In the previous post, we left the human subject behind.
Edelman's distinction between primary and higher-order consciousness allowed us to consider consciousness as something with a much longer natural history than human language.
An animal does not need a word for danger in order for danger to matter.
It does not need a concept of pain in order to experience injury.
It does not need a theory of itself in order to be conscious.
But this does not mean that language and consciousness are unrelated.
It means something more interesting.
Language may not create consciousness. It may transform what consciousness can become.
And to see why, we need to take seriously the social life of organisms.
Consciousness is not a solitary achievement
Living organisms are relational from the beginning.
They exist in environments.
Many exist among other organisms.
They compete, cooperate, reproduce, care for offspring, defend territory, follow one another, imitate, warn and coordinate.
Social organisation therefore changes the field in which biological value operates.
Another organism is not simply another object in the environment.
It may be food, predator, mate, offspring, rival, companion or collaborator.
Its behaviour matters.
And the organism's own behaviour can matter to it in return.
The social world is therefore already a world of significance.
It does not yet follow that it is a semiotic world in the fully developed human sense.
But it creates the conditions under which increasingly elaborate systems of signalling and coordination can evolve.
Signals before signs
This returns us to the distinction between mattering and meaning.
A signal can matter without functioning as a symbol in a human language.
A warning call can alter the behaviour of other animals.
A courtship display can alter the behaviour of a potential mate.
A movement can coordinate a group.
A facial expression can affect another individual's behaviour.
The signal does something because of the social organisation within which it occurs.
It need not be a proposition.
It need not represent an abstract concept.
Its significance may lie in the difference it makes to the ongoing behaviour of the participants.
This is why the emergence of social signalling should not be treated as the sudden appearance of language.
There is a considerable space between nothing means anything and human symbolic language.
That intermediate space matters.
A social semiotic possibility
Halliday's work gives us a particularly useful way of thinking about this.
For Halliday, language is not primarily a collection of labels attached to pre-existing things.
It is a social semiotic system.
Its fundamental role is to create resources for making meaning within social life.
This makes the emergence of language inseparable from the emergence of new kinds of social relation.
A social semiotic system does not merely transmit information between already formed individuals.
It changes what individuals can do with one another.
And therefore it changes what they can do with experience.
This suggests that the evolution of social communication should not be viewed simply as an increase in the amount of information available to an organism.
It may represent an expansion of the possibility space of significance.
From signal to meaning
There is no need to imagine a single moment when a signal suddenly becomes a sign.
Evolution rarely works that way.
A signal can initially be tightly coupled to a particular biological response.
Over time, however, social systems can differentiate, stabilise and reorganise such signals.
What matters is no longer only the immediate physical event.
The participants can begin to respond to what another organism is doing as part of an organised pattern of social behaviour.
The signal becomes increasingly embedded in a system of relations.
At some point in such a trajectory, we can begin to speak more confidently of semiotic organisation.
But even here, we should resist the temptation to draw an absolute line.
Meaning can be more or less differentiated.
Social systems can be more or less elaborate.
The relevant question is not:
When did meaning suddenly appear?
It is:
What new possibilities became available when social differences could themselves become systematically significant?
Consciousness in a social world
This matters for consciousness because an organism's world is partly shaped by the relations in which it participates.
A solitary organism has one kind of world.
An organism living in a complex social group has another.
The latter must respond not merely to physical conditions but to the behaviour of others.
And the behaviour of others can itself become something to discriminate.
An animal may learn what another individual is likely to do.
It may distinguish individuals.
It may remember previous interactions.
It may anticipate future interactions.
It may modify its behaviour according to what others are doing.
None of this requires human language.
But it does suggest that social organisation can transform the structure of primary consciousness.
The world becomes more differentiated because the organism's relations become more differentiated.
The importance of the protolanguage
This is where Halliday's notion of protolanguage becomes suggestive.
Halliday's protolanguage belongs specifically to the development of the human child.
It is the early semiotic system through which the child begins to construct meanings before entering the full grammar of the adult language.
We should therefore be careful about simply projecting the term onto other species.
A bird's calls, a bee's dance or a primate's social signals are not thereby human protolanguages.
But Halliday's concept points towards a more general possibility:
meaning can begin in a much simpler social semiotic organisation than mature language.
The significance of this possibility is not that animals secretly possess miniature human languages.
It is that consciousness may develop within social worlds that already possess structured systems of significance.
The human protolanguage is one particularly consequential form of such organisation.
And because it develops within the child rather than being simply imposed from outside, it gives us a clue about the relation between social semiotics and consciousness.
The child changes the question
The child is not born into a meaningless world and subsequently taught the names of things.
The child enters a social world already saturated with significance.
People respond to the child.
They interpret gestures.
They anticipate needs.
They establish routines.
They distinguish actions, objects, people and events.
And the child gradually develops semiotic resources for participating in this world.
In Halliday's account, the child's early language is not simply a defective version of adult language.
It is an evolving system of meaning.
As that system develops, the possibilities for construing experience change.
The child does not merely acquire more words.
The child acquires new ways of making distinctions.
And new distinctions make new forms of experience available for reflection.
The social construction of possibility
This gives us another sense in which consciousness has a social life.
The social world does not simply provide information that an already complete consciousness processes.
It can provide new possibilities for consciousness itself.
A child learns to distinguish things that previously were not distinguished.
Relations that were previously lived can become recognised.
Events that were previously experienced can become remembered, narrated and compared.
The self can become an object of interaction.
Another person's perspective can become something to consider.
Eventually, one's own thoughts can become objects of thought.
This is not merely more information.
It is a reorganisation of the space in which experience can be construed.
And this is where higher-order consciousness begins to look less like an inexplicable addition to primary consciousness and more like a transformation of its possibilities.
But language does not make experience
We should nevertheless preserve an important distinction.
Language does not create the experience it construes.
The pain comes before the word pain.
The colour is experienced before the child can use the word red.
The infant does not need grammar before anything can matter.
Semiotic systems do something different.
They make experience construable.
They provide resources through which what happens can become something that can be distinguished, related, remembered, shared and reflected upon.
This is a crucial difference.
Meaning is not simply experience with labels attached.
It is a new level of organisation of experience.
And once that organisation becomes sufficiently elaborate, consciousness acquires new possibilities.
From primary to higher-order consciousness
We can now see Edelman's distinction in a broader context.
Primary consciousness can arise without language.
But a social semiotic system can reorganise the possibilities available to a conscious organism.
The organism can become able to construe its own states.
It can participate in meanings that are not reducible to immediate biological value.
It can construct relations across time.
It can distinguish what happened from what might happen.
It can make its own previous experience available for further experience.
And eventually, through language, it can talk about consciousness itself.
This is not a transition from unconsciousness to consciousness.
It is a transition in the organisation of consciousness.
The difference is profound.
A wider possibility space
The hard problem asks why physical processing should ever produce experience.
The evolutionary and social questions we have been following ask something different.
What happens when organisms become systems for which things matter?
What happens when conscious organisms live in social worlds?
What happens when social interaction becomes increasingly semiotic?
What happens when experience becomes something that can be construed, shared and reflected upon?
These questions do not eliminate the distinction between physical organisation and experience.
They put that distinction into a history.
And perhaps that is what has been missing.
Consciousness may not have appeared all at once.
It may have acquired new forms as organisms acquired new ways of relating to their worlds and to one another.
Primary consciousness is therefore not simply an inferior version of human consciousness.
It may be the foundation upon which radically different forms of consciousness can develop.
The human form is one such development.
Perhaps a particularly extraordinary one.
But it is not the starting point.
From the social to the semiotic
We are now approaching the boundary that matters most for this series.
The biological organism has a world of mattering.
The social organism has a world increasingly structured by the behaviour of others.
The social semiotic organism has something more:
a world in which significance can itself become organised as meaning.
That changes the possibilities again.
And when meaning becomes sufficiently powerful, something remarkable happens.
Experience can cease merely to be something that happens.
It can become something that can be construed.
That is the point at which the evolutionary story of consciousness intersects with Halliday's account of language.
But before we turn to the human child, there is a larger question to address.
All of these developments occurred within a history that began long before language.
So if consciousness has a natural history, where does that history begin?
Not with the hard problem.
Not with qualia.
Not with language.
It begins with life itself.
The next question is therefore the evolutionary one:
What might it mean to evolve into consciousness from a world that existed before consciousness as we know it?
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