Okay, the reason why I believe the way things appear to us more nearly approximate their structure and character than the way these same things appear to other animals is that our perceptual experience of reality is intellectually enlightened by commonsense categories and empirical concepts that are derived from the common core of our ordinary reality; theirs is not. In addition, other animals are less likely to be able to correct all the tricks the senses play that result in deceptions rather than perceptions.
Human beings have learned how the senses produce illusions and hallucinations. They know how to correct or avoid them. They are, therefore, seldom misled into mistaking an illusory appearance for a veridical (truthful) perception of reality, and if some persons are misled, others can always be found to correct them.
HitEmUp21 said:
Does this consciousness exist outside of social conditioning? Or, alternatively, is the influence of any conditioning not strong enough to distort the human-commonality we share?
Yes, it exists outside of social conditioning, just as reality exists outside of what we think about it. And this is because we share the same mind. I believe what you’re asking is do human beings, living in the same world, have divergent mentalities because of the diverse languages they use and because of the differing cultural conditions under which they have been reared? Or is there one human mind, having specific properties common to all members of the human species?
My answer is the latter. There is one and the same human mind in all members of the species, not a primitive and a civilized mind, not a Western and an oriental mind, not an ancient and a modern mind. The many different languages that human beings use result in superficial differences in the way they think, none of which is an insuperable barrier to communication. The many diverse cultures in which human beings are reared result in superficial differences in the habits they form and the customs practiced, none of which abolishes the common humanity that is most significantly represented by the human mind they all possess.
If something is perceptible, any human being should be able to perceive it. If something is intelligible, any human being should be able to understand it. If something is thinkable, any human being should be able to think it. If something is knowable, any human being should be able to know it.
Of course, there are many exceptions to this statement of an ideal in principle. But they result from intellectual deficiencies or other mental impairments, such as sensory deprivations or loss of sensory acuity, never from language defects. Given adequate sensory equipment and adequate intellectual power, there are no unsurmountable obstacles to communication between one person and another, because what one of them can teach, the other can learn.
The ideal in principle thus remains: all conventional languages are completely translatable; all human experience (all that is public, not private) and all human thought are completely communicable. These two facts—universal translatability and universal communicability—attest to the universality of the human mind and intellect regardless of the diversity of human languages.
I focused on differences of language above, but I can take any cultural difference and get the same results. Not only is reality one and the same for all human beings. Not only does our experience of that reality have a common core in which we all share. But by virtue of having the same human nature with the same species-specific properties, each of us has a mind and intellect that is essentially the same in all other human beings.
The experienced reality of the world in which we live is not a construction of our minds, even though our experience of it is mind-dependent as its reality is not. In the course of human history many different worldviews--models or
versions of the world--have been developed, varying from culture to culture, from time to time, and from one stage of religious, cultural, scientific or philosophical speculation to another.
These are all products of the intellectual imagination. The plurality of worlds thus pictured or imagined should never be confused with the world that we perceive. If some are better and others worse, the only measure of that is the degree to which they can be harmonized and made coherent with our commonsense knowledge of reality, which, being based on the common core of ordinary human experience, is the same for all of us.
The innate nature of the human mind is the same wherever there are human beings—under all cultural conditions at all times and places. But that one and same human mind is nurtured differently under different cultural conditions. What the cultural anthropologists are describing when they report diverse patterns of human behavior in different subsets of the human population are all nurtural differences. These nurtural differences exist as acquired behavioral habits or dispositions. Underlying diverse habits are the same natural powers or potentialities.
Nurtural differences should never be interpreted either as natural differences or as a basis for denying the existence of a common nature. All the forms of racism and sexism with which we are acquainted have been prejudices bred by the error of attributing to nature what are only the products of nurture.
By correcting this error, Rousseau corrected one of Aristotle’s most serious mistakes, the mistake of thinking that some men are by nature slaves. Those who are nurtured as slaves will appear to have slavish natures. Similarly, females nurtured as inferior human beings will appear to have natures inferior to males. It’s this substitution of nurture for nature that causes the error made by cultural anthropologists and philosophical existentialists in the twentieth century.
So, like languages, all culturally conditioned differences in human behavior are superficial nurtural differences as compared with the underlying sameness of specific human nature.
