Through our experience communicating with Koko and with higher primates like chimps, we've come to understand how much 'more conscious' a chimp is than a gorilla, and how we can better assess consciousness without using language. We've seen that the chimp is aware of more of the world than is a gorilla, both inner and outer worlds -- the content of one's own mind and the minds of others.
This really isn't so different from what Dennett espouses, that consciousness is a continuum that begins with a lowly few-cell organism that's aware of nothing in the universe more than a sugar gradient, and ends with another organism (man?) that's attuned to the loftiest truths and actively strives to achieve ideal/complete consciousness, or Satori.
I suspect that on reflection, Dennett would not defend his own "lion-ness" argument for the same reasons you suggest. Koko is an existence proof to the contrary.
I think you're overstating your case. "although the gorilla learned a large number of signs she never understood grammar or symbolic speech" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_ape_language#Koko
> humans that don't have language
Which humans are those? Language arises pretty spontaneously among humans even if they're deaf or blind - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicaraguan_Sign_Language
Yet no amount of exposure will make a dog or ape understand language.
> There is, literally, a part of the brain that if you shut it off, you lose language.
You mean the entire left hemisphere?
> > You mean the entire left hemisphere?
probably not that, that's overkill. there are smaller, more specific areas in the brain directly associated with language faculties. two prominent examples are Broca's Area and Wernicke's Area which are both involved in speech comprehension (but not in control of the physiological apparatus for forming speech sounds).
But it's not. Lions can't talk, almost by definition. A talking lion is necessarily a creature so different from a regular lion that it can't reliably tell you what being a regular lion is like.
It's like how smartphones aren't really phones, they're computers with telephony capabilities. Calling them phones is ridiculous when you really think about it, but we apply that label for historical reasons based on their evolution from early phones. Still, opening up a smartphone won't really tell you anything about how regular phones work.
In other words, completely different brains than regular lions. So, not lions.
A lack of sight from birth results in visual cortex used for other things. Damage to language areas can result in loss of comprehension or production, but neighboring tissue can recover the functionality. The lines we draw are fairly blurry to be honest.
Dennett isn't saying that the language area makes the human but that language and narrative as a cognitive currency are what make us human; the neurobiology is incidental.
When I quiet my mind, look around me passively and simply experience the input of my senses, I can easily suppose that the experience I have in those moments is very similar to the experience of a dog or a chimp in a similar mental state. If I'm not using the higher functions of my brain such as language and only using those functions I share with other mammals, I don't see why I should expect my experience of them to be radically different.
Similarly, many mammals exhibit emotions and desires. We have those too and we evolved them from common ancestors. If a common ancestor of chimps and humans evolved these behaviors and we and chimps exhibit them, why should we necessarily expect the experience of them to be utterly and incomprehensibly different? Especially when many of the resulting behaviors in chimps and humans are so closely analogous and presumably also closely analogous to the behavior of our common ancestor? Surely any claim that we should expect them to be completely different or incomprehensible is the one that is extraordinary and needs to justify itself?
The statements, "Animals are sentient", and, "Animals are not sentient", are opposite positions extrapolated from the same axiomatic premises; that there is some thing called 'sentience', that humans 'have' this 'sentience', and animals either do or do not. Most commonly this kind of thinking also assumes that there is one kind of thing called sentience, (often referred to in religions as a soul). Your phrase, "lack certain tooling", is in line with this logic; it implies that there is some absolute definition, some core kernel of "inner experience" that is separable from ancillary layers that it may leverage. This is analogous to the statement that a computer may be running an operating system, whether it has a keyboard and speakers or not.
What Dennett argues, here and in general, is that this definition of sentience is not nearly holistic enough. That there is no one objective thing called 'sentience'. Instead, there are a bunch of different things; being a lion, being a bat, being a human. Each of these is a model of experience in and of itself, and is defined in and of itself; you can't factor out a common set of experiences or functions and expect them to translate. Part of being a human is being able to, amongst other things, see, hear, taste, and speak. These are not tools built on top of some common 'sentience interface'[1]. To continue (dangerous and leaky) software metaphors, it's much more like a spaghetti-coded monolith[2]; the features -are- the system, and their implementation is part of a feedback loop into the deepest parts of the system, and all the way back out again. The tools aren't 'used by' the 'sentience'; they _are_ the sentience, and the sentience is the tools. A practical demonstration to consider here is something like synesthesia, where what might superficially seem to be well-defined verticals are crossed and interwoven.
And so, when he (extending Wittgenstein) says, "If a lion could talk, we’d understand him just fine. He just wouldn’t help us understand anything about lions.”, he's saying that if such a thing as a talking lion existed, it wouldn't help us understand lions because talking lions and non-talking lions have different experiences, in part because they have different capabilities, different available tools, and thus different architectures. This isn't to say that they don't each have some rich inner life. Just that these inner lives are not mutually comprehensible, shared, or even compatible. In fact, the article, further down, pretty much says just this, albeit in many fewer words:
“If you think there’s a fixed meaning of the word ‘consciousness,’ and we’re searching for that, then you’re already making a mistake,”
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[1] This line of thinking is very close to the "17th century delusion" of something like a homunculus. It is made more palatable by using a word like 'soul', however
[2] or, indeed, something like a neural network; the weights 'mean' something inside the system, but they're all relatively defined, not absolutely; you can't necessarily look inside the system and expect to understand what individual components 'mean' without addressing their entirely relative context.
Suggesting that "consciousness" is some kind of smooth continuum is just plain wrong. Empirically, it's more like a series of discrete abilities that kick in as more and more sophisticated neurological processes become available. (We don't really know that for sure, and Chalmers and the animists/dualists may turn out to be right. But that kind of dualism is very fuzzy, and if you're trying to build intelligent systems it's hard to do anything useful with it.)
One tell-tale is the mirror test. Some animals understand they are the creature in the mirror, while others see a different animal - and respond accordingly, driven by instinct.
That's a binary test. You can't "sort of" see a reflection of yourself.
It's true you can get it wrong some of the time - as a human, you can be tired or confused or drunk or ill or simply in a poorly lit environment.
But the ability to make the distinction, assuming you're functioning normally, is either there or it isn't. You either have the self-abstractive processing needed to operate with a self symbol and to understand that you're experiencing it in the mirror, or you don't. And if you don't, you never will.
There are many other possible binary tests, and consciousness seems to exist as a sum total of the pass/fail profile for all of them.
That's why the lion question is irrelevant - it doesn't go far enough to make this point. It assumes - on the basis of no neurological theory - that being able to talk would transform the instinctual and perceptual mechanisms built into lions so completely they'd become irrelevant, and you'd have something that looked like a lion but thought like a philosopher and was no longer even slightly interested in chasing after antelopes.
This is clearly wrong, because being able to talk hasn't made us stop feeling and acting like primates, or - often - even dumber animals.
With those kinds of details in mind, a multidimensional consciousness scale could be defined quite precisely.
But Dennett's fuzzy argument about being sort-of conscious and sort-of not is - I think - hand-wavey vagueness. It lacks the precision needed to do that usefully.
That's an interesting position for him, considering (IIRC) his co-author Douglas Hofstadter (The Mind's I) has a sister who is a perfectly normal & functional adult except for her complete incapacity for language.
"Our folks’ third and last child, Molly, born in Palo Alto, was, sadly, not what anybody had thought. By four or so, Molly was visibly abnormal — not saying any words at all, nor absorbing any. It wasn’t autism; it was a profound brain malfunction, probably dating from birth or prior to birth, but what was wrong, nobody could say — no diagnosis. Molly just didn’t pick up any words, who knows why, and our Mom and Dad had such anguish for so long on Molly’s account, as did Laura and I. What bad luck."
https://prelectur.stanford.edu/lecturers/hofstadter/autolipo...
The second sentence of the quote does seem strongly opposed to what I know of Dennett's position.
I can't imagine a "normal functioning" human that cannot communicate in any way with others. Surely there are things she can do to express herself and understand others?
Her handlers were gorilla handlers, not linguists. They were willing to accept any combination of hand signs as communication, and they got to decide what was being "communicated".
The phenomenon was no different from dog owners who believe their dog understands English.
That's just silly. We taught Koko the gorilla how to talk, the effort was supremely insightful in helping us to understand animal cognition. Animals communicate with us all the time, they just do it non-verbally. We often just choose not to listen.
A talking lion would still be a lion. He wouldn't be able to tell us directly what life on the fields is like, but that's what the researchers are for.
I would not continue the 17th century delusion of non-sentient animals any further than we absolutely have to. Animals have exceedingly rich inner lives, and so do humans that don't have language. They just lack certain tooling. I'd put not having language on par with not having sight. A handicap for sure, but you're still a person and you still have thoughts.
There is, literally, a part of the brain that if you shut it off, you lose language. Dennett would have you believe that it's that one part that makes us human.