I wonder about consciousness - my inner experience.

I marvel about language - enabling the complexity of

thought and the construction of culture.

Both so common in our human lives of cognition and emotion.

Yet, both so astonishing in our universe of hot gases

and cold rocks.

What's the relationship between consciousness and language?

Like "chicken and egg"?

So, which came first?

Does it matter?

To me, yes, it does matter - because I seek the deep essence

of inner experience.

Is language a cause of consciousness?

Or, the other way around, does consciousness cause language?

How do consciousness and language relate?

I'm Robert Lawrence Kuhn and Closer To Truth is my

journey to find out.

I find the mystery of consciousness and the magic

of language to have at least one fact in common -

both are taken for granted!

Both seem simple and ordinary - which is precisely what

they are not.

Consciousness and language are usually explored separately.

What can I learn by exploring them together?

I ask a philosopher who has made seminal contributions to both

mind and language - John Searle.

John, you're known as a philosopher of consciousness,

but before that, you were a philosopher of language.

How do the two articulate, language and consciousness?

Yeah, I didn't stop being one to start being the other;

I work on both.

Well, the parts of language that are most important to us are

precisely those that are conscious.

Are consciously communicating with each other.

Now, the whole lot of unconscious process is going

on in the brain that make that possible and may enable

us to form sentences and hear each other.

But language is crucial for consciousness, just as

consciousness is crucial for language, because, much of our