Consciousness and Mental Representation

Consciousness and Mental Representation

There is a language of thought, or so they say (and think).[1] When you think you are speaking inwardly (or perhaps hearing inwardly): there is a code with symbols, a syntax, a semantics. The words in this code combine like words in spoken languages. To think is to say in the head. Thought has its own language. If so, we are told, the Representational Theory of Mind is true: the mind is a device for representing things—that is its essence. Hence, the computational theory of mind. And thus, cognitive science has its paradigm, shiny and new. When the mind acts it manipulates mental representations, which we may as well label linguistic. To have a mind is to have a language faculty, but bigger and better than the language faculty we speak with. Even non-speaking animals have one of these—doggerel, as it were. Symbols in the noggin. It’s a nice theory, if you like that kind of thing: unifying, reductive, assimilative. Once we understand language, we have understood mind; and we have a pretty good understanding of language (it is believed). The mind is representational and its representations consist of words—that’s the whole deal. Now we can set to work discovering this language and mapping its operations. The sentence is the basic unit of the mind. Psychology is the science of the language of mind; it’s all psycholinguistics up in there.

But where is consciousness in all this? It seems irrelevant, since the mental language is deemed unconscious. It occasionally pops into consciousness in the form of conscious thoughts, but that is incidental to its existence. The mind, thus conceived, could be completely unconscious and still be the mind. There is nothing particularly conscious about the mind. Behaviorism ignored consciousness in favor of bodily behavior; representationalism ignores it too. The representations are internal, to be sure, but they have nothing intrinsically to do with consciousness. But doesn’t that sound wrong—crap, basically? Isn’t the mind that we all have a conscious mind (though we have an unconscious mind too)? You can’t subtract consciousness from the story and do justice to mind as it actually exists; thought itself frequently comes to us clothed in consciousness. Accordingly, RTM is a false theory; at most it is a partial theory of mind. Unless…unless consciousness itself is representational—unless there is a language of consciousness. Can we say that the operations of consciousness are linguistic operations, analogous to cognitive operations? Is all of consciousness made up of special symbols that define its identity? Call it LOC. Is there a LOC as well as a LOT? If there were, we could extend RTM to include LOC, sitting beside LOT. Conscious thought is then LOT plus LOC—one language combined with another. In conscious thinking, you “token” (verb) a sentence of LOC as well as one of LOT—a kind of double utterance. When you become conscious you acquire a LOC (it might be innate). There will be vocabulary for conscious pain and seeing red and feeling blue. For the brain to be conscious, or capable of producing consciousness, is for it to house the appropriate language—the language we employ in order to be sentient. This language constitutes what it is like to be a certain kind of conscious being. Bats deploy a language we don’t understand—the language of conscious echolocation. If we knew this language, we would effectively have solved the mind-body problem. Qualia are words in LOC, as concepts are words in LOT.

Isn’t all this pure fantasy? Whatever we might say about thought and language, it doesn’t carry over to consciousness and language. For what kind of language is LOC? Do we have even the faintest idea of what it would be? How could pain be a word? Is it anything like speaking or hearing the word “pain”? Does LOC have a grammar, a semantics, a pragmatics?[2] What would it sound like to say the pain word out loud—would it hurt to hear it? This is all nonsense. Consciousness is no more linguistic than blood is, or digestion, or bone marrow. It may not be a category mistake to describe consciousness as a language, but it is surely a capital mistake—criminal, cringeworthy, cretinous. It may well be that symbolic computations underlie and make possible conscious life, but they aren’t what consciousness is—if it is anything like what it seems to be. A conscious being is not a chatterbox or a poet or a vocalist (is being conscious anything like singing?). For one thing, it is far too primitive for that, being a biological basic (consider mouse consciousness). Even Jerry Fodor would recoil at the notion of a language of consciousness! We don’t know much about what consciousness is, but we sure as hell know it isn’t words. It could turn out that thinking involves mental words—the parallels between thinking and speaking are striking—but it couldn’t turn out that sensations are words (saying ouchinternally). The mind is not all linguistically constituted; language doesn’t get into everything mental. Consciousness is something separate and distinct from language, prior to it, irreducible to it. Experience isn’t utterance.

It might be replied that this can be conceded without damage to the RTM: thought is internal language but sensation is not—these being distinct faculties of mind. Well and good, but now we have abandoned a key tenet of RTM, namely that the mind is a device of representation. All we have is that representation is a bit of the mind along with other bits. And then the battle will be fought as to which bit constitutes the beating heart of mind: is the mind essentially consciousness or is it essentially computation? Is the mind symbolic in its essence or is it something else entirely, say “seembolic”? Is the mind a place of seeming or speaking? Or is it both with neither able to claim hegemony? Do we accept RTM or STM or RSTM? We have lost that unity we prized in general RTM and with it the hope of subduing the whole mind theoretically. No LOC, no RTM—sorry folks. Cognitive science is going to need a new paradigm (we might have to re-rehire Granny). One has the sneaking suspicion that the shine will be taken off LOT as the be-all and end-all. I myself would prefer to remove language from mental life except when it is manifestly present, i.e., in speech and in internal monologue. Or better: it is not clear that “language” is the right word to use for mental processes that are not evidently linguistic; otherwise, it risks collapse into metaphor. For example, a purely computational theory of vision is too linguistically oriented; consciousness needs to be recognized as a vital element. Come to that, even overt speech (let alone inner speech) is saturated by consciousness; it is not only symbolic. Speech acts are conscious acts of mind (excuse the redundancy) and this is not a contingent fact. There could conceivably be a consciousness theory of speech not a speech theory of consciousness. Perhaps the enthusiasm for LOT (partly) derives from its promise to do without the enigma of consciousness (the behaviorists were right to despair over this), while acknowledging the inner; but there is no escaping it, or containing it. CTM is here to stay.[3]

[1] The “they” are Peter Geach, Gilbert Harman, and Jerry Fodor (most famously).

[2] What kind of grammar does the language of consciousness have—phrase-structure, hierarchical, Markovian, transformational, logical? And what kind of semantics—truth-conditional, model-theoretic, Fregean, Gricean, denotational, etc.? What about the pragmatics—is it anything like conversational implicature or language games or conventions of use? These questions have no answers, except to say “Consciousness isn’t a type of linguistic exercise”. When I see a red bird flying past, I don’t say anything to myself along the lines of “There goes a red bird”, which does have a linguistic structure and a meaning. That is just bad phenomenology. Seeing is not talking (your lips don’t even slightly move). Being conscious is not saying “I am conscious”.

[3] We can imagine giving up the theory that thought is linguistic, but can we imagine giving up the belief that the mind (our mind) is conscious? Freud added an unconscious mind, but he never subtracted the conscious mind! It couldn’t turn out that we have no conscious mind. The only question is how central and formative it is. RTM might be false, but not CTM. I am certain that my mind is conscious.