From newshub.ccs.yorku.ca!torn!cs.utexas.edu!uwm.edu!linac!mp.cs.niu.edu!rickert Mon Aug 24 15:41:51 EDT 1992
Article 6693 of comp.ai.philosophy:
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Path: newshub.ccs.yorku.ca!torn!cs.utexas.edu!uwm.edu!linac!mp.cs.niu.edu!rickert
>From: rickert@mp.cs.niu.edu (Neil Rickert)
Subject: Re: Consciousness
Message-ID: <1992Aug24.143747.29479@mp.cs.niu.edu>
Organization: Northern Illinois University
References: <705@trwacs.fp.trw.com> <1992Aug23.014900.16178@news.Hawaii.Edu>
Date: Mon, 24 Aug 1992 14:37:47 GMT
Lines: 32

  NOTE: Your "Distribution: sci" is bogus.  It is also unwise to specify
	"Followup-To: sci.cognitive" when your article itself was not
	even cross-posted to sci.cognitive.

In article <1992Aug23.014900.16178@news.Hawaii.Edu> lady@uhunix.uhcc.Hawaii.Edu (Lee Lady) writes:
>It seems to me that one of the things that distinquishes humans from
>other animals is that humans (at least in most cultures) have a real
>sense of time, a sense of the past and future.  While certainly other
>animals have memory in some sense, I don't think they have a real sense
>of the past.  When a dog's owner comes back from being away at college,
>for instance, and the dog seems totally overjoyed, I think it is only our
>anthropomorphism that interprets this as meaning that the dog has been
>aware that the owner was gone a very long time.  I realize that this is
>pretty fuzzy speculation on my part, but there it is, for what it's worth. 

I largely agree with this.  The human sense of time is mainly a consequence
of language.

In a series of postings a few weeks back, I argued that memory isn't
much like the way we commonly perceive it.  The extension of that point
is that our perceived memory is very largely a consequence of language.
Our ability to recognize, and to learn to recognize, is largely language
independent.  But our ability to recall is mainly a side effect of our
use of language.  That is, we remember well -- at least in the sense of
being able to recall -- only those things for which we have build verbal
descriptions.  And we remember them by remembering the verbal descriptions,
which may in turn trigger other associations.

Our sense of time is heavily dependent on our ability to construct mental
models of the past and future.  Such models tend to be too complex to
construct without the use of language.



