Can We Talk? Human Language as the Business End of Consciousness

Recently, I wrote about thehard problemof consciousness, made much harder by the effort to reduce consciousness to a -- for example -- fourth state of matter. Which is somewhat like trying to reduce the U.S. Constitution to a flavor of ice cream.

Naturalism (the view that it's material nature all the way down) hasn't fared much better with human language than with consciousness. The problem is that the things we communicate to each other are often stuff that nature never otherwise knew. Wheth...