The hard problem of consciousness from the perspective of language (succinct summary and clarifications)

For those who found my last essay to meandering, muddled or long I’ve tried to simplify an idea into points that hopeful follow a sequence.

1. Language both reflects, represents and creates our reality
2. There is a hard problem of consciousness
3. Because the problem consists of a kind of category problem it is also a linguistic problem — the words (or words for concepts) simply don’t ‘fit’ — or to put it another way — we use words like subject and object that seem to describe two kinds or reality that can’t be properly fitted together. (how do things produce inwardness)
4. Because this problem is one of language it is found everywhere — issues such as gender debates reflect questions about the self that reflect an inability to unite disparate concepts.
5. While we tend to present the primacy of the physical/material, other cultures have seen other aspects of reality such as consciousness or morality as primary (e.g. non-duality in Vedanta or the primacy of moral reality in Dante)
6. The solution to this problem may not be scientific, since science is an objective endeavour, it may be something that uses the possibilities of language to go beyond objectivity. What we used to called ‘poetry’ (1)
7. This is because introspective knowledge is subjective — the ‘knower’ cannot be ‘known’ but can only ‘be’. Consciousness is beyond objectivity, therefore beyond linguistic concepts unless they are symbolic of non-objective realities (metaphors). Absolute being cannot be ‘said’, only signposted or represented.
8. This may be in part the baby in the bathwater thrown out when we abandon religion and personal myth, the beginning of these linguistic/category problems.

Notes:

1 — For a definition of poetry used in this sense see Percy Bysshe Shelly’s ‘A Defence Of Poetry’: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/69388/a-defence-of-poetry

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Bless you, Matthew.