A conscious muddle

To decide whether consciousness can be uploaded into a machine, we have to understand first what consciousness is and how it emerges. This is where engineers may need help from philosophers. Professor Emeritus Lynn Trainor, a long-time member of the physics department at the University of Toronto who died earlier this year, is reported as saying: "What fascinates me is this. The egg gets fertilised. The cells start dividing. And then consciousness arises out of it. How?" In his book The Mysterious Flame', British philosopher Colin McGinn argues that the emergence of consciousness in the physical brain is a mystery that we will never unravel. Could he be mistaken? In 'Evolution and Consciousness', Canadian philosopher Leslie Dewart asserts that speech generates consciousness in the race and in every new member of the race. To examine this possibility, we need to differentiate between communication, speech and language. In her book The First Word', Christine Kenneally does a survey of the unsuccessful quests by linguists for the origin of language. But, maybe, linguists are the wrong people looking for the wrong thing? The bodily act of speech long precedes all language, reading, writing, Braille, sign language and all speech substitutes. I listened to a University of Toronto professor speaking about age-related changes in hearing. He referred to the resulting difficulties in language comprehension. But we do not hear language; we hear speech. He went on to refer to "spoken language". He was referring to the act of speech. Even worse, the BBC reported a Lancaster University study of 120 toddlers which found that the ability to perform complex mouth movements was strongly linked to language development. Aren't complex mouth movements linked to the development of speech? Even neurologists are misled when they refer to language centres in the brain. Sufferers of a debilitating stroke soon know that it is the speech centre in the brain that has been affected, regardless of the language previously spoken. As Thomas Hobbes writes in 'Of Man': "The most noble and most profitable invention of all other, was that of Speech." He was not confused by the red herring of language. The distinction between speech and language is beauti-fully illustrated in the biblical story of the tower of Babel. The Hebrew Scriptures tell us: "And the Lord said, "Behold they are one people and they have all one language; Come, let us go down, and there confuse theanguage, that they may not understand one another's speech [my italics]"." I am not surprised at the confusion between speech and language. Rather than search fruitlessly for the origin of the latter, we can realistically reconstruct the emergence of speech. If anyone should object that this happened in prehistoric times, let me remind them that Darwin successfully reconstructed the origin of species that took place over billions of years. The emergence of speech is recent by comparison.