Innovation in Language Learning

It has often been suggested that what differentiated man from animal was consciousness.  Self-consciousness or self-awareness.  To be distinguished from (moral) conscience, but not separated.  There cannot be conscience without consciousness—no one has any doubt about it.  Perhaps some might argue that there could exist a consciousness without moral, or ethical, conscience, and responsibility.  We will not discuss this here.

            After the experiments conducted by Gordon G. Gallup, Jr. and others beginning in the late sixties, it has been postulated that some apes, in particular orang-utans and chimpanzees, did develop self-awareness in adulthood.  But oddly enough from our stand lost it in old age.  Gallup paints a dot of colour on the animal’s forehead while it is asleep.  When it wakes up, it is presented with a mirror.  If it tries to remove the spot, Gallup states that it is aware of itself, i. e. self-conscious.  I do not believe it to the extent that as far as I gather even the best trained chimps or orang-utans lag far behind a 2-two year old human child.  As I now watch my granddaughter, who speaks and behaves much more like an adult human being that any grown up ape, even trained from birth in sign language with a human family, I’m afraid that she is not conscious of herself like we are until we die—except of course when we sleep, are drunk or drugged.  And for Gallup’s experiment, my granddaughter has recognized herself in the mirror for more than a year, long before she started speaking.  I do not see why recognizing oneself in a mirror should be equivalent to being conscious.  As far as I can remember, my oldest memories of myself date back to me fourth or fifth year of existence.  The memories from before have been reconstructed from photographs and stories by my parents.  I do not trust that friend of ours who claims that she remembers and can depict the meeting of her mother’s egg and her father’s spermatozoid to form her.  No doubt I agree that unconscious memories dating as far back as around or even before birth may have been stored in brains.  But precisely they are unconscious.  Or subconscious.  Not conscious.

            It seems to me that indeed what characterizes our species is consciousness.  And I observe that it arises between the ages of three and five or six.  The Ancients called this age the age of reason.  Clearly consciousness and reason go together.  What is consciousness, and what does it imply for us in our reflexion on language and languages today?