I do not deny consciousness to animals. Consciousness is a scale, not a dichotomy; analogue, not digital. That is, it is not either there or not there. It is half-true and half-false, like fuzzy logic. Throughout evolution, it has grown continuously in brightness; but “continuous” means that there are no breaks in the curve, not that the slope is constant. In fact, it has probably grown in spurts and plateaus, like so many other things.

The human type of consciousness lies along that continuous curve, but that does not mean that it is not a novel, emergent quality. It is an instance of quantity passing into quality, which is the essence of emergence. It is not the first spurt of growth in the brightness of consciousness among evolving life forms, but we know nothing about the earlier ones, though we can surmise that they have occurred. It would make sense that a mammal would be more aware than a worm, or a worm more than an amoeba, just to take some widely separated reference points.

A philosopher whose name I forgot postulates that consciousness began with human language, only about 100,000 years ago. Since I believe that consciousness is a very ancient property of all living things, I have to disagree; but I could accept the statement that human-type conscious-ness began with language at that fairly recent time. In the life of an individual, it begins at about age 3, just when language really ripens with a reasonably large vocabulary and the ability to construct sentences. Also, and perhaps significantly, most of us have no direct memories of the time before we were 3 years old. Some kind of maturation takes place at about that time.

With humanity as a whole (the genus Homo), this type of maturation may have occurred with the emergence of modern man, Homo sapiens, 100,000 years ago, which I am surmising coincided with the origin of language. (I don’t think that has been proved.) Perhaps Neanderthals did not have langua-ge, and that was the crucial difference. (That too is a guess.) Therefore, by analogy, the time 100,000 years ago was the time when our genus was about 3 years old, in terms of equivalence with a single human life span.

Just what was the long time of coexistence of Neander-thals and Sapiens like? Was there deliberate genocide of those who could not speak? Was there only the “structural violence” of competition for means of livelihood? Just why did Neanderthals become extinct? Why was there no inter-breeding, when perhaps it was possible? Or was it not possible? I have never seen or read or heard any answers to these questions.

The Whorf hypothesis (not fully accepted) states that thought is impossible without words. This is not true: thoughts form and ripen even in sleep to give full-blown solutions to problems in the morning that were posed the night before. And the mute right brain hemisphere thinks, though in different ways. But a certain type and quality of thought requires words; to that extent, Whorf is right. What type and quality? Lucid (aware and controllable like lucid dreams), conceptual (abstract), and communicable to other persons (inter-subjective).

The “awakening” to language and consciousness can be compared to everyday awakening from sleep. As morning dawns (unless we wake up to the shrill unnatural insistence of an alarm clock), images come, like colours, picture cards, random thoughts, quasi-dreams (but lucid ones, or evolving from such) – like visual music, pure patterns. But then meaning comes, and words, and thoughts and sentences – and we are awake, grateful to be alive. The same “border” patterns occur as we go to sleep at night.

The “dream-time” of Australian Aborigines may have been like that all their lives. They were among the first modern humans scattered from Africa to all corners of the world, according to Colin Renfrew (“World Linguistic Diversity”, Scientific American, Jan. 1994). They may have been at the edge of the transition to full language and consciousness – the Awakening from Dreamtime – still dimly remembered.

Is the human brain’s right hemisphere still in Dream-time, doing the other – more ancient – type of thinking? It is possible to survive with only this type of thinking, as the Australian Aborigines did. And since right-brain type of thinking CAN solve problems, as in sleep, it is certainly worth preserving. And it gives us continuity with the rest of Nature – our living cousins throughout creation.

However, Personhood should probably be defined in terms of the linguistic type of consciousness. Humanization in evolution then means primarily the attainment of personhood. One day, I expect, the corresponding structure in the brain will be found that corresponds to this transition. The Neanderthal brain was just as big as the Sapiens brain, but there may have been a structural difference. Brain SIZE is not all that matters. Quality, not quantity, counts; perhaps the same number of neurons, but different connectivity.

Women are supposed to be less “lateralized” than men; i.e. have less differentiation between left brain and right brain. This would give women more continuity between the different levels of consciousness, not such a sharp sepa-ration between the natural and the human. I will refrain from judging either mode as superior or inferior; it simply adds to the variey and richness of personhood.

Life is supposed to self-organize “at the edge between order and chaos” Just as dreamtime emerges at the edge between day and night. And at that beginning was The Word – human language. Just as, 4.5 billion years earlier, The Word that emerged was the first genetic code.