Consciousness as the highest level of mental reflection.
Consciousness and unconsciousness
Main questions:
1. Basic approaches to the problem of consciousness.
2. Basic psychological characteristics of consciousness.
3. Theory of consciousness by K.K. Platonov. Structure of consciousness.
4. Form consciousness.
5. Consciousness and unconsciousness.
CONSCIOUSNESS is the highest level of mental reflection of reality, characteristic only of humans.
In the history of psychological science, consciousness has been the most difficult problem, which has not yet been solved from a materialistic or idealistic position; many difficult questions have arisen on the path of its materialistic understanding. Definition consciousness faces many difficulties associated with very different approaches to this problem. The problem of consciousness is one of the most global and complex problems in psychology.
1. Basic approaches to the problem of consciousness
"Consciousness, – wrote V. Wundt, – lies only in the fact that we generally find in ourselves any mental states". Consciousness psychologically represents, from this point of view, a kind of inner glow, which can be bright or darkened, or even fades away completely, as, for example, during deep fainting (Ledd). Therefore it can only have purely formal properties; they are expressed by the so-called psychological laws of consciousness: unity, continuity, narrowness, etc. According to W. James, consciousness is "master of mental functions", that is, in fact, consciousness is identified with the subject. Consciousness is a special mental space, a “scene” (K. Jaspers). Consciousness can be a condition of psychology, but not its subject (Natorp). Although its existence is a basic and completely reliable psychological fact, it cannot be defined and can only be deduced from itself. Consciousness is qualityless, because it itself is quality - the quality of mental phenomena and processes; this quality is expressed in their presentation (representation) to the subject (Stout). This quality cannot be revealed, it can only exist or not exist.
A common feature of all the above views is an emphasis on the psychological lack of quality of consciousness.
Representatives of the French sociological school (Durkheim, Halbwachs, etc.) have a slightly different point of view. The psychological lack of quality of consciousness is preserved here, but consciousness is understood as a plane onto which concepts, concepts that make up the content of social consciousness are projected. By this, consciousness is identified with knowledge: consciousness is “co-knowledge”, a product of the communication of knowledge.
L. S. Vygotsky’s system of views on consciousness is of interest. He writes that consciousness is the subject’s reflection of reality, his activities, and himself. “What is conscious is that which is transmitted as a stimulus to other reflex systems and evokes a response in them.” “Consciousness is, as it were, contact with oneself.” Consciousness is consciousness, but only in the sense that individual consciousness can exist only in the presence of social consciousness and language, which is its real substrate. Consciousness is not given initially and is not generated by nature, consciousness is generated by society, it is produced. Therefore, consciousness is not a postulate or a condition of psychology, but its problem is the subject of concrete scientific psychological research. Moreover, the process of interiorization (that is, the growth of external activity into internal) does not consist in the fact that external activity moves into the pre-existing internal “plane of consciousness”; it is the process by which this inner plan is formed. The elements of consciousness, its “cells,” according to Vygotsky, are verbal meanings.
A. N. Leontiev’s views on the problem of consciousness largely continue the line of Vygotsky. Leontyev believes that consciousness in its immediacy is the picture of the world that is revealed to the subject, in which he himself, and his actions and states are included. Initially, consciousness exists only in the form of a mental image that reveals the world around it to the subject; at a later stage, activities also become objects of consciousness, the actions of other people are realized, and through them the subject’s own actions. Internal actions and operations are generated that take place in the mind, on the “plane of consciousness.” Consciousness-image also becomes consciousness-reality, that is, it is transformed into a model in which you can act mentally.
According to B. G. Ananyev, “consciousness as a mental activity is a dynamic relationship between sensory and logical knowledge, their system, which works as a single whole and determines each individual knowledge. This working system is the state of human wakefulness, or, in other words, the specifically human characteristic of wakefulness is consciousness”[i]. According to Ananyev, consciousness acts as an integral part of the effect of action. The primary facts of consciousness are the child’s perception and experience of the results of his own actions. Gradually, not only the effects of actions, but also the processes of the child’s activity begin to be realized. Individual development of consciousness is carried out through the transition from the consciousness of individual moments of action to purposeful, planned activity. In this case, the entire state of wakefulness becomes a continuous “stream of consciousness”, switched from one type of activity to another. "Consciousness as an active reflection of objective reality is the regulation of human practical activity in the world around him".
According to L.M. Wecker, consciousness in a broad sense covers the highest levels of integration of cognitive, emotional and regulatory-volitional processes. In a narrower sense, consciousness is the result of the integration of cognitive and emotional processes.
2. Regardless of what philosophical positions the researchers of consciousness adhered to, the so-called reflective ability those. the readiness of consciousness to understand other mental phenomena and itself. The presence of such an ability in a person is the basis for the existence and development of psychological sciences, because without it this class of phenomena would be closed to knowledge. Without reflection, a person could not even have the idea that he has a psyche.
The first psychological characteristic of consciousness a person includes the feeling of being a cognizing subject, the ability to mentally imagine existing and imaginary reality, to control and manage one’s own mental and behavioral states, the ability to see and perceive the surrounding reality in the form of images.
Feeling oneself as a cognizing subject means that a person recognizes himself as a being separated from the rest of the world, ready and capable of studying and knowing this world, i.e. to obtain more or less reliable knowledge about it. A person is aware of this knowledge as phenomena that are different from the objects to which they relate, can formulate this knowledge, expressing it in words, concepts, various other symbols, transfer it to another person and future generations of people, store, reproduce, work with knowledge as a special object. With loss of consciousness (sleep, hypnosis, illness, etc.), this ability is lost.
Mental representation and imagination of reality - the second important psychological characteristic of consciousness. It, like consciousness in general, is closely connected with will. We usually talk about conscious control of ideas and imagination when they are generated and changed by the effort of a person’s will.
There is, however, one difficulty here. Imagination and ideas are not always under conscious volitional control, and in this regard the question arises: are we dealing with consciousness if they represent a “stream of consciousness” - a spontaneous flow of thoughts, images and associations. It seems that in this case it would be more correct to talk not about consciousness, but about preconscious - an intermediate mental state between the unconscious and consciousness. In other words, consciousness is almost always associated with volitional control on the part of a person of his own psyche and behavior.
The idea of reality that is absent at a given moment in time or does not exist at all (imagination, daydreams, dreams, fantasy) acts as one of the most important psychological characteristics of consciousness. In this case, the person arbitrarily, i.e. consciously, distracts himself from the perception of his surroundings, from extraneous thoughts, and focuses all his attention on some idea, image, memory, etc., drawing and developing in his imagination what at the moment he does not directly see or does not see at all able to see.
Volitional control of mental processes and states has always been associated with consciousness.
Consciousness is closely related to speech and without it it does not exist in its highest forms. Unlike sensations and perception, ideas and memory, conscious reflection is characterized by a number of specific properties. One of them is the meaningfulness of what is represented, or realized, i.e. its verbal and conceptual meaning, endowed with a certain meaning associated with human culture.
Another property of consciousness is that not everything and not random ones are reflected in consciousness, but only the main, main, essential characteristics objects, events and phenomena, i.e. that which is characteristic of them and distinguishes them from other objects and phenomena that are externally similar to them.
Consciousness is almost always associated with the use of words-concepts to denote the conscious, which, by definition, contain indications of the general and distinctive properties of the class of objects reflected in consciousness.
The third characteristic of human consciousness - is his ability to communicate, those. transferring to others what a given person is aware of using language and other sign systems. Many higher animals have communicative capabilities, but they differ from humans in one important circumstance: with the help of language, a person conveys to people not only messages about his internal states (this is the main thing in the language and communication of animals), but also about what he knows, sees, understands, imagines, i.e. objective information about the world around us.
Another feature of human consciousness is the presence of intellectual circuits in it. A schema is a specific mental structure in accordance with which a person perceives, processes and stores information about the world around him and about himself. Schemes include rules, concepts, logical operations used by people to bring the information they have into a certain order, including selection, classification of information, assigning it to one category or another.
By exchanging various information with each other, people highlight the main thing in what is being communicated. This is how abstraction occurs, i.e. distraction from everything unimportant, and concentration of consciousness on the most essential. Deposited in vocabulary, semantics in conceptual form, this main thing then becomes the property of the individual consciousness of a person as he masters the language And learns to use it as a means of communication and thinking. The generalized reflection of reality constitutes the content of individual consciousness. That's why we say that Without language and speech, human consciousness is unthinkable.
Language and speech seem to form two different, but interconnected in their origin and functioning layers of consciousness: a system of meanings and a system of meanings of words. Word meanings They call the content that is put into them by native speakers. Meanings include all sorts of shades in the use of words and are best expressed in various kinds of explanatory, commonly used and specialized dictionaries. The system of verbal meanings constitutes a layer of social consciousness, which in sign systems of language exists independently of the consciousness of each individual person.
The meaning of the word in psychology they call that part of its meaning or that specific meaning that a word acquires in the speech of the person using it. The meaning of a word, in addition to the part of its meaning associated with it, is associated with many feelings, thoughts, associations and images that this word evokes in the mind of a particular person.
Consciousness, however, exists not only in verbal, but also in figurative form. In this case, it is associated with the use of a second signaling system that evokes and transforms the corresponding images. The most striking example of figurative human consciousness is art, literature, and music. They also act as forms of reflection of reality, but not in an abstract way, as is typical for science, but in a figurative form.
3. An interesting theory about consciousness is the concept of K.K. Platonov, who develops the views of S.L. Rubinstein and E.V. Shorokhova.
For more than two and a half millennia, the concept of consciousness has remained one of the fundamental ones in philosophy. But until now we treat the phenomenon of consciousness, despite certain successes in its research, as the most mysterious mystery of human existence.
The relevance of the philosophical analysis of the problem of consciousness is due primarily to the fact that the philosophy of consciousness represents the methodological basis for solving the main theoretical and practical issues of virtually all the humanities - psychology, computer science, cybernetics, jurisprudence, pedagogy, sociology, etc. At the same time, the versatility of consciousness makes it the subject of various interdisciplinary and special scientific studies.
When presenting the philosophical theory of consciousness, we will limit ourselves to discussing only some, in our opinion, the most important global issues of the topic.
One of the main characteristics of the psyche, or consciousness, in a broad sense, is its ability to reflect.
The philosophical theory of reflection understands the latter as an immanent characteristic of any interaction, expressing
the ability of objects and phenomena to reproduce more or less adequately, depending on the level of their organization, in their properties and characteristics, the properties and characteristics of each other. Reflection represents both the process of interaction between the reflected and the reflecting, and its result. The changes in the structure of the displaying object that arise as a result of interaction are determined by its characteristics and are adequate to the structure of the displayed object. Structural correspondence expresses the essence of reflection, inherent in all its forms, including human consciousness. And it is natural that more complexly organized material systems are characterized by the ability of more adequate reflection, up to the most complex and adequate form of conscious mental reflection.
If reflection in inanimate nature is characterized by relatively simple forms and a passive nature, then biological forms of reflection are already characterized by various levels of adaptive activity, starting with irritability as the simplest ability of living things to selectively respond to environmental influences. At a higher level of living evolution, reflection takes the form of sensitivity. We can talk about the mental form of interaction of a living organism with the environment when the reflection content appears adequate to the displayed object, and is not reducible to the living organism’s own biological properties. It is the mental form of reflection that carries out the regulatory reflective interaction of the organism with the environment, which consists in targeting a living organism to activities that reproduce the biological conditions of its existence.
The motivation of an animal's activity is provided by innate neurophysiological structures in the form of certain sensory impulses based on a system of unconditioned reflexes. With the advent of the brain, the possibilities of adaptive reflection are already being realized, as some researchers believe, with the help of visual-effective and visual-figurative thinking on the foundation of conditioned and unconditioned reflexes.
What has been said is fundamentally related to the human psyche. However, man is not reducible to the totality of the biological conditions of his existence. A person exists in the space of society, the reflection and regulation of interaction with which is carried out mainly with the help of consciousness.
nia. If the animal psyche reflects only the simple, external properties of things in sensory images, then human consciousness is the essence of things and phenomena hidden behind their external characteristics. In other words, mental reflection at the animal level is carried out through the identification of external objects with the reflecting subject itself “in that form of immediacy in which there is no difference between the subjective and the objective” (G.V.F. Hegel).
In human consciousness, on the contrary, objects and phenomena of the external world are separated from the subject’s very experiences, i.e. they become a reflection not only of the object, but also of the subject itself. This means that in the content of consciousness not only the object is always represented, but also the subject, its own nature, which provides a qualitatively new level of adaptive reflection based on goal setting compared to the animal psyche. “A person’s mental image is the result of not only the impact of a specific situation, but also a reflection of the ontogenesis of individual consciousness, and therefore, to a certain extent, the phylogenesis of social consciousness,” therefore, when analyzing consciousness as a form of mental reflection, it is necessary to take into account the three-dimensionality of reflection. Namely, the understanding of consciousness as a “subjective image of the objective world” presupposes several levels of “figurative” reflection: direct, indirectly generalized reflection at the level of the individual and indirectly generalized reflection as the result of the entire history of society. Consciousness is the highest form of mental, purposeful reflection of reality by a socially developed person, a form of sensory images and conceptual thinking.
1 See: Smirnov S.N. Dialectics of reflection and interaction in the evolution of matter. M., 1974. S. 54-66.
2 Zhukov N.I. Philosophy: Textbook for universities. M., 1998. P. 154.
Consciousness, being an expedient, ordered, regulatory reflection, represents the highest type of information processes. The informational characteristic of consciousness makes it possible to clarify the understanding of it as the highest form of reflection of reality.
Information is not identical to reflection, since in the process of transmitting reflection part of its content is lost, because information is the transmitted part of the reflected variety, that side of it that can be objectified.
reading, transmission. In addition, reflection depends on its material carrier in the most direct way: reflection is often impossible to transfer to another material carrier - like music in color or a painting in musical rhythms - i.e. difficult to recode. Information is always recoded from one material medium to another. However, we must not forget that the images of consciousness formed as a result of receiving information never coincide with the images of the information transmitter - they have their own characteristics and individuality, they are subjective. What they have in common will only be certain information transmitted. The subjective image obtained as a result of the transfer of information is necessarily richer than the received information itself, since it is not its passive reproduction, but the interaction of the recipient subject with the information itself.
1 See: Ursul A.D. Reflection and information. // Lenin’s theory of reflection in the light of the development of science and practice. Sofia, 1981. T. 1. P. 145-160.
2 See: There. same. P. 154.
3 See: Ibid.
Ideality and subjectivity are specific characteristics of consciousness; the ideal is always the subjective existence of individual consciousness, including social forms its interaction with the outside world. The existence of consciousness does not lend itself to conventional description in the coordinates of space and time; its subjective-ideal content does not exist in the physical and physiological sense of the word. At the same time, human feelings, thoughts, and ideas exist no less realistically than material objects and phenomena. But how, how? Philosophers talk about two types of reality: the objective reality of material phenomena and the subjective reality of consciousness, the ideal.
The concept of subjective reality expresses, first of all, belonging to the subject, the subjective world of man as a certain contrast to the object, the objective world of natural phenomena. And at the same time - correlation with objective reality, a certain unity of the subjective with the objective. Thus understood, the reality of the ideal allows one to draw a conclusion about the functional, rather than substantial, nature of its existence.
In other words, the subjective reality of consciousness does not have an ontologically independent existence; it always depends
from the objective reality of material phenomena, for example, from the neurophysiological processes of the brain, from interaction with objects of the material world as prototypes of images of consciousness. We can say that the existence of the subjective reality of consciousness is always the existence of an active-reflective process of interaction between a social person and the surrounding reality: the ideal is not found either in the head of a person or in the reality surrounding him, but only in real interaction.
As already noted, the concept of subjectivity expresses, first of all, its belonging to a subject, be it a person, a group of people or society as a whole. That is, the subjectivity of consciousness presupposes belonging to the subject, characterizing the originality of his world of needs and interests, reflecting objective reality to the extent that this is significant or possible for the subject. Subjectivity expresses the originality of the life experience of a historically specific subject, the specific work of his consciousness, as well as values and ideals.
The subjectivity of the existence of the ideal is also understood as a certain dependence of the images of consciousness on the individual characteristics of the subject: the development of his nervous system, the functioning of the brain, the state of the organism as a whole, the quality of his individual life and experience, the level of mastery of the knowledge accumulated by humanity, etc. Images are formed in the unity of rational and irrational components of the ideal, as a result of direct and indirect generalized reflection of reality, including reflection as the result of the entire history of the human individual, and to a large extent the history of all previous generations and society as a whole.
Images of human consciousness as relatively independent conceivable forms of subjective reality can be sensory, visual, visually similar to their original, but also conceptual, the similarity of which to objects of objective reality is internal in nature, expressing only essential types of connections and properties of objects.
Consciousness, understood as the subjectivity of what is reflected in it and the subjectivity of the reflection process itself, is determined by a person’s ability to distinguish between an image and an object, to think the latter in the conditions of its absence, and also to separate oneself from the object, to feel and understand one’s own “from-
individuality" and thereby distinguish oneself from the environment. The subjectivity of consciousness is expressed in a person’s assimilation of the separateness of both the person himself and objects of the external world. It is also determined by the self-awareness inherent in the individual, i.e. awareness of oneself as an I, separate from others. Some authors generally interpret subjectivity as that which separates us from the world around us.
Concluding the consideration of the issue, we note that the subjectivity of the existence of consciousness is also expressed in a certain incompleteness of what is reflected in it: images reflect objects of the objective world always with a certain degree of approximation to them, through discrimination, generalization and selection, are the result of the creative freedom of the individual, his practical-active attitude to the world. Noting the “incompleteness,” we must also say about the “overcrowding” of the subjective image through analogies, conjectured subjective experience, which, naturally, is broader than the displayed object.
3. Ideality of consciousness. Its structure
Ideality is the most important property of consciousness. For many centuries, the problem of the ideal remains one of the most pressing and complex in world philosophy. It is from the opposite attitude towards nature and the ideal in philosophical thought that the opposition between materialism and idealism is born, as well as various “readings” of the ideal and the material in various philosophical schools.
The philosophical interpretation of the ideal evolves from the question of the relationship between consciousness, ideas and matter, objects of the real world. The idealistic tradition considers the ideal as the constructive and transformative essence of reality, the impulse for change and development of the material world, and the world of material phenomena as the sphere of realization, expression and manifestation of the ideal. As E.V. rightly notes. Ilyenkov, “the objectivity of the “ideal form” is not a mistake of Plato and Hegel, but an indisputable fact of a sober statement of the existence of the ideal, independent of the will and consciousness of individuals, in the space of human culture.”
1 See: Smirnov S.N. The emergence and essence of consciousness // Lenin’s theory of reflection in the light of the development of science and practice. Sofia, 1981. T. 1. P. 135.
2 Ilyenkov E.V. The problem of the ideal // Questions of philosophy. 1979. No. 7. P. 150.
Ideality as extra-spatiality, inaccessibility to sensory perception, immateriality, invisibility, inaudibility, etc. sensory images and sign-symbolic thinking exists only in the perception, imagination, thoughts of a feeling and thinking social subject. This is the fundamental difference between the reality of consciousness and the reality of the material, the reality of the mental, subjective from the reality of the physical, objective.
“Ideal” denotes both the process itself and the result of this process, namely the process of idealization, a mental reflection of reality, forming the image of an object, which, in turn, is “the ideal form of existence of an object in a person’s head.” Initially, ideal images arise and are formed as a moment of a person’s practical relationship to the world, mediated by the forms created by previous generations of people.
The ideal, being a world of images and concepts, has its own logic, relative independence of its own functioning, a certain level of freedom, expressed in the ability of the ideal to generate something new or even something that is not directly encountered in reality and is the result of spiritual activity.
1 Spirkin A.G. Consciousness and self-awareness. M., 1972. P. 70.
2 It must be borne in mind that at the first stages of its formation, the ideal is directly woven into material activity, further becoming more and more independent. With the increase in the “ideal space”, the logic of thinking as the reproduction of objects in the surrounding world is sharpened, the level of advanced reflection of reality, the level and quality of creative imagination rises.
The ideal always remains a personal phenomenon, a subjective manifestation of human brain processes. The latter update information for the individual in the form of subjective experiences, knowledge, etc. Information that is not actualized for the individual (potential), stored in various structures of the brain, recorded in cultural monuments, works of art, books, engineering structures and developments, cannot in any way be correlated with the concept of the ideal until it becomes relevant for the consciousness of the individual.
The ideal always remains identical to individual consciousness, which in turn determines and shapes social consciousness. Only in the process of actualization, deobjectification of the forms of social consciousness by the consciousness of specific individuals, does social consciousness become ideal, the subjective reality of the consciousness of these individuals.
In philosophical literature there is also a point of view on the ideal as creativity in the broad sense of the word, i.e. its activity, constructiveness, focus of thought on the new, selective intentionality, anticipatory nature of the reflection of reality, etc. In this sense, the ideal as the creativity of consciousness is a purposeful, controlled and personality-driven reflection of the external and internal world. That is why the ideal includes in its content emotional-volitional components, intuition, value structures that determine the assessment of the phenomena of reality and, accordingly, the choice of the desired future. The ideal becomes a mental “playing out” of future options for action, constantly ahead of the structures of future practice in its ideal structures.
1 See, for example: Morozov M.N. Creative activity of consciousness. Methodological analysis of natural scientific aspects. Kyiv, 1976.
So, the ideal is polysemantic in its essential characteristics, which also determines the variety of philosophical classifications of the ideal content of consciousness.
Often in the literature, three levels of the functioning of the ideal are distinguished: a) the ideal in the mental activity of animals; b) the ideal of the human psyche; c) ideal in cultural values.
Particular difficulties arise when analyzing the specific nature of the functioning of the ideal in the sphere of culture. Indeed, texts, symbols and cultural objects represent something in the eyes of the individual and society only because they carry ideal meanings, values and meanings. They have ideal content to the extent that they are generally significant elements of public culture and are reproduced by its carriers. At the same time, in the process of perceiving and “deciphering” the ideal content of cultural objects, a dialogue takes place between each individual and the author of cultural values and meanings, their “appropriation” and understanding. Some authors, such as K. Popper, generally come to the conclusion that the functioning of socio-cultural values cannot be attributed to either the material or the ideal sphere, that it is something third, stored in cultural objects.
Depending on the content and functions of the ideal, it can also be classified into: a) cognitive (scientific and other theories, hypotheses, ideas); b) axiological (moral, aesthetic ideals); c) psychological (subjective experiences of emotions and feelings); d) praxeological (specific ideas, goals and objectives of people’s everyday practical activities) and other forms of functioning of the ideal.
It is customary to distinguish between such types and forms of the ideal as practical and theoretical, concrete and abstract, real and formal, utopian and realistic, etc.
Structure of consciousness. Let us remember that the concept of “consciousness” is ambiguous. The definition of consciousness depends on its broad or narrow interpretation, the ontological or epistemological aspect of its consideration and other approaches to its analysis.
In a broad sense, consciousness means a person’s mental reflection of reality, regardless of the level at which it is carried out - sensual or rational. In a narrow and special meaning, the concept of consciousness means the highest conceptual form of reflection of reality.
Consciousness is structurally organized and represents an integral system of various elements that are in relationships of a structural and procedural nature. Consciousness is studied both in terms of the organization of its content and in terms of the dynamic development of its characteristics - the process of mental reflection of reality characteristic of a socialized individual.
Most often, the structure of a person’s consciousness (psyche) is considered as three-level, consisting of the spheres of the unconscious (adjacent to it is the subconscious), consciousness and superconsciousness. Each of these elements of consciousness in the broad sense of the word plays an important role in the implementation of the basic functions of consciousness: a) obtaining information about the external and internal world of a person; b) transformation and improvement of the internal and external world of man; c) ensuring communication, “dialogue mutual understanding” of people; d) managing the life activity and behavior of people, etc.
The sphere of consciousness includes, first of all, the reflection of reality in distinct forms of sensuality and thinking. Consciousness as a process is usually characterized by the term “awareness” as the inclusion of the reflected object in the system of knowledge
and assigning it to a certain class of related phenomena, as awareness of the meaning of what is perceived in the context of real events.
But consciousness in the narrow sense is also not an unambiguous phenomenon. This is always an awareness not only of the surrounding and internal world in certain feelings and logical conclusions, but also of one’s personal relationship to the world and one’s place in it. And for this reason, human knowledge, being the core of consciousness, is emotionally colored, i.e. reflect objects of awareness in the form of experiences and evaluative attitudes towards them. In the emotional sphere of consciousness, elementary emotions are distinguished - hunger, fatigue; feelings - love, grief, joy; affects - rage, despair; various kinds of emotional moods and well-being, stress as states of special emotional tension. Strong emotions can optimize or, conversely, disorganize the processes of awareness, increase or decrease their level, orient and direct them.
1 See: Spirkin A.G. Consciousness and self-awareness. P. 82.
In other words, in the structure of consciousness, two interconnected processes of awareness and experience as a person’s relationship to the content of what is realized are most clearly distinguished. Sensations, perceptions, ideas, concepts and thinking in judgments and inferences form the core of consciousness. However, they do not exhaust its entire structural completeness: consciousness also includes acts of attention, will, memory, various feelings and emotions as necessary components. It is thanks to setting a goal, volitional efforts to achieve it, concentration and value interest that a certain circle of objects is in the focus of attention and is realized by the subject.
Consciousness as a complex information-regulatory process of awareness, recollection, recognition also includes memory, i.e. processes that ensure the recording of past experience - imprinting, saving, reproduction (reproduction) and recognition (identification) of information.
A very common concept of the nature of memory today is the holographic theory, which considers memory as a set of holograms interacting with each other in a certain way. Just as part of a hologram retains the image of the entire object, so any neuron in the brain
the brain carries information about all states of other neurons, i.e. acts only as a participant in the general process of storing and reproducing information, but a full participant, containing information accumulated in the brain - as “everything about everything.”
Will, as the basis of the intentionality (orientation) of consciousness, is an effort that determines the vector of a person’s mental energy and the conscious regulation of his behavior and activities. The will, as it were, strengthens the dominant need of a person, weakening others that compete with it, and counteracting the negative emotions that accompany the need to achieve the dominant goal, the dominant of a person’s life activity or his “super task” (K.S. Stanislavsky).
So, consciousness is capable of functioning adequately only in the volitional form of emotions, i.e. a person’s intentional-value experience of the space “I am the world”. In this sense, the qualitative characteristics of will, memory and emotions are decisive factors in the regulation of human activity, since they not only form the basis of the processes of awareness of what is important and significant for the individual, but also give purposefulness to the actions of the subject of awareness. Therefore, the problem of consciousness is inseparable from the problem of freedom as a characteristic of voluntarily made choice in setting goals and implementing actions.
In this regard, some philosophers, for example M. Mamardashvili, define consciousness as a moral phenomenon, deriving the terms “consciousness” and “conscience” from the same root. Consciousness is moral at its core, since it expresses a person’s ability to be guided by motivation that is not caused by anything. Consciousness is the sphere of free moral choice and responsibility for it, there is “something between our heads.” Thanks to this, the meeting and “mutual identification of consciousness” between different people is realized. Thus, consciousness is understood as an information field, thanks to which one person understands another, namely in the coexistence of two points of this “field”, which give an additional effect of consciousness.
1 See: Mamardashvili M. Paradoxes of consciousness // Secrets of consciousness and the unconscious: Reader. Minsk, 1998. P. 20.
2 Ibid. P. 25.
3 See: Ibid. pp. 12-30.
Yu.M. Borodai believes that consciousness in its genesis comes from morality, because the essence of the primary ideal-community connections of people (their first language - myth) is everywhere ideas about what should be, and not about what is true. Morality retains the trace of its birthright in consciousness and modern man- anyone! Morality as the essential basis of consciousness is manifested in the ability to arbitrarily evaluate everything that is conscious of the individual, including self-esteem, as good or evil. It is morality that ensures the unity of the value orientation of many selves included in the human community through their identification with some ideal essence.
1 See: Borodai Yu.M. Erotica. Death. Taboo. The tragedy of human consciousness. M., 1996. P. 188.
2 See: Ibid. P. 190.
The problem of the boundary between sensory-imaginative and conceptual-symbolic consciousness is often assessed as one of the “world mysteries”, a possible solution to which is the understanding of the genetically original process of “compact folding” of sensory images into logical-conceptual signs.
So, consciousness is based on memory, the emotional sphere, volitional effort and is an intentional-arbitrary process of reflecting reality, realized at the sensory and conceptual levels. Can we assume that everything that a person observes and hears is conscious to him? Of course not. Only that which becomes the object of human attention is realized. In this sense, consciousness works as an act (voluntary or involuntary) of attention, i.e. consciousness is always intentional, directed towards something.
The program of action is undoubtedly developed under the control of consciousness. However, when actions are repeated many times, their implementation is already stereotypical in nature, the action becomes a skill, then it is controlled at another level of consciousness, lying “below the field of consciousness” (Z.P. Zinchenko), at the level of the subconscious. The sphere of the subconscious includes everything that was conscious or can become conscious under certain conditions - skills brought to automatism, rooted in the consciousness of the individual, social norms and rules, etc. The subconscious plays the role of an assistant to the consciousness, protecting it from the unnecessary backbreaking work of constant monitoring of the entire set of actions, directing
regulated and regulated by the human psyche. As noted by A.G. Spirkin, “a person could neither think effectively nor act effectively if all elements of his life activity simultaneously required awareness.”
Therefore, the subconscious is defined as a set of mental phenomena, states, reflexes that are not the center of meaningful activity at a given time, that are not amenable to the control of consciousness, at least at the moment, i.e. unconscious mental acts performed automatically and reflexively. In other words, not all, but rather a relatively small part of mental activity is realized by a person; the predominant part of it remains outside the focus of consciousness. Of course, the border between the conscious and the unconscious is quite fluid: what was previously unconscious can be realized later, and vice versa, what is the subject of careful understanding eventually goes into the sphere of the subconscious.
We can say that a well-developed subconscious serves as the foundation for the clear work of consciousness, and vice versa. It is no coincidence that the subconscious is assessed as “an involuntarily acquired, unconscious research experience, as if imposed by the objects with which one had to act.” “Where is the second phrase when I say the first? - In the waiting room” (i.e., the subconscious), noted the outstanding French mathematician Adamer.
As for the unconscious, which usually includes dreams, hypnotic states, somnambulism, states of insanity, etc. like some released relict forms of pre-logical thinking, it is always present in the human psyche. What can be included in the sphere of consciousness through the efforts of memory does not belong to the unconscious, unlike instincts (although the feelings generated by instincts sooner or later become the region of consciousness).
1 Spirkin A.G. Consciousness and self-awareness. P. 171.
2 Ponomarev Ya.A. Psyche and intuition. M., 1987. P. 244.
3 See: Grimakh L.P. Reserves of the human psyche. Introduction to activity psychology. M., 1987. P. 32.
The problem of the unconscious has worried human thought since ancient times. The unconscious has been interpreted in different ways: both as the highest level of knowledge, the intuition of the inner voice (Socrates), and as internal hidden knowledge (Plato), and as an interior hidden from consciousness (Augustine), and
as the lowest form of spiritual activity, dormant ideas - small perceptions (Leibniz), and as sensory images not illuminated by the light of consciousness, intuition (Kant), and as will (Schopenhauer), and as elemental “life force” (Hartmann), and, finally , as complexes of unconscious drives, libido (Freud) and archetypes of the “collective unconscious” (Jung).
There are four main forms of manifestation of the unconscious: 1) supra-individual samples of what is typical for the community of which the subject is a member - “archetypes of the collective unconscious” by K. Jung, “collective ideas” by E. Durkheim, etc.; 2) unconscious motivators of activity (motives and semantic attitudes of the individual) - “dynamic repressed unconscious” 3. Freud, post-hypnotic suggestion by J. Burnham, etc.; 3) unconscious operational attitudes and stereotypes of automated behavior, for example, “unconscious conclusions” by G. Helmholtz, “properceptions” by W. James, “preconscious” by 3. Freud, “hypotheses” by D. Bruner, “dynamic stereotypes” by I.P. Pavlova, “action acceptors” P.K. Anokhina; 4) unconscious subsensory perception of certain stimuli - the range of sensitivity of I.M. Sechenov, “pre-attention” by W. Neisser, “subsensory area” by G.V. Gershuni, - as zones of stimuli (inaudible sounds, invisible light signals, etc.) that cause an involuntary, objectively recorded reaction and can be recognized when they are given a signal meaning.
1 See: Philosophical Encyclopedic Dictionary. M., 1989. pp. 58-59.
One of the varieties of the unconscious, following K.S. Stanislavsky and M.G. Yaroshevsky is called superconsciousness or supraconsciousness. The work of the superconscious, which at one stage or another generates new, previously non-existent information through the recombination of ideas received from outside, is not controlled by conscious volitional effort. Only the results of the unconscious activity of the superconscious are presented to the analysis of consciousness, and these results have a certain probability of their correspondence with reality. It is in the sphere of superconsciousness that hypotheses and guesses are born, and intuitive insight occurs.
The superconscious acquires material for recombination work (associations, analogies, etc.) from the conscious
experience and reserves of the subconscious. And yet, in superconsciousness there is something precisely “super-” than consciousness or the unconscious itself, namely new information that does not follow directly from what was previously acquired. Therefore, superconsciousness is understood as the highest stage of the creative process of reflecting the world or intuition.
The activity of the superconscious is directed by the consistently dominant need of the subject (the principle of dominance by A.A. Ukhtomsky). But unlike the subconscious, the activity of the superconscious is not realized under any conditions, only its results are realized.
The recombination work of the superconscious manifests itself in inspiration as an intense manifestation of feelings leading to anticipation of the result of mental activity: imagination, intuitive insight. Intuition, being a vivid manifestation of the sphere of superconsciousness, is an emotional-rational process of guessing or “direct perception” of the truth, a process that does not require special logical justification and proof. To intuitively comprehend means to “guess”, “figure out”, “suddenly understand”, etc.
The structural understanding of the human psyche is also based on the distinction between consciousness and self-awareness, i.e. a person’s awareness of the surrounding world and himself, or the self-relationship of the Self with itself.
Self-awareness as knowledge of oneself presupposes the inclusion in its content of introspection, self-knowledge, self-esteem, self-control, introspection, etc. All of these forms of self-awareness serve as a means of self-control, self-government and self-identification of a person.
At the initial stages, self-awareness arises as the identification of oneself with the people, objects and phenomena surrounding the individual, which he perceives as relating directly to him and identifies them with his Self. For example, almost any person reacts emotionally to a positive or negative assessment of a profession, a circle of people, settlements, etc., to which he himself belongs. The program of self-awareness is formed during the constant repetition of acts of comparing oneself with certain models stored in memory and, as it were, “fused” with one’s own Self, and the correlation of the system of these comparisons with new external or internal experience.
So, individual consciousness has a complex structure. But an equally complex organization of its content presupposes the transpersonal consciousness of society, constituting a system of dialectically interconnected forms and levels.
Social consciousness functions, on the one hand, as a result of the objectification of personal (individual) consciousness in language, objects and processes of culture, scientific concepts and research methods, etc., and on the other hand, as a source of individual consciousness, the content of which by its nature is also socially, as well as public consciousness. Social consciousness develops through the consciousness of individual people, being only relatively independent of the latter: “undeciphered writings in themselves do not yet contain mental content, only in relation to individual people the book wealth of the world’s libraries, monuments of art, etc. have a spiritual meaning wealth."
In other words, the consciousness of society does not possess consciousness in the sense in which an individual possesses it: the consciousness of society does not exist in the form of a transpersonal substrate carrier separate from specific people - the brain or some other instrument of consciousness. It exists as a fact of consciousness only through its involvement in the actually functioning consciousness of the individual. It turns out that the individual and the social - as different levels and ways of organizing consciousness - exist as a subjective reality only in constant interaction with each other.
Consciousness and language. The content of consciousness is expressed through language (speech), i.e. objectified with the help of language, which serves as a material design of the ideal content of consciousness. Mental, and to a certain extent, sensory processes of consciousness are always carried out in some language.
1 Philosophical Encyclopedia. T. 5. P. 47.
2 Language is considered as a material system of meaningfully (ideologically) significant sign forms, as the direct reality of consciousness. Or as a system of signs that serves as a means of human communication, thinking and expression (see: Philosophical Encyclopedia. Vol. 5. P. 604), and speech (speech activity) - as one of the types of specific human activity, which is usually understood as communicative activity mediated by language signs as a means of speech activity (see: Philosophical Encyclopedia. Vol. 4. P. 506).
Language is as ancient as consciousness: in the process of the formation of consciousness, mental activity is “dressed” in a verbal shell. Initially, speech is formed to designate (name) things and phenomena necessary in the process of communication
nications. As it is fixed in memory, mechanisms for identifying categorical features are formed. They begin to be fixed in long-term memory as words. The further evolution of concepts is the result of processes of mental compaction of information. This is how the formation of a system of concepts, judgments, etc. takes place. as ideal images of reality and corresponding conventional signs, models, etc.
The word is not only a fixer, but also an operator of all thought processes, since both the formation of concepts and the operation of them are impossible outside of verbal signs, which in this case act as an internal mechanism of thinking.
So, the word as the basic elementary unit of language represents the unity of a material sign and ideal meaning, or semantic content (concept). A visual representation of the contradictory unity of word and concept is given by the “semantic triangle”, the vertices of which correspond to the displayed object, the word and the concept adequate to them: the concept in an indirect and generalized form reflects the object, and the word expresses the concept and denotes the object (in semiotics and information theory the word will be correspond to the sign and signal, and to the concept - meaning and information).
1 See: Klicke F. Awakening Thinking. The author examines the formation of concepts requiring verbal naming in the process of a number of stages of abstraction compression and reduction of information (pp. 278-287).
2 According to the definition of L.S. Vygotsky, the word is also an operator of thought because a thought is not simply expressed in a word, but is accomplished in it, and thanks to the word its further course is directed. Therefore, there cannot be a rigid connection between language and thinking, between word and concept. Although thoughts may arise as if in prelinguistic expression, they acquire their distinctness precisely thanks to language.
3 Philosophical understanding of the difference between word and concept, thinking and speech is already outlined in Plato’s dialogue “Theaetetus”.
4 See: Zhukov N.I. Philosophy: Textbook. M., 1998. pp. 170-171.
Information encoded using natural language is expressed not only in the external form of linguistic signs, but also in the internal form that structures mental processes. Therefore, a word in different contexts of thinking and communication carries a different information load.
Language performs important functions for human life - communicative, instrumental-mental, cognitive, regulatory, translation, etc.
In addition, language, having relative independence, its own logic of functioning and development, influences the nature of the flow of sensory and mental processes, the formation of a particular style of thinking in a particular linguistic culture.
Language functions in the forms of external and internal speech. Internal speech has a shortened form compared to external speech. It omits non-core words, which are reconstructed by context, and only key words and themes are spoken. Inner speech, expressed in key words that concentrate the meaning of an entire phrase, sometimes an entire text, becomes the language of “semantic support points” or “semantic complexes.” And in the case of intuitive insight, thinking is based on these internal speech complexes.
They also talk about the language of animals. Let us only note that the language of an animal serves as an expression of a situational state caused by hunger, thirst, fear, etc., or a call to some specific action, a warning of danger. Animal language never involves the indirect reproduction of objective reality through generalization; it functions with the help of unconditional reflex mental activity.
There are points of view on the existence, along with natural and artificial languages, of an ancient, primordial and almost forgotten language by modern man - the mythological language of dreams, symbols as the language of internal experiences and feelings, the language of the unconscious. E. Fromm believes that “the language of symbols is a language with the help of which internal experiences, feelings and thoughts take the form of clearly tangible events of the external world; it is a language whose logic is different from that by whose laws we live in the daytime; logic , in which the dominant categories are not time and space, but intensity and associativity." The author clarifies: “It is the only language invented by mankind, common to all cultures throughout history. It is a language with its own grammar and syntax that must be understood if you want to understand the meaning of myths, fairy tales and dreams.”
1 Korshunov A.M., Mantatov V.V. Reflection theory and the heuristic role of signs. M., 1974. P. 131.
2 Fromm E. Forgotten language: the meaning of dreams, fairy tales and myths // Secrets of consciousness and the unconscious. Minsk, 1998. pp. 367-368.
Indeed, not all feelings and experiences of a person find their expression in an exact linguistic form, remaining the sphere of the unconscious. Fromm is right in asserting that often the language and logic of conceptual thinking act as a kind of social filter that does not allow certain feelings to reach consciousness. And yet, if the sensory life of the sphere of the unconscious is identified with language, then the very ability to symbolize and mythologically interpret the world should be legally placed in the sphere of the unconscious. It seems that the so-called language of myths and dreams becomes a language as a system of signs expressing even the most “ancient” and illogical experiences only when it becomes a form of consciousness, i.e. acquires a certain ideal value. In other words, when experiences are conscious, they take the form of language.
LITERATURE
Alekseev P.V., Panin A.V. Philosophy. M., 1996.
Vinogradovsky V.G. Social organization of space. M., 1988.
Ivanov A.V. Consciousness and thinking. M., 1994.
Ilyenkov E.V. Ideal // Philosophical Encyclopedia. M., 1962. T. 2. P. 219-227.
Ilyenkov E.V. The problem of the ideal // Questions of philosophy. 1979. No. 6, 7.
Prigozhy I., Stengers M. Burden, chaos, quantum. M., 1997.
Spirkin A.G. Consciousness and self-awareness. M., 1972.
Secrets of consciousness and the unconscious: Reader. Minsk, 1998.
Heidegger M. Time and Being. M., 1993.
CONTROL QUESTIONS
1. What are the features of the understanding of matter within the framework of metaphysical materialism?
2. What is the essence of the Marxist understanding of matter?
3. What properties of objective reality are expressed using the categories of space and time?
4. What are the features of the substantial and relational concepts of space and time?
5. What new did A. Einstein introduce into the understanding of space and time?
6. What is common between matter and consciousness, objective and subjective reality, making the opposition between them relative?
7. How do you imagine the structural content of consciousness?
8. Is it possible to talk about the ideality of social consciousness?
Consciousness is a function of the brain. It represents the highest level of mental reflection and self-regulation inherent only to humans. Consciousness acts as a continuously changing set of mental and sensory images appearing before the subject (actual and potential), representing and anticipating his activity. Consciousness and the human psyche are inseparable.
Physiological, that is, material mechanisms of mental phenomena associated with the vital activity of the body, the functioning of the nervous system, are directly connected to the human psyche, but are not identical to it. The psyche is an individual reflection of reality in the form of subjective, ideal images, through consciousness and sensory perception. This is the essence of the materialistic understanding of consciousness and the human psyche in general, in contrast to idealistic concepts that represent mental processes as the personification of certain transcendental norms.
The materialistic approach to the psyche also provides an answer to the primitive interpretation of consciousness by supporters of vulgar materialism - K. Vogt, L. Buchner, J. Moleschott, who reduced consciousness only to its material substrate - physiological nervous processes occurring in the brain.
In particular, K. Vogt noted that every natural scientist must come to the conviction that “all abilities known as mental activity are only functions of the brain matter or, to put it somewhat more roughly, that thoughts have the same relationship to the brain , like bile to the liver1...". And in this sense, according to Vogt, consciousness appears as something material.
Moleschott Jacob(1822-1893), German physiologist and philosopher, representative of vulgar materialism; I saw only a physiological mechanism in thinking. Moleschott's biochemical research played a significant role in the development of physiological chemistry.
Büchner Ludwig(1824-1899), German doctor, naturalist and philosopher, representative of vulgar materialism; understood consciousness not as an active reflection of objective reality, but as a mirror (passive) reflection of reality.
We must understand and understand that identification of consciousness and matter is objectively impossible. The human brain itself is material, and the “product” of its conscious activity - thought - is ideal. We talked about this in the paragraph above. However, from the history of philosophy (Moleschott, Buchner, Vogt) it is clear that the process of this understanding was not easy. German thinker of the 19th century. Dietzgen, another representative of vulgar materialism, also believed that “spirit is no more different from a table, light, sound than things are different from each other.” This, of course, is a clear methodological error. The fact that human thought is real is a fact objectified by social nature, which is material. However, to recognize thought as material means to unprincipledly confuse materialism with idealism.
Dietzgen Joseph(1828-1888), thinker, self-taught philosopher, leather worker, one of the original representatives of German Social Democracy. Lived and worked in Germany, Russia, America. He was strongly influenced by the materialist ideas of L. Feuerbach and independently discovered materialist dialectics. However, he was unable to overcome the vulgar materialistic approach. True, Dietzgen viewed the universe in motion, believing the source of development to be in contradiction.
The concept of psychophysical parallelism (Greek. par alíelos - next to each other), according to which mental (ideal) and physiological (material) processes are presented as independent entities, unrelated to each other by relationships of cause and effect, developing in parallel. The concept of psychophysiological parallelism was put forward both in the system of materialistic (D. Hartley and others) and in the system of idealistic views on the psyche (W. Wundt, T. Lipps, G. Ebbinghaus, etc.). For the materialist direction, psychophysical parallelism assumed the inseparability of consciousness from the brain, for the idealist direction - the independence of consciousness from material formations, its subordination to a special mental causality. In both cases, the psychophysical problem did not receive a positive solution, since consciousness was considered in its relation to the processes inside the body, as a mechanistic opposition of the disembodied soul to the extended body. The reflective nature of the psyche and its regulatory role in behavior within the framework of psychophysical parallelism could not be scientifically explained, since the soul (mental) was opposed to the body (physiological) and was not considered in relation to the objective world of human activity.
Hartley David(1705-1757), English thinker, one of the founders of associative psychology. In an effort to establish precise laws of mental processes to control people's behavior, D. Hartley tried to apply the principles of I. Newton's physics for this. According to Hartley, the vibrations of the outer ether cause corresponding vibrations in the sense organs, brain and muscles; the latter are in a parallel relationship to the order and connection of mental phenomena, from elementary feelings to thinking and will.
Wundt Wilhelm (1832-1920), German psychologist, physiologist, philosopher and linguist. He put forward a plan for the development of physiological psychology as a special science that uses the method of laboratory experiment to divide consciousness into elements and clarify the natural connection between them. In 1879, Wundt created the world's first psychological laboratory. In the field of consciousness, he believed, a special mental causality operates, and human behavior is determined by apperception (perception requiring effort of will). In his philosophical views, he eclectically combined the ideas of B. Spinoza, G. Leibniz, I. Kant, G. Hegel and other thinkers. Wundt divided the process of cognition into three stages: the first - sensory cognition of everyday life; the second is rational knowledge of particular sciences, which represent only different points of view on the same subject of study; the third (rational knowledge) is the philosophical synthesis of all knowledge, which metaphysics deals with.
What is the essence of consciousness and what are the reasons for its appearance?
Consciousness is not a special entity represented separately from matter, but ideally connected with it. Consciousness is a property of the human brain - that is, a material substance that has specific properties.
The ideal image of an object created by an individual in his brain (head) cannot be reduced either to the material object itself, which really exists and is located outside it, or to the physiological processes that occur in his consciousness, giving rise to this image. In this paradigm, it is necessary to understand that the very thought of a person, the very consciousness of the subject, generating images, are real. But this is not the reality that is inherent in a specific object of reality, but something subjectively human, ideal, passed through consciousness- the ideal image of this item. Therefore, two people can perceive, reproduce, and evaluate the same object in their consciousness differently, in accordance with the characteristics of their own psyche, where consciousness is its “upper” floor, and the “lower” floor of the psyche is occupied by feelings.
We have already noted that consciousness is a subjective image of the objective world. That's why consciousness reflects the real picture of the world in the human brain, without distorting it, but presenting its ideal image. Simultaneously with the reflection in the human mind of real objects and the picture of the world (things and processes) assessment takes place their. Reflection and evaluation is a function of the brain according to which the thought process is carried out. Many ideal images previously seen by a person are “stored” in consciousness, and even more of them are located on the periphery of consciousness - in the subconscious. Reflecting real objects and processes in consciousness, a person “automatically” evaluates them, taking into account the ideal images already stored in his consciousness. He thinks. To understand this, we need to understand the origin of consciousness, understand the role of speech, language, communication, and most importantly, human activity.
Consciousness is a function of the human brain only. Animals, even the most developed of them - elephant, dolphin, monkey, dog, etc., act instinctively, although it may seem conscious. However, no, their actions are determined by the centuries-old nature of behavior, unconditioned (natural) reflexes (lat.). A person reflexively (lat. reflexio) reflecting the surrounding reality in one’s consciousness, at the same time gives it an actual and potential assessment and carries out activities on the basis of this.
The most complex process of human development was the process of decomposition of the instinctive basis of the psyche in the most developed primates and the formation of the mechanisms of their conscious activity. Consciousness could only arise as a function of a complexly organized brain, which was formed under the influence of various factors, the main of which were individual and joint actions - food production, protection, production of tools, reproduction and education of their own kind, which generally objectified the need for a variety of sound signals, subsequently - speeches.
The passage of historical time and spatial changes contributed to the evolution of anthropoids: homo ergaster(adaptive person) - homo erectus(man straightening up) - homo sapiens(reasonable person).
Let us trace the dynamics of the formation of consciousness in primates depending on the noted factors:
- - 35,000,000 - 5,000,000 BC - Dryopithecus - Australopithecus. Some change in the shape and size of the body, similar to that of a monkey, as well as the method of moving from four to two legs, adaptation to moving on the ground, a plant-based diet. Instinctive level of consciousness: homo ergaster;
- - 5,000,000 - 150,000 BC - Pithecanthropus - Sinanthropus. The origin of upright walking, changes in the functions of body organs, the use of the forelimbs for certain purposes: the use of a stick as a tool for obtaining food and hunting, the creation of primitive knives and scrapers, spear tips from stones, bones and horns, the appearance of sound signals as prototypes of speech. The diet contains natural food. Decomposition of the instinctive basis of the psyche: homo ergaster - homo erectus;
- - 450,000 - 30,000 BC - Neanderthals. The use of stone and bone devices, the construction of huts, the equipment of caves, the use of animal skins as clothing, the use of conventional sound signals. The diet is natural. The emergence of consciousness occurs: homo ergaster - homo erectus. According to the latest anthropological data, based on decoding the DNA of primates, Neanderthals are a dead-end branch of primitive man;
- - 50,000 - 10,000 BC - Cro-Magnons. Creation of labor and hunting tools using processed horns, bones, and silicon. The ability to grind, carve, drill, the origins of pottery, making tools and household items, sewing with bone and flint needles. The formation of artistic abilities - the depiction of hunting scenes on the walls of caves. Knowledge of hunting and fishing methods, eating cooked meat and fish, and fluency in articulate speech. The formation of human consciousness occurs: homo sapiens.
The main milestones in the complex development of human consciousness are also confirmed by the volume of brain matter in historical individuals:
- - chimpanzees have 400 cm3;
- - in Australopithecus 600 cm3;
- - in Pithecanthropus 850-1225 cm3;
- - Neanderthals have 1100-1600 cm3;
- - in a modern person from 1400 cm3.
A significant role in the origin of human consciousness is played by labor. About 7 million years ago, humanoid creatures descended from the trees where they mainly lived to the ground and tried to stand on their hind limbs. The attempt was a success, and it was a great event in the evolution of mankind, since the future homo sapiens freed the forelimbs of the animal to carry out a variety of targeted actions, and not just moving in space, searching for food or defensive reactions. He gradually began to work. The objective use of the forelimbs - the hands, which in the primate represented a single whole with the developing consciousness - expanded.
The brain, as an organ of consciousness, developed simultaneously with the development of the hands, as an organ that performs various functions. It was the primate’s hands, in direct contact with various objects, that gave impulses to other senses: the eye developed, and sensations were enriched.
Active hands, as it were, “taught” the head to think before they themselves became instruments for carrying out the will of the head, that is, consciousness. The logic of practical actions was fixed in the head and turned into the logic of thinking: a person learned to think. Before starting the task, he could mentally imagine the result. Marx noted this well in “Capital”: “The spider performs operations reminiscent of the operations of a weaver, and the bee, with the construction of its wax cells, puts some human architects to shame. But even the worst architect differs from the best bee from the very beginning in that, before building the cell, "from wax, he has already built it in his head. At the end of the labor process, a result is obtained that was already in the mind of a person at the beginning of this process."
The formation of man and his consciousness was facilitated by household and economic needs, in particular, hunting as a developmental activity, performing a variety of operations, from the simplest to handicraft.
The most important need contributing to the formation and development of consciousness was communication, which determined the development speech, language.
Speech was a specific type of conscious activity that was carried out with the help of language, that is, a certain system of sound semantic communication. Language helped man make the transition from living contemplation to abstract thinking. Next came practice.
In speech, a person’s ideas, thoughts and feelings were clothed in an objectively perceived form and thereby from personal property became the property of other people, society as a whole. This turned speech into a conscious tool for transmitting accumulated experience, information, and objective influence on people.
Consciousness and speech are one, but this is a contradictory unity of different phenomena. Consciousness reflects reality, and language signifies it. Being clothed in speech form, thoughts and ideas emphasize the uniqueness of a particular subject using speech.
The subject factor contributing to the formation of human consciousness was diet primitive man, including not only plant food, but also meat food, as well as its preparation. A varied diet provided the body with the microelements necessary to activate the brain, and, consequently, contributed to the evolution of the primate into Homo sapiens and the formation of his consciousness.
Continuing further our reasoning regarding consciousness, it is necessary to understand one very important point: a person’s thought itself is immaterial, it is not recorded either by instruments or by sense organs. A person feels and perceives only material signals, in particular, through hearing - individual sounds, words and sentences, and is aware of what is expressed by them: thoughts, judgments, ideas of the speaker. Human consciousness has historically been formed and developed in the process of formation of communication culture, that is, in the process of communication.
If the species experience of animals is transmitted through the mechanisms of heredity, which determines a very slow pace of their significant changes, then among people the transfer of experience and knowledge, methods of influencing the environment occurs through the means of carrying out activities and through the transfer of accumulated information in the process of communication.
Thanks to speech and communication, human consciousness was formed and developed as a spiritual social product. As a means of transmitting information and communication, speech has connected and connects people not only of a certain social or national community, but also of a wide variety of cultural and historical types. This maintains the most important quality of social development - continuity. Traditions and, in general, the culture of society are preserved.
Consciousness is a product of the Homo sapiens brain. It is not closed in itself; it develops and changes in the process of social development. The reasons for what sensations, thoughts and feelings arise in a person are not contained in the brain as the material substrate of the intellect. The human brain becomes an organ of consciousness only when its subject acts in certain conditions that fill the brain with knowledge and experience of socio-historical practice and force it to function in a certain, socially significant direction.
Home test
in psychology. On the topic of:
Psyche: nature, mechanisms, properties.
Consciousness as the highest level of mental reflection.
Psyche: nature, mechanisms, properties. Consciousness as the highest level of mental reflection.
1. Psyche as a property of highly organized living matter. The nature and mechanisms of mental phenomena.
2. Irritability. Sensitivity and sensations, their properties and main differences compared to irritability. Behavior as a process of adaptation to environmental conditions.
3. Consciousness as the highest level of mental reflection. “I-concept” and a person’s criticality, their role in shaping human behavior.
4. Activity and intentionality are the main characteristics of consciousness. Reflection and the motivational-value nature of consciousness.
5. Basic functions of the psyche. Ensuring adaptation to environmental conditions is an integrative function of the psyche. General problems of the origin of the human psyche.
6. The relationship between the development of the brain and human consciousness. The role of labor in the formation and development of human consciousness. Concept by A. N. Leontiev.
Psyche as a property of highly organized living matter. The nature and mechanisms of mental phenomena.
Psyche is a property of highly organized living matter, which consists in the subject’s active reflection of the objective world, in the subject’s construction of an inalienable picture of this world and the regulation of behavior and activity on this basis.
From this definition follows a number of fundamental judgments about the nature and mechanisms of manifestation of the psyche. Firstly, the psyche is a property only of living matter. And not just living matter, but highly organized living matter. Consequently, not all living matter has this property, but only that which has specific organs that determine the possibility of the existence of the psyche.
Secondly, the main feature of the psyche is the ability to reflect the objective world. What does this mean? Literally this means the following: highly organized living matter with a psyche has the ability to receive information about the world around it. At the same time, obtaining information is associated with the creation by this highly organized matter of a certain mental, i.e., subjective in nature and idealistic (immaterial) in essence image, which with a certain degree of accuracy is a copy of material objects of the real world.
Thirdly, the information about the surrounding world received by a living being serves as the basis for regulating the internal environment of a living organism and shaping its behavior, which generally determines the possibility of a relatively long existence of this organism in constantly changing environmental conditions. Consequently, living matter with a psyche is capable of responding to changes in the external environment or to the influence of environmental objects.
It must be emphasized that there are a very significant number of forms of living matter that have certain psychic abilities. These forms of living matter differ from each other in the level of development of mental properties.
Irritability. Sensitivity and sensations, their properties and main differences compared to irritability . Behavior as a process of adaptation to environmental conditions.
The elementary ability to react selectively to the influence of the external environment is already observed in the simplest forms of living matter. Thus, an amoeba, which is just one living cell filled with protoplasm, moves away from some stimuli and approaches others. At its core, the movements of the amoeba are the initial form of adaptation of the simplest organisms to the external environment. Such an adaptation is possible due to the existence of a certain property that distinguishes living matter from nonliving matter. This property is irritability. Outwardly, it is expressed in the manifestation of forced activity of a living organism. The higher the level of development of an organism, the more complex the manifestation of its activity in the event of changes in environmental conditions. Primary forms of irritability are found even in plants, for example, the so-called “tropism” - forced movement.
As a rule, living organisms at this level respond only to direct influences, such as mechanical touches that threaten the integrity of the organism, or to biotic stimuli. For example, plants respond to illumination, the content of microelements in the soil, etc. Thus, we will not be mistaken if we say that living organisms of a given level react only to factors that are biologically significant for them, and their response is reactive in nature, i.e. With. a living organism exhibits activity only after direct exposure to an environmental factor.
The further development of irritability in living beings is largely associated with the complication of the living conditions of more developed organisms, which accordingly have a more complex anatomical structure. Living organisms at a given level of development are forced to respond to a more complex set of environmental factors. The combination of these internal and external conditions predetermines the emergence in living organisms of more complex forms of response, called sensitivity. Sensitivity characterizes the general ability to sense. According to A. I. Leontyev, the appearance of sensitivity in animals can serve as an objective biological sign of the emergence of the psyche.
A distinctive feature of sensitivity compared to irritability is that with the emergence of sensations, living organisms are able to respond not only to biologically significant environmental factors, but also to biologically neutral ones, although for the simplest representatives of a given level of development, such as worms, mollusks, arthropods, the leading are still biologically significant environmental factors. However, in this case, the nature of the response of sensitive animals to environmental factors is fundamentally different from the response of living organisms of a lower level. Thus, the presence of sensitivity allows an animal to react to an object that has meaning for it before direct contact with it. For example, an animal of a given level of mental development can react to the color of an object, its paws or shape, etc. Later, in the process of development of organic mothers, one of the main properties of the psyche is gradually formed in living beings - the ability to anticipate and holistically reflect the real world. This means that in the process of evolution, animals with a more highly developed psyche are able to receive information about the world around them, analyze it and respond to possible influence from any surrounding objects, both biologically significant and biologically neutral.
The very appearance of sensitivity, or the ability to sense, in a certain class of animals can be considered not only as the emergence of the psyche, but also as the emergence of a fundamentally new type of adaptation to the external environment. The main difference between this type of adaptation is the appearance of special processes that connect the animal with its environment - behavioral processes.
Behavior is a complex set of reactions of a living organism to environmental influences. It must be emphasized that living beings, depending on the level of mental development, have behavior of varying complexity. We can see the simplest behavioral reactions by observing, for example, how a worm changes the direction of its movement when it encounters an obstacle. Moreover, the higher the level of development of a living creature, the more complex its behavior. For example, in dogs we are already observing manifestations of anticipatory reflection. Thus, the dog avoids meeting an object that contains a certain threat. However, the most complex behavior is observed in humans, who, unlike animals, have not only the ability to respond to sudden changes in environmental conditions, but also the ability to form motivated (conscious) and goal-directed behavior. The ability to carry out such complex behavior is due to the presence of consciousness in humans.
Consciousness as the highest level of mental reflection. “I-concept” and a person’s criticality, their role in shaping human behavior.
Consciousness is the highest level of mental reflection and regulation, inherent only to man as a socio-historical being.
From a practical point of view, consciousness appears as a continuously changing set of sensory and mental images that directly appear before the subject in his inner world and anticipate his practical activity. We have the right to assume that similar mental activity in the formation of mental images occurs in the most developed animals, such as dogs, horses, and dolphins. Therefore, what distinguishes humans from animals is not this activity itself, but the mechanisms of its occurrence, which arose in the process of human social development. These mechanisms and the peculiarities of operating them determine the presence in humans of such a phenomenon as consciousness.
As a result of the action of these mechanisms, a person distinguishes himself from the environment and realizes his individuality, forms his “I-concept”, which consists of the totality of a person’s ideas about himself, about the surrounding reality and his place in society. Thanks to consciousness, a person has the ability to independently, that is, without the influence of environmental stimuli, regulate his behavior. In turn, the “I-concept” is the core of his self-regulation system. A person refracts all perceived information about the world around him through his system of ideas about himself and forms his behavior based on the system of his values, ideals and motivational attitudes. Of course, human behavior does not always correspond to environmental conditions. The adequacy of a person’s behavior is largely determined by the degree of his criticality.
In its simplest form, criticality is the ability to recognize the difference between “good” and “bad.” Thanks to criticality, a person develops ideals and creates an idea of moral values. It is the ability to critically evaluate what is happening and compare the information received with one’s attitudes and ideals, and also, based on this comparison, to form one’s behavior that distinguishes a person from an animal. Thus, criticality acts as a mechanism for controlling one’s behavior. On the other hand, the presence of such a complex mechanism for the formation and operation of mental images determines a person’s ability for conscious activity, the manifestation of which is work.
In order to understand the importance of this conclusion, let's try to deny it by saying that certain animals also commit useful actions. For example, a dog guards, a horse transports firewood, and some animals perform in the circus, demonstrating actions that at first glance seem reasonable. However, all this is so only at first glance. In order to perform such complex actions, the animal needs a person. Without human participation, without his initiating principle, the animal is not able to perform actions similar to conscious behavior. Consequently, human activity and animal behavior differ in the degree of independence. Thanks to consciousness, a person acts consciously and independently.
Thus, we can distinguish four main levels of development of the psyche of living organisms: irritability, sensitivity (sensations), behavior of higher animals (externally determined behavior), human consciousness (self-determined behavior). It should be noted that each of these levels has its own stages of development.
Only humans have the highest level of mental development. But a person is not born with a developed consciousness. The formation and evolution of consciousness occurs in the process of physiological and social development of a particular individual (ontogenesis). Therefore, the process of consciousness formation is strictly individual, determined both by the characteristics of social development and by genetic predisposition.
Activity and intentionality are the main characteristics of consciousness. Reflection and the motivational-value nature of consciousness.
What is consciousness characterized by? Firstly, consciousness is always active, and secondly, it is intentional. Activity itself is a property of all living beings. The activity of consciousness is manifested in the fact that the mental reflection of the objective world by a person is not of a passive nature, as a result of which all objects reflected by the psyche have the same significance, but, on the contrary, differentiation occurs according to the degree of significance for the subject of mental images. As a result, human consciousness is always directed towards some object, object or image, that is, it has the property of intention (direction).
The presence of these properties determines the presence of a number of other characteristics of consciousness, allowing us to consider it as the highest level of self-regulation. The group of these properties of consciousness should include the ability for introspection (reflection), as well as the motivational and value-based nature of consciousness.
The ability to reflect determines a person’s ability to observe himself, his feelings, his condition. Moreover, observe critically, i.e. a person is able to evaluate himself and his condition by placing the information received in a certain coordinate system. Such a coordinate system for a person is his values and ideals.
Basic functions of the psyche. Ensuring adaptation to environmental conditions is an integrative function of the psyche. General problems of the origin of the human psyche
It is possible to most accurately determine the functions of the psyche, perhaps, only in one area. This is the sphere of interaction between living organisms and the environment. From this point of view, three main functions of the psyche can be distinguished: reflection of the surrounding reality, preservation of the integrity of the body, regulation of behavior. These functions are interconnected and are essentially elements of the integrative function of the psyche, which is to ensure the adaptation of a living organism to environmental conditions.
The more developed a living being is, the more complex its adaptation mechanisms are. We observe the most complex adaptation mechanisms in humans. The process of human adaptation is to a certain extent similar to the process of adaptation of higher animals. Just like in animals, human adaptation has an internal and external orientation. The internal orientation of adaptation is that, thanks to the adaptation process, the constancy of the internal environment of the body is ensured and thereby the integrity of the body is achieved. The external manifestation of adaptation consists in ensuring adequate contact of a living creature with the external environment, i.e., in the formation of appropriate behavior in more developed creatures or behavioral reactions in less developed organisms. Consequently, both the internal and external aspects of adaptation primarily provide the possibility of the biological existence of a living being. In humans, the construction of contact with the external environment has a more complex structure than in animals, since a person is in contact not only with the natural, but also with the social environment, which functions according to laws different from the laws of nature. Therefore, we have the right to believe that human adaptation is aimed not only at ensuring his biological existence, but also at ensuring his existence in society.
In addition, we have the right to assume that the regulation of a person’s internal state occurs at a more complex level, since the influx of information about changed environmental conditions gives rise to certain changes in the course of mental processes, i.e., a person also experiences mental adaptation.
The method and level of adaptation of animals to living conditions is determined by the degree of development of the animal’s psyche. The available scientific material allows us to distinguish several stages in the development of the animal psyche. These stages differ in the way and level of obtaining information about the surrounding world, which prompts the animal to action. In one case, this is the level of individual sensations, in the other, objective perception.
The highest level of development of the psyche of animals at the stage of objective perception allows us to speak about the simplest intellectual behavior of animals. However, the peculiarity of animal behavior is mainly the satisfaction of their basic biological needs.
There is another problem of scientific knowledge of the psyche. This is the problem of the origin of the psyche. What determines the existence of such a phenomenon as the psyche? It was previously mentioned that there are different points of view regarding the origin of the psyche. From one point of view - idealistic - the mental (soul) in its origin is not connected with the body (the biological carrier of the soul) and has a divine origin. From another point of view - dualistic - a person has two principles: mental (ideal) and biological (material). These two principles develop in parallel and are to a certain extent interrelated with each other. From a third point of view - materialistic - the phenomenon of the psyche is due to the evolution of living nature, and its existence should be considered as a property of highly developed matter.
Disputes about the origin of the psyche continue to this day. This is due to the fact that the problem of the origin of the psyche is not only one of the most difficult in scientific knowledge, but also fundamental. Many scientists are trying to explain the origin of the psyche within the framework of not only psychological science, but also philosophy, religion, physiology, etc. Today there is still no clear answer to this question.
In Russian psychology, this problem is considered from a materialistic point of view, which involves the use of a rationalistic method of cognition based on experiment. Thanks to experimental research, today we know that there is a certain relationship between the biological and the mental. For example, it is well known that diseases or dysfunctions of certain organs can affect the human psyche. Thus, a long course of treatment using an “artificial kidney” apparatus is accompanied by the phenomenon of a temporary decrease in intellectual abilities, which is associated with the accumulation of aluminum salts in the brain. After stopping the course of treatment, intellectual abilities are restored.
It should be noted that such complex mental mechanisms observed in humans became possible only as a result of the long evolution of living organisms, historical development humanity and the individual development of a particular individual.
The relationship between brain development and human consciousness. The role of labor in the formation and development of human consciousness . Concept by A. N. Leontiev.
In Russian psychology, the question is “What determines the emergence and development of consciousness in humans? “, as a rule, are considered based on the hypothesis formulated by A. N. Leontyev about the origin of human consciousness. In order to answer the question about the origin of consciousness, it is necessary to dwell on the fundamental differences between humans and other representatives of the animal world.
One of the main differences between man and animal is his relationship with nature. If an animal is an element of living nature and builds its relationship with it from the position of adaptation to the conditions of the surrounding world, then a person does not simply adapt to the natural environment, but strives to subjugate it to a certain extent, creating tools for this. With the creation of tools, human lifestyle changes. The ability to create tools to transform the surrounding nature indicates the ability to work consciously.
Work - This is a specific type of activity inherent only to humans, which consists in influencing nature in order to ensure the conditions of their existence.
The main feature of labor is that labor activity, as a rule, is carried out only together with other people. This is true even for the simplest labor operations or activities of an individual nature, since in the process of performing them a person enters into certain relationships with the people around him. For example, the work of a writer can be characterized as individual. However, in order to become a writer, a person had to learn to read and write, receive the necessary education, that is, his work activity became possible only as a result of being included in the system of relationships with other people. Thus, any work, even one that seems at first glance to be purely individual, requires cooperation with other people.
Consequently, labor contributed to the formation of certain human communities that were fundamentally different from animal communities. These differences lay in the fact that, firstly, the unification of primitive people was caused by the desire not just to survive, which is characteristic to a certain extent for herd animals, but to survive by transforming the natural conditions of existence, i.e. with the help of collective labor.
Secondly, the most important condition for the existence of human communities and the successful performance of labor operations is the level of development of communication between members of the community. The higher the level of development of communication between members of a community, the higher not only the organization, but also the level of development of the human psyche. Thus, the highest level of human communication - speech - has determined a fundamentally different level of regulation of mental states and behavior - regulation with the help of words. A person who is able to communicate using words does not need to come into physical contact with the objects around him to form his behavior or ideas about the real world. To do this, it is enough for him to have information that he acquires in the process of communicating with other people.
It should be noted that it was precisely the characteristics of human communities, consisting in the need for collective work, that determined the emergence and development of speech. In turn, speech predetermined the possibility of the existence of consciousness, since human thought always has a verbal (verbal) form. For example, a person who, by a certain coincidence of circumstances, ended up in childhood with animals and grew up among them, does not know how to speak, and the level of his thinking, although higher than that of animals, does not at all correspond to the level of thinking of modern man.
Thirdly, the laws of the animal world, based on the principles of natural selection, are unsuitable for the normal existence and development of human communities. The collective nature of work and the development of communication not only entailed the development of thinking, but also determined the formation of specific laws of existence and development of the human community. These laws are known to us as the principles of morality and ethics.
Thus, there is a certain sequence of phenomena that determined the possibility of the emergence of consciousness in humans: work led to a change in the principles of building relationships between people. This change was expressed in the transition from natural selection to the principles of organizing social life, and also contributed to the development of speech as a means of communication. The emergence of human communities with their moral standards, reflecting the laws of social coexistence, was the basis for the manifestation of critical human thinking. This is how the concepts of “good” and “bad” appeared, the content of which was determined by the level of development of human communities. Gradually, with the development of society, these concepts became more complex, which to a certain extent contributed to the evolution of thinking. At the same time, speech development occurred. More and more new functions appeared. It contributed to a person’s awareness of his “I” and to distinguishing himself from the environment. As a result, speech acquired properties that make it possible to consider it as a means of regulating human behavior. All these phenomena and patterns determined the possibility of the manifestation and development of consciousness in humans.
At the same time, it should be emphasized that such a logical sequence is only a hypothesis presented from a rationalistic position. Today there are other points of view on the problem of the emergence of human consciousness, including those presented from irrational positions. This is not surprising, since there is no consensus on many issues in psychology. We give preference to the rationalistic point of view not only because similar views were held by the classics of Russian psychology (A. N. Leontiev, B. N. Teplov, etc.). There are a number of facts that make it possible to establish the patterns that determined the possibility of the emergence of consciousness in humans.
First of all, you should pay attention to the fact that the emergence of consciousness in humans, the emergence of speech and the ability to work were prepared by the evolution of man as a biological species. Upright walking freed the forelimbs from the function of walking and contributed to the development of their specialization associated with grasping objects, holding them and manipulating them, which generally contributed to the creation of the ability for humans to work. At the same time, the development of sense organs occurred. In humans, vision has become the dominant source of information about the world around us.
We have the right to believe that the development of the sense organs could not occur in isolation from the development of the nervous system as a whole, since with the emergence of man as a biological species, significant changes were noted in the structure of the nervous system, and primarily the brain. Thus, the volume of the human brain is more than twice the volume of the brain of its closest predecessor, the great ape. If the average brain volume of an ape is 600 cm 3 , then in a human it is 1400 cm 3 . The surface area of the cerebral hemispheres increases in an even greater proportion, since the number of convolutions of the cerebral cortex and their depth in humans are much greater.
However, with the advent of man there is not only a physical increase in the volume of the brain and the area of the cortex. Significant structural and functional changes in the brain occur. For example, in humans, compared to the apes, the area of projection fields associated with elementary sensory and motor functions has decreased in percentage terms, and the percentage of integrative fields associated with higher mental functions has increased.
Such a sharp growth of the cerebral cortex and its structural evolution are primarily related to the fact that a number of elementary functions, which in animals are carried out entirely by the lower parts of the brain, in humans already require the participation of the cortex. There is further corticalization of behavior control, a greater subordination of elementary processes to the cortex compared to what is observed in animals. It can be assumed that the evolution of the cerebral cortex in the process of human phylogenesis, along with its socio-historical development, determined the possibility of the emergence of the highest form of mental development - consciousness.
Today, thanks to clinical research, we know that conscious activity and conscious behavior in humans are largely determined by the anterior frontal and parietal fields of the cerebral cortex. Thus, when the anterior frontal fields are damaged, a person loses the ability to consciously and intelligently manage his activities as a whole, and to subordinate his actions to more distant motives and goals. At the same time, damage to the parietal fields leads to the loss of ideas about temporal and spatial relationships, as well as logical connections. An interesting fact is that the frontal and parietal fields in humans, compared to apes, are most developed, especially the frontal ones. If the frontal fields in monkeys occupy about 15% of the area of the cerebral cortex, then in humans they occupy 30%. In addition, the anterior frontal and lower parietal areas in humans have some nerve centers that are absent in animals.
It should also be noted that the nature of structural changes in the human brain was affected by the results of the evolution of motor organs. Each muscle group is closely associated with specific motor fields of the cerebral cortex. In humans, motor fields associated with a particular muscle group have a different area, the size of which directly depends on the degree of development of a particular muscle group. When analyzing the ratios of the size of the area of motor fields, attention is drawn to how large the area of the motor field associated with the hands is in relation to other fields. Consequently, the human hands have the greatest development among the organs of movement and are most associated with the activity of the cerebral cortex. It must be emphasized that this phenomenon occurs only in humans.
Thus, we can draw a twofold conclusion about the relationship between work and human mental development. Firstly, the complex structure that the human brain has and which distinguishes it from the brain of animals is most likely associated with the development of human labor activity. This conclusion is classic from the point of view of materialist philosophy. On the other hand, given that the volume of the modern human brain has not changed significantly since the times of primitive people, we can say that the evolution of man as a biological species contributed to the emergence of the ability for people to work, which in turn was a prerequisite for the emergence of consciousness in humans. The absence of indisputable evidence confirming or refuting one of the conclusions has given rise to different points of view on the causes of the emergence and development of consciousness in humans.
However, we will not focus our attention on theoretical disputes, but will only note that the emergence of consciousness in humans as the highest known form of mental development became possible due to the complication of the structure of the brain. In addition, we must agree that the level of development of brain structures and the ability to perform complex work operations are closely related. Therefore, it can be argued that the emergence of consciousness in humans is due to both biological and social factors. The development of living nature led to the emergence of man, who has specific body structure features and a more developed nervous system compared to other animals, which generally determined man’s ability to engage in work. This, in turn, led to the emergence of communities, the development of language and consciousness, i.e., that logical chain of patterns mentioned above. Thus, work was the condition that made it possible to realize the mental potentials of the biological species HomoSapiens.
It must be emphasized that with the advent of consciousness, man immediately stood out from the animal world, but the first people, in terms of the level of their mental development, differed significantly from modern people. Thousands of years passed before man reached the level modern development. Moreover, the main factor in the progressive development of consciousness was labor. Thus, with the acquisition of practical experience and with the evolution of social relations, work activity became more complex. Man gradually moved from the simplest labor operations to more complex types of activity, which entailed the progressive development of the brain and consciousness.
Used Books:
1. Maklakov A. G. General psychology - St. Petersburg: Peter, 2001.
2. Gippenreiter Yu. B. Introduction to general psychology: Course of lectures: Textbook for universities. - M., 1997.
3. Nemov R. S. Psychology: Textbook for students. higher ped. textbook institutions: In 3 books. Book 1: General fundamentals of psychology. - 2nd ed. - M.: Vlados 1998.
4. Psychology / Ed. prof. K. N. Kornilova, prof. A. A. Smirnova, prof. B. M. Teplova. - Ed. 3rd, revised and additional - M.: Uchpedgiz, 1948.
5. Simonov P. V. Motivated brain: Higher nervous activity and natural science foundations of general psychology / Rep. ed. V. S. Rusinov. - M.: Nauka, 1987.
Consciousness and its characteristics
The psyche as a reflection of reality is characterized at different levels. The highest level of the psyche, characteristic of a person, forms consciousness. Consciousness is the highest, integrating form of the psyche, the result of the socio-historical conditions of human formation in activity, with constant communication (through speech) with other people. Consequently, consciousness is a social product. Characteristics of consciousness. 1. Human consciousness includes a body of knowledge about the world. The structure of consciousness includes cognitive processes (perception, memory, imagination, thinking, etc.), with the help of which a person truly enriches knowledge about the world and about himself. 2. The second characteristic of consciousness is a clear distinction between “I” and “Not-I”. A person who has separated himself from the surrounding world continues to maintain peace in his consciousness and exercise self-awareness. A person makes a conscious assessment of himself, his thoughts, and actions. 3. The third characteristic of consciousness is ensuring goal setting. The functions of consciousness include the formation of goals, while motives are compared, volitional decisions are made, and the progress of achieving goals is taken into account. 4. The fourth characteristic is the inclusion of a certain attitude in the composition of consciousness. The world of his feelings enters a person’s consciousness; emotions of evaluation are represented in it interpersonal relationships. In general, consciousness is characterized by 1. Activity (selectivity), 2. intentionality (direction towards an object), 3. motivational-value character. 4. Different levels of clarity.
Genesis of consciousness Gippenreiter
The main thing that distinguishes the group behavior of animals from human social life is its subordination exclusively to biological goals, laws and mechanisms. Human society arose on the basis of joint labor activity.
Productive work became possible through the use of tools. Therefore, the tool activity of animals is considered as one of the biological prerequisites for anthropogenesis. Animals, however, cannot make tools using another tool. Making tools with the help of another object meant the separation of action from the biological motive and thereby the emergence of a new type of activity - labor. Making a weapon for future use presupposed the presence of an image of future action, i.e. the emergence of a plane of consciousness. It assumed a division of labor, i.e. the establishment of social relations on the basis of non-biological activities. Finally, it meant the materialization of the experience of labor operations (in the form of tools) with the possibility of storing this experience and passing it on to subsequent generations.
The transition to consciousness represents the beginning of a new, higher stage in the development of the psyche. Consciousness initially emerged as something that provided biological adaptation. Conscious reflection, in contrast to the mental reflection characteristic of animals, is a reflection of objective reality in its separation from the subject’s existing relations to it, i.e. a reflection that highlights its objective, stable properties. This definition by Leontiev emphasizes “objectivity”, i.e. human impartiality, conscious reflection. For an animal, an object is reflected as having a direct relationship to one or another biological motive.
The classics of Marxism repeatedly expressed the idea that the leading factors in the emergence of consciousness were labor and language. These provisions were developed in the works of Vygotsky and Leontiev. According to Leontyev, any change in mental reflection occurs following a change in practical activity, therefore the impetus for the emergence of consciousness was the emergence of a new form of activity - collective labor.
Any joint work presupposes a division of labor. This means that different members of the team begin to perform different operations, and different in one very significant respect: some operations immediately lead to a biologically useful result, while others do not give such a result, but act only as a condition for its achievement. Considered in themselves, such operations seem biologically meaningless. These operations have an intermediate result in mind. Within the framework of individual activity, this result becomes an independent goal. Thus, for the subject, the goal of an activity is separated from its motive; accordingly, a new unit of activity is identified in the activity - action. There is a separation between the motive of an entire activity and the (conscious) goal of an individual action. There is a special task to understand the meaning of this action, which has no biological meaning. The connection between motive and goal is revealed in the form of the activity of the human work collective. An objective and practical attitude towards the subject of activity arises. Thus, between the object of activity and the subject there is awareness of the very activity of producing this object.
In terms of mental reflection, this is accompanied by experiencing the meaning of the action. After all, in order for a person to be encouraged to perform an action that leads only to an intermediate result, he must understand the connection of this result with the motive, i.e. discover its meaning. Meaning, according to Leontiev’s definition, is a reflection of the relationship between goal and motive.
To successfully perform an action, it is necessary to develop an “impartial” type of knowledge of reality. After all, actions begin to be directed towards an increasingly wider range of objects, and knowledge of the objective stable properties of these objects turns out to be a vital necessity. This is where the role of the second factor in the development of consciousness manifests itself - speech and language. The results of knowledge began to be recorded in words.
A unique feature of human language is its ability to accumulate knowledge acquired by generations of people. Thanks to it, man became a bearer of social consciousness (consciousness is shared knowledge). Each person, in the course of individual development through language acquisition, is introduced to “shared knowledge,” and only thanks to this is his individual consciousness formed.
Thus, meanings and linguistic meanings turned out to be, according to Leontyev, the main components of human consciousness. Speech first appears to influence others like itself, and only then does it turn on itself and become a regulator of its own behavior.
Leontyev adheres to the position of K. Marx on the essence of consciousness. Marx said that consciousness is a product of socio-historical relations into which people enter, and which are only realized through their brain, their senses and organs of action. In the processes generated by these relationships, objects are posited in the form of their subjective images in the human head in the form of consciousness. Leontiev writes that consciousness is “a picture of the world that is revealed to the subject, in which he himself, his actions and states are included. And following Marx, Leontiev says that consciousness is a specifically human form of subjective reflection of objective reality; it can only be understood as a product of relationships and mediations that arise during the formation and development of society.
Initially, consciousness exists only in the form of a mental image that reveals the world around it to the subject, but activity, as before, remains practical, external. At a later stage, activity also becomes the subject of consciousness: the actions of other people are realized, and through them the subject’s own actions. Now they communicate using gestures or speech. This is a prerequisite for the generation of internal actions and operations that take place in the mind, on the “plane of consciousness.” Consciousness-image also becomes consciousness-activity. The developed consciousness of individuals is characterized by its psychological multidimensionality.
According to Vygotsky, the components of consciousness are meanings (cognitive components of consciousness) and meanings (emotional and motivational components).
Consciousness is the highest, human-specific form of generalized reflection of the objective stable properties and patterns of the surrounding world, the formation of a person’s internal model of the external world, as a result of which knowledge and transformation of the surrounding reality is achieved.
The function of consciousness is to formulate the goals of activity, to preliminary mentally construct actions and anticipate their results, which ensures reasonable regulation of human behavior and activity. A person’s consciousness includes a certain attitude towards environment, to other people.
The following properties of consciousness are distinguished: building relationships, cognition and experience. This directly follows the inclusion of thinking and emotions in the processes of consciousness. Indeed, the main function of thinking is to identify objective relationships between phenomena of the external world, and the main function of emotion is to form a person’s subjective attitude towards objects, phenomena, and people. These forms and types of relationships are synthesized in the structures of consciousness, and they determine both the organization of behavior and the deep processes of self-esteem and self-awareness. Really existing in a single stream of consciousness, an image and a thought can, colored by emotions, become an experience.
The primary act of consciousness is the act of identification with the symbols of culture, which organizes human consciousness and makes a person human. The isolation of meaning, symbol and identification with it is followed by implementation, the child’s active activity in reproducing patterns of human behavior, speech, thinking, consciousness, the child’s active activity in reflecting the world around him and regulating his behavior.
There are two layers of consciousness (V.P. Zinchenko): I. Existential consciousness (consciousness for being), which includes: - biodynamic properties of movements, experience of actions, - sensory images. II. Reflective consciousness (consciousness for consciousness), including:
Meaning is the content of social consciousness, assimilated by a person. These can be operational meanings, objective, verbal meanings, everyday and scientific meanings - concepts. - Meaning - subjective understanding and attitude to the situation, information. Misunderstandings are associated with difficulties in comprehending meanings. The processes of mutual transformation of meanings and meanings (understanding of meanings and the meaning of meanings) act as a means of dialogue and mutual understanding.
At the existential layer of consciousness, very complex problems are solved, since for effective behavior in a given situation, it is necessary to update the image and the necessary motor program needed at the moment, i.e. the way of action must fit into the image of the world. The world of ideas, concepts, everyday and scientific knowledge correlates with the meaning (of reflective consciousness). The world of production, object-practical activity correlates with the biodynamic fabric of movement. and action (the existential layer of consciousness). The world of ideas, imagination, cultural symbols and signs correlates with the sensory fabric (of existential consciousness). Consciousness is born and is present in all these worlds.
The epicenter of consciousness is the consciousness of one's own “I”. Consciousness: 1) is born in being, 2) reflects being, 3) creates being. Functions of consciousness:
1) reflective, 2) generative (creative - creative), 3) regular-evaluative, 4) reflexive function - the main function that characterizes the essence of consciousness. The object of reflection can be: reflection of the world, thinking about it, ways a person regulates his behavior, the processes of reflection themselves, his personal consciousness. The existential layer contains the origins and beginnings of the reflective layer, since meanings and meanings are born in the existential layer. The meaning expressed in a word contains: image, operational and objective meaning, meaningful and objective action. Words and language do not exist only as language; they objectify the forms of thinking that we master through the use of language.
Two approaches to understanding consciousness: 1. Consciousness is devoid of its own psychological specificity - its only feature is that, thanks to consciousness, various phenomena appear before the individual that make up the content of specific psychological functions. Consciousness was considered as a general “non-quality” condition for the existence of the psyche (Jung consciousness - a scene illuminated by a spotlight) - the complexity of a specific experimental study, 2. Identification of consciousness with any mental function (attention or thinking) - a separate function is being studied.
At the level of consciousness, basic mental processes acquire new characteristics, compared to the psyche of animals. Cognitive processes become voluntary, indirect and conscious (voluntary attention, meaningful perception, voluntary and indirect memorization, verbal-logical thinking, etc. arise). The need-motivational sphere also loses the direct incentive character inherent in animals, correlating with culturally developed values and means, sociogenic needs arise - spiritual, creative, aesthetic, etc. It is with the level of consciousness that the will correlates. The emotionally sensitive sphere is transformed, certain emotions acquire the character of socially determined values, and higher feelings are formed.