Inquire about purchasing the book | Table of Contents | Annotated Bibliography | Class on Nature of Mind
These are excerpts and elaborations from my book "The Nature of Consciousness"
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Collective Cognition What is, ultimately, the
function of language? To communicate? To think? To remember? All of this and
more. But, most likely, not only for the sake of the individual. Language's
crucial function is to create a unit out of so many individuals. Once we learn
to speak, we become part of something bigger than our selves. We inherit other
people's memories (including the memories of people who have long been dead)
and become capable of sharing our own memories with other people (even those
who have not been born yet). Thanks to language, the
entire human race becomes one cognitive unit, with the ability to perceive,
learn, remember, reason, and so forth. Language turns the minds of millions of
individuals into gears at the service of one gigantic mind. As the US neuroscientist
Paul Churchland once pointed out, language
creates a collective cognition, a collective memory and intelligence. Back to the beginning of the chapter "The History of Language: Why We Speak" | Back to the index of all chapters |
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