Materialism › Language
Fedotov's Communication Hypothesis of Consciousness
Consciousness as Encoding Experience Into Shareable Messages
Fedotov holds that consciousness is a specialized brain function that encodes personal information into messages that can be shared with another person. Being aware of a mental image means that information is ready to be passed to an interlocutor, so consciousness arises with language and develops in each person as they acquire it.
Sergei A. Fedotov, E. V. Baidyuk
What consciousness is
Consciousness is the brain's ability to encode personal information into communicative messages built from shared conventional signals such as words and gestures. Awareness of an event is awareness of it in the context of its significance for others.
Mind and body
Consciousness is one specialized brain function among others, sitting alongside sensory detection, decision-making, and emotion and receiving their outputs only when they are encoded into messages.
Mechanism
Encoding of personal information into messages made of universal conditioned signals. Other cognitive processes are projected into consciousness only while their information is being encoded this way.
Core claims
- Conscious intention arrives after the readiness potential in Libet's experiments, which Fedotov reads as message encoding following goal-directed behaviour.
- Children's first lasting memories appear around age two with the onset of speech, supporting the claim that declarative memory stores language-encoded messages.
- Blindsight and split-brain cases show that sensory and motor processing can run without the message encoding that constitutes awareness.
- Passing the mirror self-recognition test reflects learned visual-proprioceptive association and does not, on this view, indicate message-based consciousness.
Criticisms
Tying consciousness to language implies that prelinguistic infants and most animals lack it, a conclusion many researchers reject. Most of the cited evidence comes from reinterpreting existing experiments rather than from tests designed to separate this hypothesis from rivals.
Implications
- AI consciousness: Possible
- If consciousness is the capacity to encode information into shared conventional signals, a system that genuinely acquired and used language in a social community might qualify. Fedotov does not address machines directly.
- Survival beyond death: No
- Since consciousness here is a brain function acquired through language, it ends when the brain stops working.
- Meaning and purpose: Humanistic only
- Consciousness serves communication and social coordination among people, with no cosmic role implied.
- Virtual immortality: Uncertain
- The hypothesis is silent on whether a copied brain function would preserve a person's conscious message encoding.
Related theories
- Deacon's Symbolic Communication (Human Consciousness) (Overlap)
- Parrington's Language and Tool-Driven Consciousness (Overlap)
- Libet's Mind Time: Readiness Potential, Unconscious Initiation, Delayed Awareness, Antedating Consciousness (Influence)
- Koch's Consciousness does not Depend on Language (Contrast)
Sources
- Communication as the Origin of Consciousness, Sergei A. Fedotov and E. V. Baidyuk (2023)
- Fedotov's Communication Hypothesis of Consciousness, Sergei A. Fedotov (Landscape of Consciousness entry) (2022)
- Time of Conscious Intention to Act in Relation to Onset of Cerebral Activity (Readiness-Potential), Benjamin Libet, C. A. Gleason and E. W. Wright (1983)
- Consciousness, Personal Identity and the Divided Brain, Roger Sperry (1984)