The first tier of consciousness provides a continuous physical substrate of our encounters with reality that is different in kind from the conscious version of the world we differentiate from this continuous cloth. The world we know at the verbal-symbolic tier of consciousness is populated with the discrete entities we identify and the event sequences we describe in accordance with our own assumptions. We define the world we know from its grounding in a continuous physical reality we will never know.
The most striking example of the interface between the continuous physical realities of the first tier and the entities and events of the verbal-symbolic tier involves language itself. Two much-debated topics in linguistics can be readily explained in terms of this continuous / differentiated interface. The first involves the existence of a deep structure for language that reveals its universal grammar, and the second concerns the Whorfian conjecture that language constrains the thoughts that can be expressed.
Wittgenstein begins the Philosophical Investigations with a quote from Augustine about learning the names of things as they are pointed out to us and notes that “only a person who already knows how to do something with it can significantly ask a name.” It is the physical substrate we develop in the first tier of consciousness that provides the “how to do something with it” framework needed for learning a language. It establishes the deep structure that governs the development of the universal grammar common to all languages.
We have all had the experience of struggling to find the right word to express what we are trying to say. It feels as if our language is constraining our thoughts. Languages differ from one another with certain languages more finely differentiating certain of the varying realities we encounter and thus having more words to reflect that differentiation. Benjamin Whorf suggested that languages constrain our thoughts in a more general sense leading to important differences between cultures in the ability to think creatively.
The “how to do something with it” framework we establish in the first tier of consciousness is continuous, unvoiced and complexly interwoven. The thoughts we express in the verbal-symbolic tier of consciousness are discrete and assembled in linear, cause and effect sequences. When we express an original thought, we are guided by a continuous framework at the first tier that is difficult to convert into the discrete entities designated by language. We often don’t know what we are trying to express and our words seem inadequate. Thus, we struggle to express ourselves and feel constrained by our language. We do know when we find the right word, the bon mot, as it feels right to us in a way that other choices do not.
Language always plays out against the continuous substrate at the first tier of consciousness that provides its grounding in the physical core of experience.
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