For a marxist, discussing consciousness as a topic is akin to an atheist discussing God. How do you discuss a concept which do not exist according to your philosophy? Why should you even discuss it? However, to look at the human world objectively, to adopt the attitude of a real diamat, we must admit to ourselves that such concepts like “consciousness” and “God” exist in the language of men, and therefore, exist in the collective mind of the society. To suggest otherwise, ironically, would actually fall into the trap of idealism.
I would like to begin by examining a statement I made in the previous article:
Using language (to write or to speak) is a process of the thought becoming aware of itself, or rather, the materialization of thought,
To any person familiar with Marxism, this statement reeks of idealism: it presuppose the existence of an independent “thought”. However, to many people, this statement sounds natural, and contains no perceptible errors in concept. This is because, the idealistic society, which remains the majority of human society, assume the existence, and the primacy, of such nebulous concept as “mind”, “thought”, “consciousness”, “God” (or any of its derivative).
The question here is not whether they “exist”, but rather, do they exist independently, and form the origin of our perception of our world, or, do they exist as a result of such a perception and cannot exist without the material world surrounding us. To a Marxist, it’s always the latter. But what’s more, Marxism assumes not only the material world, it also assume a social world, and it is within a social context that the superstructures: thoughts, mind, ideologies, consciousness, conscience, eventually evolve. These superstructures cannot exist for one human. They presuppose a group of humans socially related to one another.
That is to say, superstructure, a collective terms for functions of the mind like ideas, imaginations, ideologies, beliefs and the such, requires not only a material foundation, but also a social foundation. This is evident in the studies of feral children. When found, they almost all could not use language, and their acquisition of language remained impaired. (Side note: the problem with feral children reports is that many of them are hoax. Be careful of the cases you read about.)
How then, is the phenomenon of what we commonly referred to as consciousness emerged?
Consciousness emerged at the same time symbols emerge as the form of “language”. When we start to name things, assigning the sound of “rock” to the object rock, a few things occurred all at once.
The first is the emergent of a symbol.
The association between the sound “rock” and the object rock is arbitrary. It is a complete social function: a collective consensus of associating a certain sound to a certain object, and it probably emerged over a long period. In different cultures, the same object could be referred to by other sounds, like “Shi”
These sounds function as symbols, in that they are not the objects they referred to, but represent them nonetheless. This act of creating symbols immediately result in the emergent of “meaning”. By associating two different matters together (in this case, a sound and an object), the concept of “meaning” is created. Because contained within the the word “rock”, is not the real object rock, but its meaning.
A collective of these symbols eventually became the foundation of “language”. Although language as we know it today is a much more complicated phenomenon, including not only symbols of object, but also a structure of relation between symbols and the rules of symbol evolution (what commonly known as grammar).
By assigning sounds to objects and actions (which was the foundations of nouns and verbs) collectively, we achieved the ability to create dialogues. A dialogue is only possible when two humans use the same sets of sound associations. Incidentally, this is also where meaningful language emerges. The way I wrote this article seemed to suggest that dialogue requires the foundation of a language, which is not really the case. They emerged together. Primary language is inseparable from its function in a dialogue. A language that cannot be used for the purpose of communication is not language at all.
And it is dialogue which becomes “thinking” (I realize at this point that the term “consciousness” can also refer to “awareness to the surrounding”, which is a sort of animal consciousness and not what I am discussing, so I’ll stick to the term “thinking” from now on). If you put some attention to it, you’ll realize that all our thinking activities are carried out in such a way that resembles a dialogue, or a monologue which presume an audience. We think in a language which can be understood by other people. We do not create a language for our own thinking purpose. We are also only capable of thinking in terms which we’ve heard or read before, and to some extent, our thinking is limited by our actual experience (I qualified this statement, because we are capable of thinking in fictitious situations by juxtaposing different scenarios among our experiences. This is a topic reserved for freewill and choices). All these (self)evidences point to thinking as a result of language, not the cause of it. The form of thinking activities (common language, assume an audience, even if that audience is self), also indicates that thinking is a social function, and cannot exist independently without social experience.
So what conclusion can we draw if we follow this line of thought? Well, for one, “independent thinking” is a paradox; Our thinking is the result of the accumulation of our social experiences. It is formed, and ultimately bound by our social experiences. In a sense, it is a microcosm of our social identity, distilled from all the social interactions we’ve ever had. Therefore, be aware (NOT beware) of the social situation you put yourself in, including the passive situation like reading a book or watching a movie, because they invariably become part of your thinking.
What about free will? The ability to discern and choose? Well, that is the topic for another article.