Slide 61: Supporting Evidence

Well, yes there is, from Halliday’s (2008: 143) work on ontogenesis, though he didn’t explicitly interpret his data this way.  He writes:

Interpersonally, Nigel was addressing himself.  He was in the later stage of the transition between protolanguage and mother tongue; the adult mood system was now largely in place, but he continued to refer to himself by the second person you — this is a recognised transition strategy, though less common than using the child’s own name.  From this example alone one cannot tell, because the you could be explained as casting himself in the role of the “other” who is being told what (not) to do; but in fact you was still being used to refer to himself in all moods, only just beginning to be replaced by I/me.

And outside of linguistics, the neuroscientist, Vilayanur Ramachandran has expressed the view that self-consciousness arises from imitation of others.  [This was in taking questions after the 2nd (Synapses and the Self) of his 2003 Reith Lectures entitled The Emerging Mind.]

And the more general claim, that self-awareness arises from social interaction, is supported by the work of evolutionary psychologist Gordon Gallup with other great apes, as reported by physiologist Derek Denton (1993: 61):

Gallup’s data indicated that the development of self-awareness in the chimpanzee as indicated by the mirror experiments was influenced by early experience and was an acquired phenomenon.  The idea was that an individual’s concept of self could arise only out of social interaction with others.  The way other people react to an individual is the primary source of information about the self.

 Well, let’s leave the origins of ‘higher’ consciousness there, and return to the notion of consciousness as instantial…