Originally posted by Lanny
Don't talk to obbe about illusions, it's a dark dark road to go down.
Illusion or not, consciousness is not something we just “believe in”: it is our immediate experience, and the social world as we know it wouldn’t be possible without this idea of Self endowed with consciousness and free will. The cornerstone of consciousness is
metaphor. So what is metaphor, and how can it generate consciousness? The most fascinating property of language is its capacity to make metaphors. For metaphor is not a mere extra trick of language; it is the very constitutive ground of language. I am using metaphor here in its most general sense: the use of a term for one thing to describe another because of some kind of similarity between them or between their relations to other things.
There are thus always two terms in a metaphor, the thing to be described, the target, and the thing or relation used to elucidate it, the source. A metaphor is always a known source operating on a less known target. The human body is a particularly generative source, creating previously unspeakable distinctions in a variety of areas. The head of an army, table, page, bed, ship, household, or nail, or of steam or water; the face of a clock, cliff, card, or crystal; the eyes of needles, winds, storms, targets, flowers, or potatoes; the brow of a hill; the teeth of cogs or combs; the lips of pitchers, craters, augers; the tongues of shoes, board joints, or railway switches; the arm of a chair or the sea; the leg of a table, compass, sailor’s voyage, or cricket field; and so on and so forth.
In early times, language and its referents climbed up from the concrete to the abstract on the steps of metaphors, or actually
created the abstract on the bases of metaphors. It is not always obvious that metaphor has played this all-important function. But this is because the concrete sources become hidden in phonemic change, leaving the words to exist on their own. Even such an unmetaphorical-sounding word as the verb
‘to be’ was generated from a metaphor. It comes from the Sanskrit bhu,
“to grow, or make grow,” while the English forms
‘am’ and
‘is’ have evolved from the same root as the Sanskrit asmi,
“to breathe.”Consider any word which has meanings both from the physical-behavioural world and from the inner domain of cognition. For example, grasp: one can grasp a stone or one can grasp an idea. You don’t need to know the etymology of this verb to have a clear intuition about what is the target here and what the source, which meaning is primary and which metaphorical: the direction is always from the
“outer” world to
“inner”, from
“objective” to
“subjective”, from physical to cognitive. The mind refers to the outer, objective world to “model” its inner world of ideas: grasping an idea is like grasping a stone, not vice versa.
Have you ever wondered what actually happens in the brain when you understand a word? For example, if you listen to someone saying something as simple as that they jumped, what’s actually happening in your brain to create the understanding of what you’ve heard? There is an increasing body of evidence that such understanding involves partial simulation of the very action of jumping. The pattern of neural codes engaged in understanding the word jump and the pattern of neural codes engaged in actual jumping have a portion in common (but obviously not enough to make you jump whenever you say or hear the word). And if we hear the same word used metaphorically, for example something about someone jumping to conclusions, it would still involve processing of the word jump, and hence the corresponding neural simulation of actual jumping. The sensory properties of the source are brought in to contribute to the target meaning.
Metaphors generate the illusion of special inner mind-space where consciousness “takes place”. Every time the brain processes a sentence about grasping an idea or jumping to conclusion, it simulates a space where these actions might take place, a space where ideas, conclusions, thoughts are modelled as “things” in the outer world — something one can see, approach, jump to, or get hold of.
Consciousness itself emerges as a special kind of “metaphorical” operation in which the world around us is the source and what’s happening inside us, the target. And this internal model of the outside world contains a little “I” who acts there. If I approach a problem both “I” and the “problem” must be located within the same space. This thinking and willing “I” turns out to be a tiny little actor on the stage within my own mind-space.
A mind-space is a part of what it is to be conscious and what it is to assume consciousness in others. Moreover, things that in the physical-behavioral world do not have a spatial quality are made to have such in consciousness. Otherwise we cannot be conscious of them. This is spatialization. Time is an obvious example. If I ask you to think of the last hundred years, you may have a tendency to excerpt the matter in such a way that the succession of years is spread out, probably from left to right. But of course there is no left or right in time. There is only before and after, and these do not have any spatial properties whatever - except by analog. You cannot think of time except by spatializing it. Consciousness is always a spatialization in which the diachronic is turned into the synchronic, in which what has happened in time is excerpted and seen as a spatial projection.
This spatialization of time is what allows our little metaphorical “I”s - the actors within our mind-spaces - to travel in time: to reminiscence about the past and imagine different futures which is particularly important because of its potential role in willing and decision making. But the spatialization of time is also a metaphor: we understand time by modelling it as a kind of space, and this happens in language too. The "time as space" metaphor tends to be embedded not only into the vocabulary, but in the grammar as well - for example, when we use spatial prepositions for time periods (something may happen
in America and
in winter,
within a building or
within a month). Just as we learn to understand thoughts and ideas as objects in space when we acquire language in childhood, so do we learn to think of time as a space.
This is how consciousness is generated in each of us now: by modern languages and their metaphors. Languages were not always like this. Their inherent models of our inner worlds weren’t always there, they have evolved over time with language. And before that happened, there could have been no consciousness as we know it.