The Atheist's Guide to Reality_ Enjoying Life Without Illusions - Alex Rosenberg [92]
One tip-off to the importance of helping and sharing for the emergence of language is in the differences between humans and chimps that have learned to use languages. Neurogenomics—the study of which genes are switched on in our brain cells—has not yet uncovered the details of exactly what differences in size and structure distinguish our brain from those of other primates and enable us to speak. But one clue to the difference is how chimps use the languages that experimenters have taught them. Chimps have learned to use sign language or move plastic markers on a board to communicate. They have even been known to create sentences conveying novel ideas. But their creative use of language is almost exclusively to express imperatives such as “Give Washoe [the chimp’s name] grape.” Chimps don’t help each other or people much, and they only share things grudgingly (they tolerate theft by their younger kin). Unlike even very young human speakers, when chimps do have some language, they don’t use it to share information, that is, to cooperate and collaborate. If they did, debates about whether they can “speak” would end.
Among humans, the coordination of grunts, gestures, and shrieks with other behavior and with the behavior of others got more and more complicated over evolutionary time. And in a new feedback loop, it began to enhance the very coordination and collaboration that was necessary for it to get started. The process probably took a million years of genetic and cultural evolution. Speech itself probably couldn’t have even started earlier than 400,000 years ago. That’s when the human larynx evolved into a position that makes well articulated noises possible. But helping others figure out what you were going to do by grunts, gestures, howls, and shrieks got started long before. Of course, grunts, gestures, shrieks, and marks on the ground, for that matter, can’t themselves be about other chunks of matter any more than neural synapses can. We haven’t gotten to the illusion of aboutness yet. But we are getting closer.
Natural selection turned grunts, shrieks, and gestures into coordination devices between people. That required shared memory of which grunts go with which actions. These stored memories didn’t have to come into consciousness to work. But of course hominins are conscious, and pretty soon introspection began to be filled with a silent version of the noises and gestures humans were producing along with the actions. The silent noises and gestures imagined in the mind were our species’ original sources of the illusion that conscious thoughts are about stuff.
What people had begun doing, however, was just silently talking or writing or otherwise moving markers around in consciousness. Conscious thinking, then and now, is almost always the silent subvocal succession of word-sounds. Just try counting in your head; it’s the same noises that you make when you count out loud, but the noises are in your mind. As we saw at the end of Chapter 8, those markers that your consciousness runs over as you silently count are no more capable of being about something outside of themselves—in this case numbers—than any other clump of matter. Conscious thought is this stringing together in the mind of “tokens”—silent sounds, shapes, sensations—somewhere in the brain, in just the way that gesturing or shrieking or talking or writing is the stringing together of noises or hand gestures or facial movements or marks on paper outside of the brain. None of them is about anything.
Of course, there’s lots of cognition without silent speech. In fact, most thinking is nonconscious. For example, when you speak, you are completely unaware of the thoughts you need to go through to produce what you say. Similarly, as you read these ink marks, you are not conscious of the thinking required to produce the silent “noises” you are now experiencing, the silent noises that trick you into thinking that the marks on the page