Consciousness surely does not depend on language. Babies, many animals, and patients robbed of speech by brain damage are not insensate robots; they have reactions like ours that indicate that someone's home.
Interpretation
Consciousness exists independently of language, as evidenced by non-verbal beings who still display awareness and reactions.
In this quote, Steven Pinker argues that consciousness is not solely a product of language. He highlights that infants, animals, and individuals with speech impairments exhibit reactions indicating awareness and understanding, suggesting that consciousness is a fundamental aspect of being that transcends linguistic ability.
In practice
In a discussion about cognitive abilities in animals, this quote can be used to emphasize that awareness is not limited to language.
The foundation of individual rights is the assumption that people have wants and needs and are authorities on what those wants and needs are. If people's stated desires were just some kind of erasable inscription or reprogrammable brainwashing, any atrocity could be justified.
The linguistic clumsiness of tourists and students might be the price we pay for the linguistic genius we displayed as babies, just as the decrepitude of age in the price we pay for the vigor of youth.
If we are not to abandon values such as peace and equality, or our commitments to science and truth, then we must pry these values away from claims about our psychological makeup that are vulnerable to being proven false.
We adults protect ourselves with laws, police, workplace regulations and social norms and there is no conceivable reason why children should be left more vulnerable, other that laziness or callousness in considering what life is like from their point of view.
The idea that children are passive repositories to be shaped by their parents has been massively overstated. A child's peer group is a far greater determinant of its development and achievements than parental aspiration.
Reason is non-negotiable. Try to argue against it, or to exclude it from some realm of knowledge, and you've already lost the argument, because you're using reason to make your case. ... We don't "believe" in reason.
And so it is they who, between them, give me all the reasons for believing in none.
Magic is the science of the jungle.
In every author let us distinguish the man from his works.
Who knows if to live is to be dead, and to be dead, to live? And we really, it may be, are dead; in fact I once heard sages say that we are now dead, and the body is our tomb.
What pornography is really about, ultimately, isn't sex but death.
There are things that tend to moderate with age. Schizophrenia is somewhat like that.
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