I agree and "Doors of Perception" by Aldous Huxley seems to suggest so as well.
The biggest thing for Heller I guess was that she could all of a sudden perceive, and not only perceive but also understand language. So I'm wondering what would be the equivalent big leap between my current consciousness and the consciousness I cannot yet imagine? What would be the equivalent of "discovery of language" in that scenario? I'm just wondering I don't think we can have the answer before we get there.
That's the question I was trying to answer. I don't think we can quantify or qualify what higher consciousness actually is, but my hypothesis is the perception of time as non-linear is what leads to it, similar how the perception of communication gave rise to Keller's self awareness.
You can “perceive” time as non-linear all you want, but at the end of the day every effect we’ve found has a temporally-preceding cause.
The “higher consciousness” that we experience thanks to language is probably similar to how—for example—autistic savants can perform astonishing feats of mental math. You’re probably better off trying to understand their thought process and replicate it in a more neurotypical brain than you are trying to figure out how to think in terms of non-linear time in a linear-time reality.
Linear can mean two things though: cause-and-effect reality, which, sure seems to be the case. But also - uniform dilation of the experience of time. Which, arguably, we already play with day to day in many subtle ways, and in every conversation/writing/movie/fiction as we distill the thoughts and experiences of others from vastly larger times to our own understanding in the present. We even experience this ebb and flow dilation of the meaningful experience of time as we daydream, work, rest, and sleep - time is rarely experienced with equal attention to every second. It's a dance through the day. And there certainly seem to be (chemical, or meditative) ways to consciously tinker with that effect, or to be more or less skilled with it.
To consider: if you could read every book in existence, watch every movie and show, experience every path through every trail, see through the eyes of every person - as if time had all just happened at once - how would you think? What would your abstraction of the experiences be? How would you condense that into an understanding that could fit back into a single person's experience?
To some extent, this is already the experience of the internet, and of language and culture in general. We already operate at levels of empathy and understanding of possibilities at scales people even 50 years ago didn't come close to. We build many abstraction tools to try and distill these experiences down to wikipedias, reviews, analyses, podcasts. We distill even those too - with a constant meta-cultural debate on what's important, what's cool, what's political, what fits our personal identities, and what our interests and purposes are within the space of potential understanding.
We live in the space of the abstract. We build virtual worlds, games, movies, economies in the abstract. We anticipate a future where the abstract becomes even more tangible, yet also more diverse and ephemeral. We are a flowering seed on the stalk of human consciousness up to this point - just how every generation has been to the ones before it - changing each time.
While this can still all reduce to "language" - the tool used between each generation, and which Keller used to awaken to the living culture of her moment in time - it's not just language anymore. There are more mediums now. A complex story can be told with merely tacit interactions, exploring a virtual physical space with no dialogue. Practical abstractions of these spaces make operating systems. Language and abstract consciousness are embedded into new environments both virtual and real, instilling new tones of consciousness in everyone who interacts with them - just look at your phone use behavior for proof. We are learning how to shape our minds by shaping our spaces. We are learning to control the entire breadth of our experienced reality at once, so we can control ourselves (and each other).
Our limited bandwidths enforce that experiencing these perpetually crafted realities, stories, recorded experiences, journeys - be done one at a time, lest we lose parts of the whole in the abstracted summary. And so we practice witnessing a mix of short abstractions and deep dives, making the most of a variety of experiences, all while balancing a real life and profession. We maintain that bridge between the grounded experience of the now and the abstraction of the digested analyzed fiction of everything else. The limits of the human perception seem to prohibit us from anything else.
But are those limits permanent? Are we forever to experience time in such limited balanced uniform slices? Will we never manage to connect our brains to these machines which experience time so much faster, and less linearly? What would we be if we could experience all these worlds, not through merely abstracted stories and reviews, but through a direct walk - as if we were the eyes of every other person out there, in every second of experience?
Before we get to answer those questions for ourselves - and I don't think they're forever insurmountable technological challenges - it seems likely a new species of intelligence, raised from the start to think exactly like that, is being spawned in AIs. We will see how it communicates the experience back to our lower dimensional slices of experience.
I think the problem with this line of thinking is that we _know_ humanity can speak, and has some innate ability to formulate and learn from language. We don't exactly have a means of proving there's a means of consciousness beyond speaking internally and imagining sensations our nerves can comprehend. To say there may be unlocked consciousness would imply either we're capable of communicating with or feeling a sensation beyond what we can already say is reality. Like what would constitute a consciousness we can't imagine? Seeing on a broader wavelength? Withstanding higher pressures, lower temperatures? Some mention time, or the possibility we could be able to interpret others' brainwaves, but without concrete organs to connect these sensations to, it all seems far too subjective to call consciousness. And what about people that experience consciousness differently, incapable of making images or even words in their heads? Is that backwards, or are we forwards?
The biggest thing for Heller I guess was that she could all of a sudden perceive, and not only perceive but also understand language. So I'm wondering what would be the equivalent big leap between my current consciousness and the consciousness I cannot yet imagine? What would be the equivalent of "discovery of language" in that scenario? I'm just wondering I don't think we can have the answer before we get there.