Words, words, words. With the advent of the stream of consciousness in twentieth-century literature, it has come to seem that the self is very much a thing made of words, a verbal construction forever narrating itself and reconstituting itself in language. In line with the dominant, internalist view of consciousness, it is assumed that this all takes place in the brain—specifically, two parts known as Wernicke’s area and Broca’s area in the left hemisphere. So, direct perception of sights and sounds in the world outside the body are very quickly ordered and colored by language inside our heads. “Once a thing is conceived in the mind,” wrote the poet Horace in the first century BC, “the words to express it soon present themselves.” And we call this thinking. All our experience can be reshuffled, interconnected, dissected, evoked, or willfully altered in language, and these thoughts are then stored in our brains. —Tim Parks
This is the fourteenth in a series of fifteen conversations on consciousness between Riccardo Manzotti and Tim Parks.Tim Parks: Riccardo, you have been presenting quite a different theory of consciousness, which suggests that there is nothing “stored” in the brain. No images, no sounds, and, I assume, no words. As you see it, the brain is a powerful enabler that allows experience to happen, but this experience is actually one with the objects we see, hear, smell, and touch, outside our bodies, or again, one with the body itself in those cases where it is the body that is experienced. And we are this experience, not something separate from it. You have explained dreams, hallucinations, and non-verbal thoughts as more complex and delayed forms of perception, always insisting that each experience is identical to something outside the brain, something whose existence is relative to our body. But how can that possibly be the case for language? When I am thinking silently to myself, where can the language possibly be, if not inside my head?
Riccardo Manzotti: Imagine you’re lying in bed planning to furnish a house you’ll soon be moving to in a distant town. What do you do? You start thinking about different items of furniture to figure out if they will go together in the space there. This would normally be explained by saying that you are imagining mental objects—representations in your head—and arranging them together in a mental space, another mental representation, again in your head. But in our previous conversation, we reached the conclusion that there are no “mental” objects—no thoughts, that is—separate from real objects. Simply, there is no need to introduce this new entity, thought, between body and object.
When we say we are thinking, what we are actually doing is rearranging causal relations with past events, objects that we have encountered before, to see what happens when we combine them. We don’t need a mental sofa to put next to a mental armchair. We allow the sofas and armchairs encountered in our past to exert an effect in the present, in various combinations. Like a controlled dream.
Parks: But we were talking about words, Riccardo, not sofas and armchairs! Last time we talked about thinking things directly; this time we’re considering thinking in language, which is surely different.
Manzotti: Not at all. Words are really not so different from sofas and armchairs. They are external objects that do things in the world and, like other objects, they produce effects in our brains and thus eventually, through us, in the world. The only real difference is that, when it comes to what we call thinking, words are an awful lot easier to juggle around and rearrange than bits of furniture.
Parks: External objects you say. But what kind of object is a word? Is it a sound? Is it a visual sign? What about when it is neither spoken nor written, but simply thought in the head?
Manzotti: Exactly as with the furniture, what we have is a rearrangement of our causal relations with past events—in this case, words initially heard in the external world. If we take things slowly and simply observe what happens as we learn to speak and think, you’ll see that, once again, there’s no need to posit the entity you call “a thought in the head.”
Parks: Go on, then....
MORE: http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2017/12/27/...are-words/