Drabkin’s “Language” as Fundamental Expression

Philosopher/jurist Daniel Drabkin posits conscious experience as a property of human behavioral immersion (contra functioning) within an environment empowered by a particular understanding of “language” as the fundamental expression or self-manifestation of reality (Drabkin, 2025a, 2025b).

Core Insight: Language as Expression

He contends that the notion of consciousness as a kind of content (a qualitative or meaningful substance) that must be accounted for in agentic terms and explicated by way of relational schematics to a concrete underlying substrate (physiology, computation, etc.) is metaphysically erroneous. Rather, agency itself—whether functional or experiential—inheres in an entity's maturation as an intrinsic component of a larger whole.

Drabkin says that his core insight and theoretical framework is that the notion of “language” (interpretable manifestation)—construed as the expressive (rather than potential or processual) essence of reality—is the only truly metaphysical “constant.” According to this view, the fundamental property of reality, in its most general sense, is not “existence” (to be) but “expression” or self-manifestation (to articulate itself).

He claims, radically, that this view of “language” is neither a communicative medium among group members nor an instrument for individual cognitive or experiential aptitude (e.g., sensual/emotional qualia, reflection, inquiry, survival, creativity, etc.). Rather, it constitutes the ultimate existential span for any field of coherence or conceivable phenomenology, from the most sophisticated instances of human subjectivity to the fundamental laws of nature.

Language, Meaning, and the Hard Problem

Drabkin seeks to substantiate this radical view by shifting the focus from ongoing, “matured” language application (which is how consciousness and subjectivity are typically, and he says, erroneously, approached and analyzed) to the preliminary phase of language acquisition.

He challenges the view whereby human learning and meaning generation are reducible to brain processes and computational manipulation and critically refutes the claim that it is about identifying the “essence of what makes something (e.g., a cat) something” through pattern recognition (Gawdat, 2025) or that human language acquisition resembles the “procedural learning” displayed in acquiring performative proficiency (Sejnowski, 2025).

He argues that these and other views (e.g., Kastrup, 2025; Bach, 2025; LeCun, 2025) fundamentally misrepresent how humans initially integrate into the narrative-imbued landscape of first-hand experience (agentic subjectivity). He says that meaning does not stem from “injecting” ethereal intention into words and other forms or structures of articulation but rather from the functional-environmental context of language use in “language games,” which are integral to its earliest acquisitive phases. Specifically, he cites Wittgensteinian “language games” as relevant for the body-mind problem (Wittgenstein, 2018).

Drabkin also offers a radical critique of the notion of “what it means to be like something” as the purported core of the “hard problem” of consciousness. He argues that this notion is philosophically vacuous, providing no viable starting point for exploration or further consideration. Since any articulation (assertive, reflective, interrogative, and so on) is itself a manifestation of “to be like something,” the very possibility of considering the latter (relating to it cognitively), let alone investigating it, is logically and existentially impossible. His approach to consciousness, Drabkin says, offers a theoretical framework that bypasses that fundamental logico-categorical trap.

Animals, AI, and Expression

Drabkin's perspective, asserting language as a metaphysically foundational behavior, dissolves the perceived distinction of humans as “language animals” and reduces the seeming discontinuity between animals' performative engagement with their environment and humans' non-performative interaction with scenery to a conceptual error or illusion.

The syntactic expression of meaning, he argues, is not singular except in evolutionary terms. Existentially, its distinction from other modes of expressibility lies in its form, not its kind. In other words, it is not exceptional in terms of agentic aptitude per se.

Other animals also perceive their environment, interact therewith, and even perceive themselves as part of their environment. For strictly evolutionary reasons, they lack the capacity for 'reflective' contemplation and the syntactic category of I/me, but aren't denied, for that very fact, the possibility of self-expression. Since meaningful subsistence in the world essentially emerges—the capacity therefore is initially acquired—across the biological realm via behavior in concrete practical contexts, its later, mature (and equally contextual) manifestations throughout that realm, namely among all its inhabitants, allow and retain an equally vibrant level of agentic—percepto-conceptual—relatability, and the syntactic form humans had evolved to be able to do so does not disqualify other forms of the same phenomenal category (self-expression as part of a larger whole).

The implications for artificial intelligence, Drabkin says, are profound. The way these systems “grow” (learn, improve) has nothing to do with human cognitive development. Going beyond the familiar differences (e.g., statistical processing in cyberspace vs. purposeful growth as a corporeal entity in an empiric environment), he highlights the lack of “expression” (as distinct from intention) at the core of artificial semantics, deriving from an equal absence of immersion in an environment that is expressive (as a whole).

Drabkin argues that this is the ultimate reason AI is categorically devoid of the possibility to comprehensively mimic the buildup of human agentic properties. He claims that his unique philosophical framework posits his kind of language (rather than consciousness) as a “property of the world” and argues that the brain acts as a machine for the world, rather than for the individual agent, to “express itself.” This perspective, he says, offers a novel and critical lens for evaluating both consciousness and the actual limitations of AI and may even affect philosophical ambitions per se.

Drabkin says his approach to consciousness resonates with enactivist approaches, whereas his original contribution lies in the perspective of language as the fundamental expression or self-manifestation of reality, instantiated in human consciousness via language acquisition.