Overview

This theory attempts to be a roadmap to a comprehension of human consciousness through Cartesian dualism. Although it accepts the Western principle of 'objective reality' in order to 'explain', this theory does not ignore the intersubjective connectivity of the human mind, or the value of Eastern philosophy as a dynamic, holistic, analysis.This theory provides a clear taxonomy sentience/cognition as layers of human consciousness on the historical grounds of the acquisition of language. The layers are intertwined but discrete. There is no evolutionary continuum between the basic cognition that exists in other animal species and human cognition. The point of inflection is the acquisition of language, which resulted in complex (human) cognition. Without productive language there can be no complex thought.Experience (i.e., sentience), on the other hand, is a fundamental, biological, phenomenon that is subjective by nature. Sentience, as a quantum system, basically appears to be a process; the dynamics of the process are incomplete without perception (the famous tree that falls in the forest). If there is no afference, there is no experience.In a process that took tens of thousands of years, hominins commenced to develop language and eventually branched out into H. sapiens. The process involved: 1) the human creation of productive, recursive, language; 2) human language resulted in a new species, H. sapiens. It was a story of mutual creation.Through language feedback, human cognition grew beyond normal evolutionary laws. Human consciousness-a 'black swan' event-is meta-evolutionary. Had cognition been solely natural, biological transmission would be something akin to drafting a plant. The individual cognitions of both parents would be mixed in some sort of breeding broth and a new cognition would grow from it.Extremely immature, human offspring enjoy all senses but are not fully cognitive. The way things are, human mothers need to talk to their babies. The process, which often involves the whole family group, takes at least a couple of years.There is no universal language template in the human brain. Language needs to be taught. Had there been a template, individuals would instinctively comprehend language. But language is cultural and artificial. While individuals of other animal species, especially non-gregarious ones, are basically iterations of their species, humans have become true individuals.One way to prove the process in ourselves is to test how far back our episodic memories go. We will find that we registered our first memories-and probably our identity-when we were between three and four years of age, not before speech comprehension.

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9781764094597

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Rafael Pintos-López is an Argentine-Australian former academic at the University of Canberra and translator of international conferences for the FAO and WHO organisations of the UN. An awarded painter, designer, author and innovator, he has been interested in consciousness and written about it for some years. His outside-the-box approach to the subject attempts to challenge current convention.

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