I agree with most of your points, but I see no reason to assume that someone who cannot use language is not conscious. After all, use of language is just one o

I agree with most of your points, but I see no reason to assume that someone who cannot use language is not conscious. After all, use of language is just one of the brain’s functions. It’s not an emergent result of logical reasoning or something like that. On the contrary, it’s a task the brain evolved to perform, and has “hardware acceleration” for – that is, regions of its genetically encoded floor plan which are dedicated to it. If that accelerator is disabled due to not having been initialized properly… that’s no reason to conclude that the rest of the system is also defective. It does seem clear that language assists consciousness in most people – e.g. most people report experiencing an internal narrative. But some people don’t. And even if everyone did, I don’t think that would be strong enough evidence to conclude that language is required for consciousness.