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C00002 00002	#.  %3Consciousness and self-consciousness%1.  In accordance with the
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#.  %3Consciousness and self-consciousness%1.  In accordance with the
general  approach  of  this  paper,  a  being  is  considered
self-conscious iff it has certain beliefs about itself. However,
we must remember that beliefs are taken as sentences in our language,
and  by ascribing beliefs  we are  not asserting that  the being uses
that language directly or any other language.

	Here is  a hypothesis  arising  from artificial  intelligence
concerning the relation between language and thought.  Imagine a
person or machine  that represents  information internally in  a huge  network.
Each  node of  the  network has  references  to other  nodes  through
relations.    (If the system has  a  variable  collection of
relations, then the relations have to be represented by nodes, and
we get a symmetrical theory if we suppose that each node is connected
to a  set of pairs of other nodes).  We can imagine this structure to
have a long term part and also extremely temporary parts representing
current  %thoughts%1.    Naturally,  each  being  has  a
its own network depending on  its own experience. A  thought is then  a
temporary  node  currently  being  referenced  by  the  mechanism  of
consciousness.  Its  meaning is determined by its references to other
nodes which  in turn  refer to  yet other  nodes.   Now consider  the
problem of communicating a thought to another being.

	Its full communication would  involve transmitting the entire
network  that  can  be  reached  from  the  given  node, and this would
ordinarily constitute the entire experience of the being.   More than
that,  it would be  necessary to  also communicate the  programs that
that take action on the basis of encountering certain nodes.  Even if
all this could be transmitted, the recipient would still have to find
equivalents  for  the  information  in  terms  of  its  own  network.
Therefore, thoughts  have to  be translated  into  a public  language
before they can be commuunicated.

	A language  is also a network  of associations
and  programs.  However, certain  of the nodes  in this network (more
accurately a %2family%1 of networks, since no two people speak precisely the same
language) are  associated with words  or set phrases.  Sometimes the
translation from thoughts to sentences is easy,
because large  parts of the  private
networks are taken from the public network, and there is an advantage
in preserving the correspondence.  However, the translation is always
approximate (in sense that still lacks a technical definition),
and some  areas of
experience  are  difficult to  translate  at  all.  Sometimes this is for
intrinsic  reasons, and  sometimes because  particular cultures don't
use language in this area.  (It is my impression that cultures differ
in the  extent to which information about  facial appearance that can
be used for recognition is  verbally transmitted).  According to  this
scheme, the "deep structure"  of a publicly expressible thought  is a
node in the public network.  It is translated into the deep structure
of a sentence as a tree  whose terminal nodes are the nodes to  which
words or set  phrases are attached.  This "deep  structure" then must
be translated into a string in a spoken or written language.

	The need to use language to express thought also applies when
we have to ascribe thoughts to other beings, since  we cannot put the
entire network into a single sentence.

→→→→→→→→→→There is more to come here about what ideas are ←←←←←←←←←←←
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