Deacon’s Symbolic Communication (Human Consciousness)
Neuroanthropologist Terrence Deacon asserts that symbolic communication has radically altered the nature of human consciousness, whereas consciousness broadly is coextensive with the development of brains in animals that regulate their movement with the aid of long-distance senses, such as vision, because of the predictive capacity this affords and requires.
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Terrence Deacon
Professor of Anthropology
Terrence W. Deacon is an American neuroanthropologist and Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. He holds a Ph.D. in Biological Anthropology from Harvard and is affiliated with Berkeley’s Cognitive Science faculty. His research explores the evolutionary origins of language and symbolic thought, bridging neuroscience, anthropology, and semiotics.
Key Takeaways
Core Claim
Human consciousness is transformed by symbolic communication into a virtual, meaning-seeking awareness.
How It Works
Symbol use lets us think beyond the immediate world, accessing others’ minds and abstract concepts.
Distinguishing Idea
Symbolic thought makes us a "symbolically eusocial" species with extended, shared mentality.
Implications
Enables memory, emotion, ethics, and aesthetics far beyond what animal consciousness supports.
Raises the Question
Does symbolic communication create a fundamentally different kind of mind in humans?
Deacon’s Symbolic Communication (Human Consciousness)
Neuroanthropologist Terrence Deacon asserts that symbolic communication has radically altered the nature of human consciousness, whereas consciousness broadly is coextensive with the development of brains in animals that regulate their movement with the aid of long-distance senses, such as vision, because of the predictive capacity this affords and requires. However, symbolic communication has given humans the capacity of being conscious of a virtual realm that has become untethered from physical contiguity and immediacy (Deacon, 1998, 2024).[1]
Moreover, by virtue of the way that symbolic communication allows us indirect access to others’ thoughts and experiences, we have become a symbolically eusocial species that derives our personal identities and ability to think from a physically and temporally extended shared mentality. Some, he says, have referred to this structure as “Extended Mind.”
Deacon sees this symbolic mode of cognition as enabling the emergence of novel kinds of remembering and unprecedented forms of emotional experience, as well as unprecedented forms of value, such as ethical norms and aesthetic sense. This is also, he says, the source of our feeling of incompleteness and need to find Meaning.
Footnote
[1]. Note that Terrence Deacon has two theories of consciousness on the Landscape: “Self-Organized Constraint and Emergence of Self” and “Symbolic Communication” here. This is not an error; nor does it imply that the two cannot be woven together. Rather, it recognizes that, at this time, the two are sufficiently different, and sufficiently interesting, to warrant their separate locations.
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Footnotes
1.
Note that Terrence Deacon has two theories of consciousness on the Landscape: “Self-Organized Constraint and Emergence of Self” and “Symbolic Communication” here. This is not an error; nor does it imply that the two cannot be woven together. Rather, it recognizes that, at this time, the two are sufficiently different, and sufficiently interesting, to warrant their separate locations.