The Unity of Consciousness and the Consciousness of Unity

Abstract

Every language-learning child eventually automatically segments the organization of word sequences into natural units. Within the natural units, processing of normal conversation reveals a disconnect between listener’s representation of the sound and meaning of utterances. A compressed or absent word at a point early in a sequence is unintelligible until later acoustic information, yet listeners think they perceived the earlier sounds and their interpretation as they were heard. This discovery has several implications: Our conscious unified experience of language as we hear and simultaneously interpret it is partly reconstructed in time-suspended “psychological moments”; the “poverty of the stimulus language learning problem” is far graver than usually supposed; the serial domain where such integration occurs may be the “phase,” which unifies the serial percept with structural assignment and meanings; every level of language processing overlaps with others in a “computational fractal”; each level analysis-by-synthesis interaction of associative-serial and structure dependent processes.