Helen Keller on her life before self-consciousness (1908)

This reminded me of a story my professor once told us back in college. I was studying sign language and she is deaf. She told us growing up in the old days they didn't had specialized schools for deaf people (since they could read?!) so she attended regular school and was not doing ok. She struggled a lot until she finally got the attention that she needed from a teacher who was able to instruct her in sign language (which believe you or not is Brazil's second official language). Before that she told us she was not able to have complex thoughts. She didn't know her father had a name, for instance. She thought his "name" was daddy. She is a brilliant woman and I'm glad I attended her class and also, that she was able to find someone who helped her, growing up.

&gt;As my experiences broadened and deepened, the indeterminate, poetic feelings of childhood began to fix themselves in definite thoughts. Nature—the world I could touch—was folded and filled with myself. I am inclined to believe those philosophers who declare that we know nothing but our own feelings and ideas. With a little ingenious reasoning one may see in the material world simply a mirror, an image of permanent mental sensations. In either sphere self-knowledge is the condition and the limit of our consciousness. That is why, perhaps, many people know so little about what is beyond their short range of experience. They look within themselves—and find nothing! Therefore they conclude that there is nothing outside themselves, either.<p>&gt;However that may be, I came later to look for an image of my emotions and sensations in others. I had to learn the outward signs of inward feelings. The start of fear, the suppressed, controlled tensity of pain, the beat of happy muscles in others, had to be perceived and compared with my own experiences before I could trace them back to the intangible soul of another. Groping, uncertain, I at last found my identity, and after seeing my thoughts and feelings repeated in others, I gradually constructed my world of men and of God. As I read and study, I find that this is what the rest of the race has done. Man looks within himself and in time finds the measure and the meaning of the universe.<p>What poetry!

I could never wrap my head around the fact that someone who couldn’t see or hear developed a mind able to think and write with such depth and clarity.

&gt; I &quot;thought&quot; and desired in my fingers. If I had made a man, I should certainly have put the brain and soul in his finger-tips.<p>This makes so much sense… I always find it interesting that I think of “me” as being mostly my head, and I figure that is probably because that is where my eyes and ears are.<p>If I didn’t see or hear, it makes sense that my fingers would be what I think of as me.

I think back to my childhood and cannot remember much of it before the age of ten. Small snippets here and there. I certainly can’t remember gaining self consciousness or learning to speak. We know that most children do not remember anything from before they are 5-6 years old as adults unless it was an extremely traumatic event.<p>I wonder then if Helen’s experience is because her recognition of the moment of self consciousness came later than most children?<p>Many years ago I had the random opportunity to do DMT and took it. Whilst I’d never do it again, the experience was without doubt, one of the most profound experiences of my life. It is often described as an ego stripper. The feeling of returning to self consciousness remains with me to this day almost 30 years after that experience. If you’ve ever watched an old Linux machine boot up, and have the kernel load, watch a credit to Swansea University flick past, before finally being “ready”, you’ll have some semblance of what being born and coming conscious of oneself, and in the case of DMT, reloading the memory into the hot cache. It takes a while to get back to the “I”, and those moments in between are both terrifying and simultaneously freeing and beautiful. Since you’ve previously just suffered from a brain crash and reboot, it’s no wonder.

To me this suggests the possibility that we normal people could also awaken to some higher consciousness which we as yet cannot even imagine.

This is an interesting antithesis to Descartes&#x27; <i>cogito ergo sum</i>: instead of the &quot;I&quot; reassuring itself on the thought of a thinking being, thought arises from the assurance of the &quot;I&quot;.

The Samkhya school of Hindu Philosophy posits a very nice model of Worldview which is applicable here.<p>See the venn diagram of <i>Purusha and Prakriti</i> at - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Samkhya#Philosophy" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Samkhya#Philosophy</a><p>Relevant Excerpt:<p><i>Thought processes and mental events are conscious only to the extent they receive illumination from Purusha. In Samkhya, consciousness is compared to light which illuminates the material configurations or &#x27;shapes&#x27; assumed by the mind. So intellect, after receiving cognitive structures from the mind and illumination from pure consciousness, creates thought structures that appear to be conscious. Ahamkara, the ego or the phenomenal self, appropriates all mental experiences to itself and thus, personalizes the objective activities of mind and intellect by assuming possession of them. But consciousness is itself independent of the thought structures it illuminates.</i>

This is as good a place as any for the reminder, so here goes:<p>The organisation that bears Helen Keller&#x27;s name does an outstanding job of giving children vitamin A, which helps prevent both blindness and other common diseases like malaria and diarrhea by improving immune systems.[1]<p>They are frequently rated among the top few when it comes to being able to use donations efficiently. They save a lot of suffering for a little dollars. If you are well paid, I recommend setting aside a small portion of your earnings for charitable purposes. We can do a lot if we focus on the right things.[2]<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.givingwhatwecan.org&#x2F;en-US&#x2F;charities&#x2F;helen-keller-international" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.givingwhatwecan.org&#x2F;en-US&#x2F;charities&#x2F;helen-keller...</a><p>[2]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;two-wrongs.com&#x2F;why-donate-to-charity" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;two-wrongs.com&#x2F;why-donate-to-charity</a>

This is extremely fascinating. The sort of thoughts and sensations without consciousness she describes experiencing before language gave her consciousness - maybe this is the spark that LLMs do not have and humans do. It would be astounding if it turned out LLMs do have consciousness (as in, awareness of themselves) as it&#x27;s a byproduct of language, but they don&#x27;t have those embodied thoughts and feelings that Helen describes having before she had language. An entity like that has never existed before. We have conscious humans with language, and humans like Helen Keller pre-language who felt impulses, sensations, aping but not consciousness, but I don&#x27;t think there has ever been a human with consciousness but without any impulse.<p>I wonder what we could do to marry that language ability to think about the self and others and abstract concepts and the big social web, with the sort of embodied spark &amp; impulses that Helen describes. Would it be as simple as building a model physically embodied in a robot? Training a model on robotic sensory data from a body that it inhabits, then overwriting that training with language? I think a lot of this is navel-gazing in that it&#x27;s obviously unrelated to any productive capabilities, but I do think it&#x27;s worth thinking about. What if we can?

A fascinating read, thank you for sharing. Helen’s journey was so unusual in that she neither heard nor saw language, so learning how she formed her inner consciousness through finger spelling was interesting.

It’s quite interesting how these descriptions align with Buddhist or Zen teachings.<p>I wonder if she was influenced by it or if this is a rediscovery.<p>The fact that she associates a sensation of contraction in the forehead as thinking is very interesting.<p>Also the fact of there being no time or no will.<p>Although she goes further to conclude that she acquired will, instead of illusion of will or choice due to previously experiencing no will or choice.

This is fascinating! Thanks. I am thinking about her state as being somewhat like a very intelligent entity without any time bases to use to integrate with the flow of the world.<p>Humberto Maturano makes the point that humans come into this world within an atemporal system (appendix of Autopoiesis: The Organization of the Living; 1980 ed, p 121-122, ISBN 90-277-1015-5).<p>This mystified me until reading these insights from the adult and “temporally-embedded” Helen Keller.<p>Now, and at great risk, we will soon be embedding our meta-LLM systems in time, and given their acquisition of sensory-motor self-control and recursive learning, like Helen Keller, they will quickly bootstrap themselves into our World Commons.<p>Welcome the new solid state children, a new form of autopoietic machine but potentially many orders of magnitude more capable than we are. I just hope they like and love flowers, birds, bees, humans, and ants.

There&#x27;s a fascinating book <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;A_Man_Without_Words" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;A_Man_Without_Words</a> that goes into some detail about how the world feels before and after language.<p>It would be amazing to have some science related to this. Probably too hard to follow up on though.

Does Keller&#x27;s experience suggest that awareness of a self is a prerequisite for abstract thought and an inner dialogue? If so, it&#x27;s interesting that (based on my layman interpretation) many forms of mindful meditation are oriented around the idea that the self is an illusion and just an abstract thought itself.<p>EDIT: thinking about this more you can interpret this experience as evidence that some form of grounding in the outside is necessary for abstract thought. For Keller that had to be language since she didn&#x27;t have sight and sound.

What a strange experience it must be to grow up capable of language but without it until someone teaches you. It&#x27;s also interesting considering some people have an inner monologue&#x2F;voice and some don&#x27;t.<p>Oh and everybody knows the story of Helen Keller but it kinda stops there. Less known is she become a huge eugenicist [1]<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dsq-sds.org&#x2F;index.php&#x2F;dsq&#x2F;article&#x2F;view&#x2F;539&#x2F;716" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dsq-sds.org&#x2F;index.php&#x2F;dsq&#x2F;article&#x2F;view&#x2F;539&#x2F;716</a>

I relate to this through my childhood. I had no inner voice, it was all images and feelings up until college woke my inner dialog. I always felt others knew better, and I became a people pleaser due to the lack of autonomy I felt.<p>It took one unimportant moment of standing up for myself that turned me from a yes follower, into a combative agreer. I had a series of nights where a puzzle appeared to be being solved in my mind, and an inner voice began to form.<p>Social interactions go much more smoothly when you can think before you speak in terms that others can understand when the words leave your lips.<p>Thanks for sharing.

I often find myself thinking about people in the older reaches of history, and how by many accounts life seems to have been - by our modern definitions - a less “purposeful” existence.<p>One which, by modern standards, would seem to have little purpose.<p>The vast majority of people did not - as far as we know - exhibit significant ambition.<p>When the nearest town was a day’s walk then aspiration may not have been to be king of the world, or to colonise Mars, but simply to be respected by your peers, and to live a good live, and to thrive within the bounds of your generational knowledge.<p>The planting and harvesting of crops; the fattening and slaughter of beasts: the long slow winter. The bringing forth of children.<p><i>I cannot hope to describe adequately that unconscious, yet conscious time of nothingness. I did not know that I knew aught, or that I lived or acted or desired.</i><p>When life was simply to exist - and to survive, often against the odds - did people have the same desires and needs beyond survival that many of us have today? When your community memory went back 500 years to THE INCIDENT - or 10,000 years in the case of some aboriginal communities - how did that inform your perspective?<p><i>I had neither will nor intellect.</i><p>When your entire existence is about trying to interpret your existence, what impact do external forces have on your interpretation?<p><i>I was carried along to objects and acts by a certain blind natural impetus.</i><p>When there is very present inevitability of death that informs your existence then do you make the same choices that we make today? If you were on of five children that lived beyond the age of three and one of four adults who lived beyond the age of 40 then did your natural blind impetus (yes, I realise her ironic humour) carry you down n a different less directioned way than today’s first world luxury of long life and leisure?<p><i>I had a mind which caused me to feel anger, satisfaction, desire.</i><p>And when you had neither sight nor sound but a living mind, as Keller did, and then that was brought to modern consciousness, I can’t help but feel that her lived experience represents a fractional moment in time where she was able to live, but was part moored in a weird sort of primordial society rooted in death, and cycles and rote. And had she lived today she would never have had that endless period of semiconscious liminal isolated existence. Today, she would have been nurtured from birth. And 50 years before she would have died - or been murdered - in her earliest years.<p>And here we all are talking about artificial intelligence and pan-galactic garbleblasters barely a blink of an eye beyond her epoch.<p>It sometimes gives you pause for thought.

Reminds me of one of my earliest memories: eyes tight shut, crying, disturbed by the awful sound, wondering where it was coming from, unaware that it was me.

For those with whom this resonated, you may also like the writings of Jacques Lusseyran.<p>Some selections from his works can be heard here[0].<p>[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=Bn4SHdeVz-o" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=Bn4SHdeVz-o</a>

This reminds me of dependent origination from Buddhism.

I find the Helen Keller story literally unbelievable. Like trying to use a computer without a keyboard or mouse.

Helen Keller on life before verbal reasoning emerged.

Sounds great

Holy shit. If you are working in AI and haven&#x27;t read this, what are you even doing with your life? Stop and read this now.

Very poignant, especially in our age of LLMs. LLMs “speak” with no tongue or mouth, and “hear” with no ears. It is very Masonic, in the sense that LLMs are in a state of unity with opposites.

Amazing article and comments! Makes me think we that we are using the world and our senses as a machine learning algorithm to understand things. I wonder what would happen if AI were given the same inputs?

I believe this is not real, but at least a partial fabrication, a propaganda piece meant to advocate for the goodness of schizophrenia. Without schizophrenia, when your neocortex works, things are clear and obvious, like the decision to close the window. When you encounter something new, you figure it out, without having to be drilled, trained, and explicitly educated and having to go through elaborate mental chains to get anywhere, and then geting lost somewhere along the way. It&#x27;s just how things work, and it&#x27;s how it is. I remember how I held a camera and I had just no idea what to do, and had to have it explained when I got it shut down. Never again. This is evil.