Sure, I didn't mean to infer that you were proposing that "consciousness" or
linguistic facility would make us superior to other animals. After all what
difference would there be between humans who cannot speak, or effectively
communicate and other species. We simply don't know if other forms of
communication, "language" and, indeed, consciousness, are any less
felicitous than our own. And if they were, so what. It is perhaps a question
of degree.
Pre-lingual communication always "seems" to directly situate species in the
here and now. But language certainly separates us as a species and separates
us from directly shared experience. Not that I see language as the report
back from some primary experience; it is, I believe, the constructor of
experience and permitted modes of being. Its power simply imprisoning us.
Best
C
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