Episode 6.31: Why our inside story is inescapably entwined with our outside story through language.

What it is like to be a bat or to be me or to be any kind of sentient creature is changed once we introduce the element of language. But language is not private. We learn language from others and so the meanings that we express in language are collectively made and shared. Therefore our inside story is inextricably linked to and mixed with outside story with a much more common shared story that we all tell about ourselves in cultures and tribes and languages. So my inside story isn’t just mine and isn’t entirely independent of the echoes that other people throw back to me that give me clues about myself because the language embedded is those echoes inevitably includes tribal and collective meanings. Implications of this for self-understanding and in particular for consciousness and self-consciousness and intelligence.