Sophia’s Reviews > Consciousness: How Our Brains Turn Matter into Meaning > Status Update

I'm 70 percent of the way through this book and he keeps talking about the "ways that the tool of language has shaped our brains and consciousness" ... Expect he's NEVER ONCE EXPLAINED WHAT THAT MEANS ON A PHYSICAL LEVEL beyond a few lines about songbirds. Which seems like a very tenuous connection if he won't even grant chimps a sense of self. As a linguist, im just in a very GIVE ME THE FACTS kinda mood right now

I'm irritated that he feels the need to go on this long rant about how chimps probably don't have a sense of self because this is a special human thing. The critiques he makes about the mirror experiments are based on absolutely no data and simply on some ideas he had about how the experimenters could have possibly fucked it up. And he seems to actually know so little about the brains of non human primates

This might be an overstatement but I feel like this man just criticized behaviorism for not being materialist enough! He'suniversally critical though because he also said that Daniel Dennets meme theory was too idealist as well. Now he's moved on to Chompsky's innate grammar. But he wants to build a large part of his argument on language and Im very skeptical of anyone who does that because so many people do it wrong