Consciousness and the Structure of Language

The title of this post is potentially just a little bit misleading. What i will be talking about here is not so much the question of "how" but issues of what I think happens. It will be a preliminary look at a viewpoint that has been forming in my mind.

I'll start out with a general look at certain issues:

One of the hardest things for us to conceptualize coherently are concepts related to conscious experience: the general world of feelings, awareness-conscious experience. We certainly use these terms in our language in everyday life, but when it comes to analysis they seem to escape out normal categories of understanding. For example: where does experience occur? Metaphorically we might respond "in the head," but this is clearly just a poetic response. Although our experience is in a certain way localized in our person in that this is the perspective of the flow of events, and the area of our sensations, it does not "there" in the sense that a table is "there" in the center of a room. Its localization exists in a different way.

Similarly, each of us has a conscious experience, and we think of others as having this too. But where are these other experiences in relation to our own? As in the case above, we may resort to linguistic devices to try to conceptualize this, but we inevitably do a bad job and the best we can hope for is to speak metaphorically, and in a way that ultimately fails to clear things up.

The ways that we have of talking about and making sense of the world seem to be ultimately drawn from, and most appropriate for the physical world rather than the intangible world of conscious experience (of course the physical world exists within conscious experience, but that is a separate issue). Those ways that exist for talking about mental events are at best crude ways of addressing the undeniable existence of our inner mental lives. While these ways allow us to touch on the existence of these things, this area doesn't seem to be appropriately integrated into the rest of our conceptual schema.

At the core of this "conceptual schema" is the identification of the first person, experiencing "I" with the third person "you." By treating these as the same, we allow for the coherent development of a social world that brings us out of (or allows us to ignore) our isolation from others. This comes at a cost: By equating the first and third persons, the differences between the two are pushed out. What separates first person experience from the awareness of the other (third) person--consciousness--is pushed out of the conceptualization, making it the difficult topic to speak about that it is.

It seems that we are unable to trick ourselves by pushing consciousness out: the differences between the first and third person are still immediately obvious to each of us, even though they're ignored by the conceptual schema. As a result, we are compelled to create a concept of consciousness and other related subconcepts to describe experiences which are still undeniably there.