No Conscious Awareness for Me, Thanks

This is #54 in a series of month-end reflections on the state of the world, and other things that come to mind, as I walk and hike in my local community. my own photo, from a number of years ago As I trace the path around the lake, I stop to watch a mother pushing a baby carriage who is talking to her baby and pointing excitedly at a mother goose and her goslings nearby. It’s obvious what the woman is thinking. But what, I wonder, is the baby thinking? Is the baby thinking at all? How exactly does one ‘think’ without the scaffolding of language? And is the mother goose thinking, or just behaving purely instinctively to do what evolution has dictated needs to be done to protect the goslings? And, of course, what are the goslings thinking? And if only the woman is thinking, in the sense of ‘consciously’ conceptualizing, making sense of what her sense perceptions are signalling to her eyes and hence to her brain, what exactly is going on in the brain of the ‘unconscious’ creatures? I’ve…