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Toomela’s Language-Mediated Structural-Systemic Theory
Consciousness as Language-Mediated Experience of Experience
Aaro Toomela defines consciousness narrowly as the experiencing of one’s own psychic experience, and argues that it arises only when a child acquires linguistic signs. A word points outward to the sensory world and inward to another sign in the mind, so every use of a word is both a reference to the world and an experience of one’s own mental content. Consciousness is therefore socially formed, developmentally acquired, and, as far as is known, distinctively human.
Aaro Toomela
What consciousness is
Consciousness is a language-mediated psychic process whose result is the experience of one’s own psyche, ‘the experience of experiences’ in Vygotsky’s phrase.
Mind and body
The brain is necessary for consciousness, but the principles governing it are semiotic and social rather than biological. Consciousness is a property of the whole formed by person, language, and environment, neither located in the brain nor a separate substance.
Mechanism
The dual linguistic sign: genuinely new information arises only when the same input is processed by two interrelated mechanisms, and a word binds a sensory form to an inner sign so that using it is itself an act of consciousness.
Core claims
- Organisms have no sense organ for their own psyche, so experiencing one’s own experience requires a mediating sign.
- Introspection reaches the results of psychic processes but not the processes themselves, in line with the Würzburg findings on imageless thought.
- A psychological theory of consciousness can be ‘brainless’, which Toomela offers as the reason decades of searching for universal neural correlates have failed.
- Consciousness is restricted to humans on present evidence because only humans acquire linguistic signs within a linguistic environment.
Criticisms
By assigning raw sensory feel to a pre-conscious psyche, the theory addresses reflective self-consciousness rather than phenomenal consciousness in Nagel’s and Chalmers’s sense, and so relocates the hard problem. Restricting consciousness to language users denies it to animals and prelinguistic infants in his sense of the term.
Implications
- AI consciousness: Uncertain
- Consciousness requires linguistic signs acquired in a social, linguistic environment and grounded in a sense-based psyche, and Toomela does not say whether a machine could meet these conditions.
- Survival beyond death: No
- Since the brain is necessary for consciousness, the view leaves nothing to persist after it stops.
- Meaning and purpose: Humanistic only
- Consciousness is a social and cultural achievement of human development, with no cosmic purpose implied.
- Virtual immortality: Uncertain
- Toomela does not address it; consciousness depends on a developmental history within a linguistic community, which a copy would not straightforwardly carry.
Related theories
- Peirce’s Phaneroscopic Semiotics (Influence)
- James’s Radical Empiricism of Monistic Pure Experience (Influence)
- Koch's Consciousness does not Depend on Language (Contrast)
- Crick and Koch's Neural Correlates of Consciousness (Critique)
Sources
- Culture, Speech and My Self, Aaro Toomela (2016)
- What Are Higher Psychological Functions?, Aaro Toomela (2016)
- Thinking and Speech, L. S. Vygotsky (1934)
- The Working Brain: An Introduction to Neuropsychology, A. R. Luria (1973)
- A Stroll Through the Worlds of Animals and Men, J. von Uexküll (1934)
- Some Consequences of Four Incapacities, C. S. Peirce (1868)
- Does ‘Consciousness’ Exist?, W. James (1904)