like Victor, the feral child) than habitually portrayed. But she may also have regressed quite a bit, socially, when she lost sight, and hence, by the time when she picked-up language learning again, regained something that had very much etiolated. The Piraha Amazonian tribe borrow many words from their Brazilian neighbors but nothing of the grammar. Since the difference between symbolic and pictoral representation is mainly a matter of logical grammar, I am thinking that Keller may have been very much like Ildefonso and his fellow languageless companions (described in Susan Shaller's book) in using signs pictorally rather than symbolically. Ildefonso and his companions had an extensive gestural "vocabulary" that was completely devoid of proper names or abstract names. The gestures were rather highly variable and idiolectical means of conveying narratives with immediate practical significance, very high contextual dependence, and a minimal degree of abstraction.

So, she may have been rather more like Ildefonso (and less like Victor, the feral child) than habitually portrayed. — Pierre-Normand

The whole feral child literature is a minefield of romanticisation. The writer, Maxim Gorky, described meeting Keller in less glowing terms: "[She] made an unpleasant, even grim, impression on me. She appeared to be an affected, very temperamental and extremely spoilt girl. She talked about God and how God disapproved of revolution. In general, she reminded me of those blessed and holy nuns and 'pilgrim women' whom I have seen in our villages and convents."

This is an issue I studied pretty closely as the evolution of the human mind was my original interest. In practice, there is no clean separation between the biological and sociocultural stories.

No ape can learn proper fluid grammatical speech. They can only get as far as mastering several hundred signs. So their linguistic skills, even when brought up by humans, only reaches the indexical level of semiosis, not the properly syntactic. That means humans do have neurobiological adaptations that underwrite grammatical fluidity.

On the other hand, those evolutionary changes would have to be minor in structural terms. They would mostly concern a reorganised vocal tract - one, that like the human hand is designed for precision manipulation, is pre-adapted to syntactically-organised articulation. And then an expansion of the cortical pre-motor areas that would add the "top-downness" to fluidly control complex grammatical speech acts. Vocalisation in apes is centred instead on the "emotional" part of the cortex - the cingulate. That is the part of our brains that still shouts shit and fuck in fairly simple and inarticulate fashion.

Then feral children stories are confounded by the fact that brains in humans also have a prolonged sensitive period for getting familiar with the regularities of speech. It takes about seven years for those parts of their brains to myelinate. So a lack of exposure to speech during infancy becomes a permanent handicap. This is why feral children fail to learn speech when taken back into civilisation and the conclusion was that they were autistic. Which could also have been true.

So when it comes to a scientific answer, nature doesn't offer an easy clean-cut experiment. You can't have a simple before an after where you can demonstrate the impact of a chimp learning syntax, or even a naive human infant learning syntax at a later age, after the brain has lost most of the necesssary plasticity.

This creates a fertile ground for people to project their wishful thinking on.

However, the story became very clean-cut for me once the question is framed in terms of biosemiotics. The similarities between genes, neurons and words as syntactical codes, grammars of regulation, just leap out.

Having said that, there are some real puzzles about exactly how quickly Homo moved from being pre-linguistic to fully linguistic. It is striking that fire was being used 800,000 years ago. Likewise spears 400,000 years ago. And Australian aborigines showed boats of some kind were being used to island hop maybe 80,000 years ago. Yet fully symbolic culture only shows around 40,000 years ago. It remains a really interesting question how to map the evolution of completely modern speech to that reasonably lengthy cultural curve.

In short, the pace of change is too fast to be a matter of biological evolution, and also too slow from the sociocultural point of view.

Of course, climate and lifestyle may play a big part in nudging progress along. But we can speculate about a more indexical protolinguistic stage to bridge the gap. The early grammars may have had to luck into their modern simple subject-verb-object logical format. The final step could have been a stumble into that last abstracting, and indeed reductionist, linguistic habit.

Language is not used in babies nice have never taught of that almost the same when kids barely
know any words so they just point to the thing and just say a sound to signify what they want It is
probably when it is the language when it is much more structured that brings a whole different
meaning too it Bringing the autistic problem it is probably that they dont want any interaction with

people because they are seen as different Maybe they perceive the world a different view which
brings a few philosophical points that should be seen as

So your own cite says the difference was like night and day. And yet you want to shrug your shoulders and say there's no big deal. Language is just a more complex form of symbol system. — apokrisis

When did I ever shrug my shoulders and say "there's no big deal"? Now you're just putting words in my mouth, creating a straw-man where there is none.

Go back and read my posts, Apo. I have consistently compared learning a language to learning other, profound things - like that there is no God after believing for most of your life that there is (Night and day), or realizing that the Earth isn't the center of the universe, or that you aren't specially-made and separate from nature. These are all profound changes in awareness of the self. They just aren't the only changes that the self can go through or be aware of, so you can't say that just one of them creates the self, or makes the self aware of itself.

The self is already aware of itself at a very basic level and learning through observation and experimentation allows one to become aware of these other relationships the self has with the rest of the world it finds itself in. We basically discover our relationships with the world. That is what we become more aware of - not so much ourselves because we are already aware of that, rather we become aware of more relationships between our self and the world. That is what learning a language does and what learning that you are an animal and not a special creation of an omnipotent being does.

This is actually a quite difficult question. — Pierre-Normand

No, it isn't. You're making things more complicated and not even getting at anything I have said. I am talking about the self. You are talking about animals, the human race as a whole, etc. Go back and read the OP. You're performing all these unnecessary mental gymnastics just to avoid answering the question I asked you.

Is the self aware of itself prior to learning a language? Yes or no? I'm not asking how the human race has changed or is different from other animals. That is all very well documented and explained by the theory of evolution by natural selection. Every animal is different and has it's special repertoire that enables it to survive in its environment. Humans aren't special. They are just one species, not just on the Earth, but in the universe as a whole. Language could have evolved on any planet in a species with a large enough brain. You're not seeing the bigger picture here.

This idea that humans are special is antiquated. If that is what you and Apo think, then maybe your are not as self-aware as I thought.

Consciousness is not really a matter of fact, but experience; nature doesnt produce consciouness, its a form tha transcends nature, and nature will became like the content of consciousness. The "analytical consciouness" does not exist.

The nature of consciousness varies across animals, both in terms of sensitivity and awareness (perception and/or cognisance), in that:
1) Lower animals have cognisance in the form of instinct (natural or innate impulse, inclination, or tendency, not acquired through learning, nor contingent upon volition).
2) Higher animals have cognisance in the form of tacit knowledge and implicit memory.
3) Human beings have cognisance in the form of tacit and declarative knowledge, and implicit and explicit memory.

Tacit data is processed in the human mind passively (in an automatic, or intuitive, manner), while declarative code is processed in the human mind actively (in a controlled, or cogitative, manner). For other correlations, see Kahneman, Daniel (2011). Thinking, Fast and Slow (1st ed.). New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. ISBN 9780374275631.

So, human language (code consisting of a set of words having paradigmatic and syntagmatic relations, hence; semantic content) implies cogitation, as opposed to just instinct or intuition.