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The problem of consciousness in philosophy and science. Problems of consciousness in philosophy and science Problems of consciousness in modern philosophy and science

Bulletin of Tomsk State University Philosophy. Sociology. Political science. 2016. No. 4 (36)

B01: 10.17223/1998863Х/36/11

I.V. Chernikova, D.V. Chernikova

THE PROBLEM OF CONSCIOUSNESS IN PHILOSOPHY AND COGNITIVE SCIENCE1

Changes in the ontology of consciousness are presented, due to the achievements of modern science in the study of the problem “consciousness - cognition - brain”. The results of the study are based on a comparative analysis of philosophical concepts of consciousness (rationalistic, personalistic, existential, dialectical-materialistic, phenomenological, analytical) and concepts of consciousness formed in cognitive science.

Key words: consciousness, cognition, language, thinking, cognitive science.

The problem of consciousness has been one of the central problems of philosophy for more than 2000 years. Formed different approaches in the philosophical interpretation of consciousness: rationalistic, personalistic, existential, dialectical-materialistic, phenomenological, analytical, etc. There are generalizing philosophical works in which comparative analysis philosophical concepts of consciousness. In rationalist philosophy, attention was focused on epistemological problems, and consciousness was identified with cognition. An important property of consciousness is its reflexivity; it reflects not only the external world, but also itself. It is based on the dialectical-materialist interpretation of consciousness as the ability of highly organized matter - the brain - to reflect the objective world. Personalists pointed out the shortcomings of the reflexive-rationalist concept of consciousness, believing that its supporters turn consciousness into a kind of “eye of the spirit” located in front of the world. Mounier emphasized that a person is “intimately involved in the object,” while denying the traditional scheme of cognition, where consciousness is located in front of the world: “consciousness in the world” is fundamentally different from “consciousness about the world.” At the center of the personalistic approach to consciousness is inner world personality. Much attention is paid to the problem of the unconscious.

In existential interpretations of consciousness there is a final break with transcendentalism. Consciousness ceases to be self-sufficient and is defined in other spheres (language, power, etc.). Unlike naturalistic concepts, consciousness does not dissolve in being and is not put on a par with natural processes. On the contrary, the starting point is that being can only be spoken of as a fact of consciousness, its constitutive abilities. It is forbidden to talk about the structures of existence outside consciousness in phenomenology.

In the phenomenological concept of consciousness, the main property of consciousness is intentionality - the ability to go beyond oneself to a new horizon, focus on an object. Consciousness in phenomenology represents a holistic flow of experiences in which an object is perceived.

1 The study was carried out under the Russian Humanitarian Foundation grant 14-03-00371-a.

In structuralism, consciousness is neither naturalistic nor reflective. Structuralists discover new contents of consciousness based on a priori truths of the mind, which are revealed in language, the unconscious, the signifier, etc. The unconscious for structuralists is a moment of the objective in the world of subjective evidence. In consciousness itself something is revealed that is not consciousness, but determines consciousness. The structuralist unconscious is an abstract form-ordering and form-generating mechanism - a “matrix”.

At the beginning of the 20th century, a so-called linguistic turn emerged in philosophy, associated with the study of language as a picture of the world, as a mirror of thinking, as a result of which linguistic concepts of consciousness are formed - hermeneutic interpretations of consciousness and the analytical concept of consciousness. The connection between thinking and speech was studied by psychologists (Vygotsky and others). Philosophers began to analyze the problem of consciousness through language. In philosophical hermeneutics, consciousness is interpreted as “co-knowledge” (Gadamer). Knowledge is considered as a “private” phenomenon, the true meaning of which is determined not by itself, but by the holistic context in which it is included. This context can be “played out” in the process of “speculative play of language.” Gadamer evaluates the European tradition of knowledge as based on the attitude of subjectivism (truth from the subject). He emphasized the superiority of the ancient tradition of knowledge, where thinking is understood as a moment of being, and not as a mode of action of the subject. The gap between being and thinking leads to a complete replacement of the movement of the thing itself with the movement of thought about it. So that thinking is not subjective, but corresponds to being, hermeneutics offers that whole that connects all the diversity of human knowledge into a single context - this is language. Language is not as an instrumental means of expressing the formal structures of logic and not as a means of speaking, but as a process of dialogue between being and thinking, “things in themselves” and human knowledge about them. For Gadamer, consciousness is not just self-consciousness, but “consciousness” as holistic knowledge that connects all other types of knowledge. The individual is only partially capable of acting as a bearer of such “co-knowledge”. The embodiment of this correlative whole is language.

A special role in the development of the problem of consciousness belongs to the analytical tradition. The so-called analytical program includes large group authors actively polemicizing with each other, who are united by an understanding of consciousness as a product of a person’s involvement in the space of meanings (Bildung). The most famous are H. Putnam (the theory of the identity of the physical states of the brain and its mental phenomena “qualia”) and D. Davidson, who is close to him in his views, who developed the theory of multiple interpretations of material events in the brain. Other analysts believe that at present it is fundamentally impossible to give a satisfactory answer to the “mind - body” problem (K. McGinn, T. Nagel, etc.). An important practical project of the analytical philosophy of consciousness was research artificial intelligence. Many of these theories have been examined in detail and critically in Russian philosophical literature. So, N.S. Yulina believes that the problem of consciousness, despite the sharply increased attention to it from philosophers and scientists, remains in the status of a “Great Mystery”

From the point of view of N.S. Yulina, all the above theories cannot even come to a common point of view on defining the very fact of consciousness and its characteristics. However, the analytical tradition in developing the problem of consciousness continues to develop intensively.

Today, in connection with the achievements of specific sciences in the study of the brain, primarily neuroscience, thanks to three-dimensional brain mapping technologies, a breakthrough is being made in understanding the secrets of consciousness. Let's consider how modern philosophy comprehends these achievements of science, how are philosophical concepts of consciousness changing? The disposition of forces of the leading players on the field of consciousness can, in our opinion, be presented as follows. J. Searle, in the interpretation of consciousness, considers its characteristic as a subjective reality to be the most important, since in principle its description in the first person is irreducible: “...consciousness is characterized by an ineliminable subjective ontology.”

D. Denet believes that consciousness is the result not of perception, but of our ability to form thoughts regarding first-level mental states. D. Dennett notes the inconsistency of the image of consciousness as a special mental reality, which he calls “Cartesian theater.” Consciousness is not in our heads and not an all-pervading ether in the world, but something between our heads, this is a multi-level phenomenon in which several layers are distinguished. Consciousness, according to D. Dennett, is a functional process or operation with cognitive information. The process was launched with the emergence of language and semiotic means and took shape in the course of memetic and social engineering.

D. Chalmers tried to find a middle way between the installations of Dennett and Searle. Chalmers makes a distinction between easy problems of consciousness and hard problems of consciousness. An “easy” problem involves a set of phenomena that are typically “associated with the concept of consciousness” and are the subject of research in neurophysiology, cognitive psychology, and related disciplines. These include: reactions to external stimuli, their discrimination and categorization; mental state reports; integration of information by the cognitive system; focus of attention; behavior control; difference between wakefulness and sleep. All these phenomena are well explained in familiar functional terms. The “hard” problem of consciousness is the problem of “subjective experience.” The “easy” problem involves identifying cognitive mechanisms aimed at understanding the functioning of consciousness. The “difficult” problem is associated with clarifying the ontological status of consciousness, with understanding the essence of the phenomenon “consciousness” as a subjective experience. How to explain subjective aspect information processes? This is the key question of the problem of consciousness. An explanation in functional terms, Chalmers believes, leaves the question open. main topic his research is the distinction between the biological functioning of the brain and behavior, on the one hand, and mental experience, which is considered separately from behavior, i.e. qualia, on the other.

Let's consider what new cognitive science brings to the study of consciousness. In relation to consciousness, cognitive science allows us to overcome contradictions and discover intersections in the discussion of consciousness, understanding

This can be both informational reality (rationalistic tradition) and subjective reality. In the rationalistic tradition, consciousness is interpreted as knowledge, in the phenomenological tradition - as intentionality (direction towards an object). In cognitive science, consciousness is the highest cognitive ability, has an informational nature (cognitive programs - perceptual and symbolic), it is a complex multi-level phenomenon formed at the junctions, created by the “overflow” of the natural and cultural.

Mentalistic studies of consciousness were carried out within the framework of a theory of higher-order representation. According to these theories, consciousness is the result of the representation of some mental states by other mental states. Today it is recognized that this approach is insufficient for understanding consciousness, since it does not reveal the ontological status of consciousness. The question about the specifics of the reality of consciousness, about what consciousness is as a subjective reality, leads to the so-called difficult problem of consciousness, which is associated with the theory of subjectivity. According to D. Chalmers, mental states are a special reality that does not coincide with functional schemes, but is only correlated with them. The philosopher believes that mental states depend on physical functional patterns. However, based on the principle of “causal closure” of the physical world, according to which all physical events have physical causes, he denies the possibility of the reverse influence of mental states on physical processes occurring in the structures of the brain (a concept called “naturalistic dualism” by Chalmers himself).

DI. Dubrovsky, analyzing the nature of subjective reality, showed that the ability of complex organisms to produce information about information, which emerged during evolution, is the basis for the emergence of subjectivity. Such a phenomenon of subjective experience as introspection - the ability to display one's own phenomena of subjective reality - is also an action of a higher level of complexity - display of display. In this context, consciousness appears as the result of second-order representations, including psychological states. These representations, when the soul contemplates itself, are called internal senses, in contrast to the external sense, through which we represent objects outside of us. Introspective consciousness, or self-awareness as consciousness of consciousness, is a higher level of consciousness than perceptual consciousness, which involves the ability to perceive the environment and one's bodily states. Researchers working on the problem of consciousness in the context of cognitive science focus on the question of the relationship between consciousness and thought (brain processes, “inner speech,” subjective reality and objectified consciousness, expressed in language and activity), on the one hand, and consciousness and material reality - on the other.

Modern cognitive research confirms that the brain functions as a complex self-developing system, the level of complexity of which increases with the formation of language at the stage of the evolution of sociality. Language is the result of self-organization and selection, notes T.V. Chernigovskaya,

it is the co-evolution of neurological base and social dynamics, it is “the interface between consciousness and brain, consciousness and world.” Neurons from different areas of the cortex can be simultaneously combined into a single functional unit. “This means that we are dealing with a finely tuned orchestra, the location of the conductor of which is unknown and unstable, and perhaps not filled at all, as the orchestra self-organizes based on many factors.”

In cognitive science, consciousness is studied through the prism of the “brain-thinking-language” interaction. Moreover, consciousness and cognition are characterized as an evolutionary ability. This characterization was given in the context of evolutionary epistemology. Evolutionary epistemology is a cognitive practice that was developed in English-speaking countries by K. Popper, S. Toulmin, D. Campbell, in German-speaking countries by K. Lorenz, G. Vollmer, R. Riedl, E. Oyser and others. Evolutionary epistemology is defined as “ theory of knowledge, which comes from the interpretation of man as a product of biological and social evolution." The subject of evolutionary epistemology is the evolution of cognitive structures, mechanisms of knowledge growth, cognition understood as a function of development, a function of life. In this context, evolutionary epistemology appears simultaneously as the “biologization of epistemology” and the “epistemologization of biology,” a new interdisciplinary communication of science and philosophy. Ideologically close to evolutionary epistemology are the genetic epistemology of J. Piaget and the naturalized epistemology of W. Quine.

The evolutionary approach to cognition and consciousness received a significant impetus for further development in the later works of U. Maturana and F. Varela, who in an evolutionary manner explain the emergence of consciousness as a new dimension of the structural coupling of the system and the environment. In humans, language and self-awareness have become such new dimensions. “The mind, as a kind of linguistic phenomenon in a network of social and linguistic coupling, is not something that is located in the brain. Consciousness and reason lie in the area of social conjugation - that is where the source of their dynamics is." The essence of “evolutionary cognitivism” is the interpretation of knowledge in the light of a richer repertoire of cognitive resources involved in its acquisition than individual experience. It includes information resources formed under the influence of algorithms of evolutionary history. A person acts as a center through which information flows coming from the physical world, biological matter, society and culture pass. The approach of cognitive science, which carries out a transdisciplinary study of thinking and intelligence, is based on a new ontology, called holistic, and on non-classical epistemology. According to the new view, thinking has a bodily basis; it is something more than simply operating with abstract symbols.

Let us turn to systemic evolutionary methodology in explaining the phenomenon of consciousness and cognitive evolution. In 1944, R. Hofstander published the book Social Darwinism and American Thought, he suggested that the naturalistic (evolutionist) current had penetrated deeply into American thought, and, most likely, it would make itself felt

and henceforth. Over time, a deep naturalistic current began to make its way into analytical philosophy itself. The leader of the analytical movement in the USA, W. Quine, once made a far-reaching statement that epistemology should become naturalistic. Life has shown that the transformation of analytical philosophy taking place today proceeds approximately in this direction: from the analysis of language and logic to the understanding of the factual side of science - not only physics, but also biology.

Ideas about the world, formed by the evolutionary-synergetic paradigm, the main characteristics of which were analyzed in the works of the author, correlate with ideas about the nature of thinking and cognition, formed by modern cognitive science. In the context of the evolutionary-synergetic paradigm, based on the ideas of global (universal) evolutionism, systematicity, coevolution, nonlinearity, the idea of cognitive evolution as a natural historical process, as a gene-cultural coevolution, is formed. The evolutionary-synergetic paradigm is knowledge of a new type, it is transdisciplinary knowledge, which is characterized not only as cooperation of various scientific fields, but also as a transfer of cognitive schemes from one area of knowledge to another. Cognitive science poses the problem of creating a transdisciplinary language in which familiar words are endowed with new meaning

Transdisciplinary research has two aspects of integration. The first aspect has an ontological basis; it is associated with the transition from a discrete, atomistic worldview to a systemic one. The Cartesian framework of the world, in which the presence of two independent substances - extension and thinking - led to the opposition of the physical and mental, led to the division of the entire variety of sciences into natural and humanities. In turn, identifying the specifics of various forms of matter motion served as the basis for the disciplinary structure of the natural sciences. In the quantum-relativistic picture of the world, in contrast to the mechanistic one, the idea of reality as a system of interconnections is formed; in the knowledge of the microworld, the “observed - observer” relationship becomes central. From the middle of the 20th century. a new idea of reality is being affirmed as a process in which one cannot look at reality as a spectator, but from the outside, one must participate, changing it and at the same time oneself (synergetic approach). Reality is not only perceived by the mind, but is constructed by it. Any object of cognition is included in a certain pre-interpreted context, outside of which there are other, also pre-interpreted contexts.

The second aspect of transdisciplinary integration is characterized by a special type of thinking, the so-called complex thinking, which combines the complexity generated by cognition and the complexity of the object of cognition - self-developing systems. Cognition, understood in evolutionary epistemology as a stage of the global evolutionary process, as a life activity, gives rise to a new level of complexity. If thinking is a component of reality, then it is possible to think about it only taking into account the thought about thought. Transdisciplinary interaction distinguishes cognitive sciences, the convergent interaction of which allows us to speak of a unified cognitive science.

a science that closely interconnects psychology, linguistics, epistemology, computer science, and neurophysiology in the knowledge of cognition. To justify that cognitive research is not just a conglomerate of sciences, it is necessary to identify the grounds for their transdisciplinary integration. A possible approach to solving this problem could be to identify a common method that unites all studies. This, in our opinion, is the system-evolutionary method, which is at the same time the ontological basis of the modern understanding of thinking and consciousness and is designated as a system-evolutionary approach.

The systems-evolutionary approach to explaining consciousness is being developed in cognitive science on the basis of the theory proposed by Nobel laureate J. Edelman and G. Tononi. According to this theory, the brain is a site of communicative interaction between competing groups of neurons, as a result of which a “dynamic core” is formed in it, acting as a new order parameter, a “functional cluster” that ensures self-organization. In connection with the deciphering of the human genome, interest has grown in searching for the genetic basis of individual cognitive functions and individual differences. There is also a convergence of cognitive research with those sections of neurophysiology that study the affective and motivational aspects of behavior. At the same time, cognitive linguistics seeks to use language as a window into the structures of the brain.

With the appearance at the end of the 20th century. With the introduction of three-dimensional brain mapping methods, the methodology and tasks of cognitive neuroscience have come to the fore. These are tasks such as identifying the patterns of evolutionary and ontogenetic development of brain systems, their connections with the phenomena of consciousness and cognitive activity. The current stage of development of cognitive science is called neural network, or connectionist. The study of cognition here is not limited to what happens in the brain, but involves the constant interaction of the organism and its environment. The cognitive system is considered to include the brain, body, and external environment. Consciousness is not identified with the brain, and cognitive processes are understood not as isolated processes within the medium, but as a result of the interaction of the system and the environment.

According to the connectionist model, the basis for the functioning of the brain's neural networks is not abstract logical thinking, but pattern recognition. In particular, the study of neurophysiological processes in the human brain showed that the speed of movement of the action potential along the nerve fiber and the time of synoptic transmission do not provide the actual speed of the mechanisms of thinking and memory, i.e. the processes of thinking and memory occur a fraction of a second faster than the transmission of nerve impulses. W. Penfield in the book “The Secret of the Mind” notes: “The mind always stands above the content of our consciousness. It is a completely independent entity. The mind commands, the brain executes. The brain is a messenger to consciousness."

So, with regard to consciousness, cognitive science, based on a system-evolutionary approach, allows us to overcome contradictions and discover intersections in various philosophical interpretations of consciousness and thereby derive

discussion of the problem of consciousness to a new higher level of conceptualization. In our opinion, cognitive science does not reduce the mental to the physical and does not reduce all behavioral functions to cognitive processes, but creates a more complex model of cognition through the integration of the natural and human sciences. She demonstrates the desire to understand consciousness and such related phenomena as language, freedom, morality, cognition, not only through the study of culture and sociality, but also using natural scientific arguments.

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Chernikova Irina V. - National Research Tomsk State University, National Research Tomsk Polytechnic University (Tomsk, Russian Federation). DOI: 10.17223/1998863X/36/11

Chernikova Daria V. - National Research Tomsk State University, National Research Tomsk Polytechnic University (Tomsk, Russian Federation). DOI: 10.17223/1998863X/36/11

THE PROBLEM OF CONSCIENCE IN PHILOSOPHY AND COGNITIVE SCIENCE

Keywords: conscience, cognition, language, thinking, cognitive science

On the basis of the comparative analysis of the philosophic concepts of conscience (rationalistic, personalistic, existential, dialectic-materialistical, phenomenological and analytical) and concepts of conscience in cognitive science the paper highlights changes in ontology of cognition conditioned by the progress of the contemporary science in the research of "conscience - cognition - brain" problem. At that, conscience and cognition are characterized as an evolutional ability. This characteristic was given in light of evolutional epistemology. The research of the conscience in the evolutional approach allows explaining the conscience as a new dimension of the structural coherence of the system and environment. Language and self-conscience appeared as such a dimension at humans. Conscience and mind is not a sort of substance placed in the brain, and not a function that can be attributed exclusively to the brain. Conscience and mind are formed in social interference; that is the source of their dynamics. The essence of the evolutional cognitivism is in the interpretation of brainpower in light of cognitive resources exceeding the individual experience. Human being is the center wherethrough information flows from the physical world, biological matter, society and culture. It is displayed that cognitive science on the basis of the system-evolutional approach to conscience analysis allows to overcome contradictions and reveal coherence in various philosophical interpretations of conscience, and thus, convey the discussion of conscience to the new level of conceptualization. In our opinion, cognitive science in the research of "conscience - cognition - brain" problem performs not the reduction of

mental to physical, and does not reduce behavioral functions to cognitive processes. Cognitive science creates a more complex model of conscience by the integration of natural sciences and humanities. It demonstrates the aspiration to understand the conscience and associated phenomena as language, cognition, freedom, moral not only by the research of culture and sociality, but by using natural science arguments.

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3. Searle, J. (2002) Otkryvaya soznanie zanovo. Moscow: Ideaya-Press.

4. Yulina, N.S. (2007) Filosofskiy naturalizm: O book Deniela Denneta "Svoboda evolyutsion-iruet" . Moscow: Kanon+.

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6. Chernigovskaya, T.V. (2013) Cheshirskaya ulybka kota Shredingera: yazyk i soznanie. Moscow: Yazyki slavyanskoy kul"tury.

7. Chernigovskaya, T.V. (2009) Esli zerkalo budet smotret "sya v zerkalo, what ono tam uvidit? . In: Ushakov, D.V. (ed.) Kognitivnye issledovaniya. Vol. 4. Moscow: Institute of Psychology. pp. 13-37.

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12. Renfield, W. (1975) The Mystery of Mind. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Consciousness is one of the traditional eternal philosophical mysteries. Its constant reproduction in the history of culture, philosophy and science testifies not only to the existence of theoretical and methodological difficulties in solving it, but also to the enduring practical interest in the essence of this phenomenon, the mechanism of its development and functioning. In its most general form, “consciousness” is one of the most general philosophical concepts denoting subjective reality associated with the activity of the brain and its products: thoughts, feelings, ideas, prejudices, scientific and extra-scientific knowledge. Without clarifying the place and role of this reality, it is impossible to create either a philosophical or scientific picture of the world. In different historical periods, different ideas about consciousness developed, natural science knowledge accumulated, and the theoretical and methodological foundations of analysis changed. Modern science, using the achievements of scientific and technological revolution, has made significant progress in studying the nature of the substrate basis of consciousness, but at the same time has identified new aspects of conscious human activity that require fundamentally different theoretical and methodological approaches to philosophical analysis.
It is traditionally believed that the merit of a holistic formulation of the problem of consciousness, or rather the problem of the ideal, belongs to Plato. Before Plato, such a problem did not exist. The soul, which was reduced to the fundamental principle of the whole world, was considered the bearer of human thoughts and feelings. Atomists (Democritus) consider the soul as a formation consisting of special round atoms and emptiness, i.e. as a special material formation. Developing Socrates' ideas about the innateness of true knowledge to the soul before its incarnation in the human body, Plato for the first time identifies the ideal as a special essence that does not coincide with and is opposite to the sensory, objective, material world of things. In the allegorical image of prisoners in a cave, Plato explains the independent existence of the world of ideas (the real world), which determines the existence of the world of things as a reflection, a shadow of the primary world. This concept of dividing the world into 2 parts (the world of ideas and the world of things) turned out to be decisive for the entire subsequent philosophical culture of Europe, in contrast to the Eastern tradition.
In philosophy they have developed and retain their significance in modern culture the following concepts of consciousness.

An objective-idealistic interpretation of consciousness as a superhuman, transpersonal, ultimately transcendental idea (the world of ideas in Plato; the absolute idea in Hegel; God in theologians; alien intelligence in ufologists), underlying all forms of earthly existence. Human consciousness is a particle, product or other being of the world mind.
Subjective-idealistic systems consider human consciousness as a self-sufficient entity that contains a picture of itself and is the substance of the material world (R. Descartes, J. Berkeley).
Hylozoism (materialized life) states that all matter thinks, consciousness is an attributive property of the entire material world. From the point of view of hylozoism, all matter is animate or, at least, has the prerequisites for thinking. This concept goes back to the early teachings of the Milesian school; its elements are contained in the teachings of Aristotle, J. Bruno, B. Spinoza. The data of modern science on the elements of rational activity of animals, the successes of physiology in diagnosing diseases of the central nervous system, the achievements of cybernetics in the creation of “thinking machines” revive the ideas of hylozoism and psychophysiological parallelism, according to which both the mental and the physiological are two independent entities, the study of which should be carried out through own substantiality.
Vulgar materialism as a reductionist identification of consciousness with material formations in the human brain. Consciousness is purely material in nature, it is the result of the functioning of certain parts or formations of the brain. The denial of the qualitative specificity of consciousness and human thinking has its origins in ancient culture and was especially clearly manifested in ancient atomism, but the materialization of consciousness gained particular popularity at the end of the 18th century. early XIX century in connection with the spread of the idea of Darwinism. Its most prominent representatives K. Vogt, L. Büchner, J. Moleschott, promoting the achievements of science in the mid-19th century, coarsened and simplified the most complex philosophical and psychophysical problem, the problem of the relationship between matter and consciousness. In the 20th century, in connection with the success of solving technical problems in the construction of artificial intelligence, philosophical discussions about the problem “can a machine think?”, and research that discovered a direct relationship between the content side of thinking and the structure of processes occurring in the brain, the ideas of characterizing thinking as attribute of the material substrate.
Sociologization of consciousness. Consciousness is placed in absolute dependence on the external, including social, environment. At the origins of these ideas are J. Locke and his followers, French materialists of the 18th century, who believe that a person is born with a soul, consciousness, like a blank sheet of paper. Criticizing the concept of “innate ideas” of Descartes, they believed that the content of ideas and concepts, with the help of which a person analyzes sensory data about the individual properties of things, shapes society and education. The beginnings of this concept can be found already in Aristotle, who made the formation of human abilities and virtues dependent on the needs of society and the interests of the state - the polis. These ideas deny the individuality of human thinking, the dependence of the abilities of a thinking individual on the structural features and functioning of his central nervous system.
Dialectical materialism approaches the study of consciousness as a complex, internally contradictory phenomenon of the unity of the material and ideal, objective and subjective, biological and social. Based on the achievements of classical and modern science, the dialectical-materialist concept of consciousness reveals the essential features and characteristics of human consciousness.

Consciousness is an ideal phenomenon, a function, a special property, a product of a highly organized material substrate - the human brain, thinking matter.
Consciousness is an ideal image, snapshot, copy, reflection of a material object in the subject’s brain.
Consciousness has creative activity, manifested in the relative independence of its functioning and development and the reverse impact on the material world.
Consciousness is a product of socio-historical development; it does not arise outside of society and cannot exist.
Consciousness as an ideal reflection of the material world does not exist without language as the material form of its expression.

All six concepts considered contain some truth in understanding the nature of consciousness, have their supporters, advantages and limitations, answer some questions, but do not give answers to others, and therefore have equal rights to exist within the framework of philosophical knowledge. In non-classical and post-non-classical philosophy, a paradoxical situation arises: in theoretical terms, the question of the specificity of consciousness and, consequently, the philosophical status of the phenomenon of consciousness is called into question, and the practical study of consciousness by objective, including scientific, methods is intensified, which indicates the enduring significance and significance human thinking. Throughout the 20th century, some participants in the debate about the nature of consciousness reproduce ideas about the unreality and transcendence of consciousness, while others reduce consciousness to language, behavior, and neurophysiological processes, denying the specificity and special structure and essence inherent in consciousness itself.
The variety of interpretations of consciousness is associated primarily with the question of the nature of consciousness and the justification of its content. Representatives of modern concrete scientific knowledge and philosophical systems oriented towards science give preference to the dialectical-materialist concept, which, unlike others, makes it possible to explore various forms and products mental activity scientific methods. However, despite its popularity in the scientific community, this concept does not provide logically consistent and testable answers to the most complex, fundamental questions of the problem of consciousness:

How did thinking matter arise in the process of evolution of inanimate, non-sentient nature?
What is the mechanism for transforming material, biological stimulation in the central nervous system of living organisms into an ideal reflection, into an act of consciousness?
What is ideal, what is its nature? And others.

These questions are directly related to the general philosophical and scientific problem of the origin of man, the solution of which is offered by the concept of anthroposociogenesis. Within the framework of this hypothesis, several ideas are formulated, in particular the concept of reflection and the concept of the evolutionary-labor nature of human origin.
According to the concept of reflection, consciousness is a property of highly organized matter – the human brain. Of the famous modern science material structures, it is the brain that has the most complex substrate organization. About 11 billion nerve cells form a very complex systemic whole in which electrochemical, physiological, biophysical, biochemical, bioelectrical and other material processes occur. Having emerged as a result of the long evolution of living things, the human brain, as it were, crowns biological evolution, closing on itself the entire information and energy system of the entire organism, controlling and regulating its life activity. As a result of the historical evolution of living things, the brain acts as a genetic continuation of simpler forms and ways of connecting living things with the outside, including the inorganic, world. But how and why does matter, consisting of the same atoms and elementary particles, begin to realize its existence, evaluate itself, and think? It is logical to assume that in the foundation of the very knowledge of matter there is an ability similar to sensation, but not identical to it, that “all matter has a property essentially related to sensation, the property of reflection.” This assumption was made by D. Diderot back in the 18th century.
Matter at all levels of its organization has the property of reflection, which develops in the process of its evolution, becoming more and more complex and multi-quality. The increasing complexity of reflection forms is associated with the developing ability of material systems for self-organization and self-development. The evolution of forms of reflection acted as a prehistory of consciousness, as a connecting link between inert matter and thinking matter. The supporters of hylozoism came closest to the idea of reflection in the history of philosophy, but they endowed all matter with the ability to feel and think, while these forms of reflection are characteristic only of certain types of it, for living and socially organized forms of being.
Reflection refers to the process and result of interaction, in which some material bodies, with their properties and structure, reproduce the properties and structure of other material bodies, while preserving a trace of the interaction.
Reflection as a result of the interaction of objects does not stop after the completion of this process, but continues to exist in the reflecting object as a trace, an imprint of the reflected phenomenon. This reflected variety of structures and properties of interacting phenomena is called information, understood as the content of the reflection process.
Etymologically, the concept of information means familiarization, clarification, communication, however, in philosophical discussions on the issue of the subject area of information, three positions have emerged: attributive, communicative and functional. From the point of view of the attributive concept of information as a reflected variety of objects in relation to each other, information is universal in nature and acts as the content of the reflective process in both living and inanimate nature. It defines information as a measure of the heterogeneity of the distribution of matter and energy in space and time, accompanying all processes occurring in the world. The communicative concept of information as the transfer of information, messages from one person to another was the most popular in connection with the everyday practical meaning of the term and remained until the mid-20s of our century. Due to the increase in the volume of transmitted information, the need for its quantitative measurement has arisen. In 1948, K. Shannon developed mathematical information theory. Information began to be understood as those messages transmitted by people to each other that reduce the uncertainty of the recipient. With the advent of cybernetics as the science of control and communication in living organisms, society and machines, the functional concept of information took shape as the content of reflection in self-developing and self-governing systems. In the context of a functional approach to the nature of information, the problem of the informational nature of human consciousness is posed and solved in a fundamentally new way.
The attributive concept of information as the necessary content of any reflection makes it possible to explain the development of living matter from non-living matter as the self-development of the material world. Probably, in this sense, it is justified to talk about different qualitative levels of manifestation of reflection and, accordingly, about different measures of information saturation of reflection. At each level of the systemic organization of matter, the property of reflection manifests itself as qualitatively different. Reflection inherent in phenomena and objects of inanimate nature has a fundamentally different intensity of information content than reflection in living nature. In inanimate nature, for interacting phenomena, firstly, the absolutely predominant volume of their mutual diversity remains unperceived, unreflected due to its “insignificance” for the given qualitative state of these phenomena. Secondly, due to the low organization of these phenomena, they have a very low threshold of sensitivity to this diversity. Thirdly, this same low level of organization of phenomena determines the weak ability to use the information content of reflection for self-organization. These are, for example, the forms of reflection available to rocks, minerals, etc., where in the sensually observed content of reflection it is impossible to grasp the constructive use of information as a factor of self-development. The destructive result of reflection dominates here, since these objects are not able to use its information content for increasingly complex self-organization, for acquiring new, more complex qualities and properties.
The emergence of organic nature forms a qualitatively new form of reflection. Phenomena of living nature have access to a higher degree of intensity of the information content of reflection and a significantly wider volume of it. So, if a mineral exhibits only the ability to accumulate changes in itself external environment, then the plant is much more dynamic and actively reflects external diversity. It actively reaches out to the sun, uses the information that appears in connection with this for a more dynamic mobilization of its resources in the process of photosynthesis and, ultimately, for self-development.
This increasing intensity and richness of information connections forms in living things the ability for more intensive growth and expanded self-reproduction of properties, the formation of new characteristics, their coding and inheritance. Thus, the complication of reflection forms expresses not only the fact of the development and complication of matter, but also the fact of the acceleration of this development. The increase in the intensity of information connections with the development of forms of reflection brings new qualitative characteristics to the spatiotemporal forms of existence of matter. The spatial parameters of the existence of matter are expanding, its development is accelerating.
The simplest level of reflection inherent in living matter manifests itself in the form of irritability. Irritability is the body’s ability to make simple responses to environmental influences. This is already a selective response of living things to external influences. This form of reflection does not passively perceive information, but actively correlates the result of the reaction with the needs of the body. Irritability is expressed only in relation to vital influences: nutrition, self-preservation, reproduction. Gradually, irritability appears not only in relation to biologically important stimuli, but also to other phenomena significant for the body, signals that carry more indirect information about the environment. Irritability is already quite noticeable in many plants and simple organisms. This rather information-rich form of reflection determines the further development and complexity of organisms, their accelerating evolution. In the course of evolution, sensory organs that are in demand due to enrichment with reflection arise. In accordance with the functions performed by these sense organs, the process of formation of a specific material tissue (material substrate) - the nervous system, which concentrates the functions of reflection - proceeds in parallel. With the emergence of this specialized material instrument, reflections become even more complex and flexible communication organism with the external environment.
The emergence of a set of receptors significantly enriches the information content of the reflection of the surrounding world. This level of reflection development is defined as sensory reflection. It has the ability to reflect individual properties of the external environment. The emergence of sensations is associated with the emergence of elementary forms of the psyche, which gives a new impetus to the evolution of living things.
Already at a relatively simple organisms The nervous system significantly expands the possibilities of reflection, allows you to record the diversity of the environment in the individual “memory” of the body and use this in rather complex adaptive reactions to changes in the environment. With the emergence of a special center of the nervous system - the brain, the information volume of reflection reaches a new qualitative level. Already in vertebrates perception arises - the ability to analyze complex complexes of simultaneously acting external stimuli and create a holistic image of the situation. Individual behavior appears, based on individual experience, on conditioned reflexes, in contrast to intuitive behavior based on unconditioned reflexes. A complex mental form of reflection is formed, accessible to highly organized mammals. The mental form of reflection is characterized not only by a significantly greater richness of reflection of phenomena, but also by a more active “presence” of the reflector in the process of reflection. Here, the selectivity of reflection, the concentration and selection of the object of reflection or even its individual properties and characteristics increases significantly. Moreover, this selectivity is determined not only by the biophysical relevance for reflecting certain properties and characteristics, but also by emotional and mental preference.
It should be noted that the complication of the properties of mental reflection is directly related to the development of the brain, its volume and structure. At this level of development, memory resources expand, the brain’s ability to capture specific images of things and their inherent connections, and to reproduce these images in various forms of associative thinking. Based on associative thinking, animals (great apes, dolphins, dogs) demonstrate excellent abilities for anticipatory reflection when they first construct their actions and actions in an ideal model that anticipates the logic of events. They also have richer content channels of information connections, more complex sound and motor means of signaling, which act as the primary forms of substitution of the objects themselves.
And yet, no matter how complex the mental reactions of animals to the outside world may be, no matter how meaningful their actions may seem, animals do not possess consciousness or the ability to think. Consciousness represents a higher level of reflection, associated with a qualitatively new level of organization of the material world - society, a social form of being.
Thus, based on all of the above, we can state that consciousness is formed as a result of the natural-historical evolution of matter and its universal, attributive property - reflection. In the process of evolutionary development, matter, becoming more and more complex in its structural organization, gives rise to such a substrate as the brain. Outside the brain, which is capable of producing information not only to adapt to reality, but also to transform it, consciousness does not arise. Consequently, the appearance of a developed brain, a mental form of reflection, is the main result of the evolution of prehuman forms of reflection.

It is traditionally believed that the merit of a holistic formulation of the problem of consciousness, or rather the problem of the ideal, belongs to Plato. Before Plato, such a problem did not exist. The soul, which was reduced to the fundamental principle of the whole world, was considered the bearer of human thoughts and feelings. Atomists (Democritus) consider the soul as a formation consisting of special round atoms and emptiness, i.e. as a special material formation. Developing Socrates' ideas about the innateness of true knowledge to the soul before its incarnation in the human body, Plato for the first time identifies the ideal as a special essence that does not coincide with and is opposite to the sensory, objective, material world of things. In the allegorical image of prisoners in a cave, Plato explains the independent existence of the world of ideas (the real world), which determines the existence of the world of things as a reflection, a shadow of the primary world. This concept of dividing the world into 2 parts (the world of ideas and the world of things) turned out to be decisive for the entire subsequent philosophical culture of Europe, in contrast to the Eastern tradition.

The following concepts of consciousness have developed in philosophy and retain their significance in modern culture.

1. Objective-idealistic interpretation consciousness as a superhuman, transpersonal, ultimately transcendental idea (the world of ideas in Plato; the absolute idea in Hegel; God in theologians; alien intelligence in ufologists), which underlies all forms of earthly existence. Human consciousness is a particle, product or other being of the world mind.

2. Subjective-idealistic systems consider human consciousness as a self-sufficient entity that contains a picture of itself and is the substance of the material world (R. Descartes, J. Berkeley).

3. Hylozoism(materialized life) states that all matter thinks, consciousness is an attributive property of the entire material world. From the point of view of hylozoism, all matter is animate or, at least, has the prerequisites for thinking. This concept goes back to the early teachings of the Milesian school; its elements are contained in the teachings of Aristotle, J. Bruno, B. Spinoza. The data of modern science on the elements of rational activity of animals, the successes of physiology in diagnosing diseases of the central nervous system, the achievements of cybernetics in the creation of “thinking machines” revive the ideas of hylozoism and psychophysiological parallelism, according to which both the mental and the physiological are two independent entities, the study of which should be carried out through own substantiality.

4. Vulgar materialism as a reductionist identification of consciousness with material formations in the human brain. Consciousness is purely material in nature, it is the result of the functioning of certain parts or formations of the brain. The denial of the qualitative specificity of consciousness and human thinking has its origins in ancient culture and was especially clearly manifested in ancient atomism, but the materialization of consciousness gained particular popularity at the end of the 18th - beginning of the 19th centuries in connection with the spread of the idea of Darwinism. Its most prominent representatives K. Vogt, L. Büchner, J. Moleschott, promoting the achievements of science in the mid-19th century, coarsened and simplified the most complex philosophical and psychophysical problem, the problem of the relationship between matter and consciousness. In the 20th century, in connection with the success of solving technical problems in the construction of artificial intelligence, philosophical discussions about the problem “can a machine think?”, and research that discovered a direct relationship between the content side of thinking and the structure of processes occurring in the brain, the ideas of characterizing thinking as attribute of the material substrate.

5. Sociologization of consciousness. Consciousness is placed in absolute dependence on the external, including social, environment. At the origins of these ideas are J. Locke and his followers, French materialists of the 18th century, who believe that a person is born with a soul, consciousness, like a blank sheet of paper. Criticizing the concept of “innate ideas” of Descartes, they believed that the content of ideas and concepts, with the help of which a person analyzes sensory data about the individual properties of things, shapes society and education. The beginnings of this concept can be found already in Aristotle, who made the formation of human abilities and virtues dependent on the needs of society and the interests of the state - the polis. These ideas deny the individuality of human thinking, the dependence of the abilities of a thinking individual on the structural features and functioning of his central nervous system.

6. Dialectical materialism approaches the study of consciousness as a complex, internally contradictory phenomenon of the unity of the material and ideal, objective and subjective, biological and social. Based on the achievements of classical and modern science, the dialectical-materialist concept of consciousness reveals the essential features and characteristics of human consciousness.

Consciousness is an ideal phenomenon, a function, a special property, a product of a highly organized material substrate - the human brain, thinking matter.

Consciousness is an ideal image, snapshot, copy, reflection of a material object in the subject’s brain.

Consciousness has creative activity, manifested in the relative independence of its functioning and development and the reverse impact on the material world.

Consciousness is a product of socio-historical development; it does not arise outside of society and cannot exist.

Consciousness as an ideal reflection of the material world does not exist without language as the material form of its expression.

The variety of interpretations of consciousness is associated primarily with the question of the nature of consciousness and the justification of its content. Representatives of modern concrete scientific knowledge and philosophical systems oriented towards science give preference to the dialectical-materialist concept, which, unlike others, makes it possible to study various forms and products of mental activity using scientific methods. However, despite its popularity in the scientific community, this concept does not provide logically consistent and testable answers to the most complex, fundamental questions of the problem of consciousness:

How did thinking matter arise in the process of evolution of inanimate, non-sentient nature?

What is the mechanism for transforming material, biological stimulation in the central nervous system of living organisms into an ideal reflection, into an act of consciousness?

What is ideal, what is its nature? And others.

According to the concept of reflection, consciousness is a property of highly organized matter – the human brain. Of the material structures known to modern science, it is the brain that has the most complex substrate organization. About 11 billion nerve cells form a very complex systemic whole in which electrochemical, physiological, biophysical, biochemical, bioelectrical and other material processes occur. Having emerged as a result of the long evolution of living things, the human brain, as it were, crowns biological evolution, closing on itself the entire information and energy system of the entire organism, controlling and regulating its life activity. As a result of the historical evolution of living things, the brain acts as a genetic continuation of simpler forms and ways of connecting living things with the outside, including the inorganic, world. But how and why does matter, consisting of the same atoms and elementary particles, begin to realize its existence, evaluate itself, and think? It is logical to assume that in the foundation of the very knowledge of matter there is an ability similar to sensation, but not identical to it, that “all matter has a property essentially related to sensation, the property of reflection.” This assumption was made by D. Diderot back in the 18th century.

Matter at all levels of its organization has the property of reflection, which develops in the process of its evolution, becoming more and more complex and multi-quality. The increasing complexity of reflection forms is associated with the developing ability of material systems for self-organization and self-development. The evolution of forms of reflection acted as a prehistory of consciousness, as a connecting link between inert matter and thinking matter. The supporters of hylozoism came closest to the idea of reflection in the history of philosophy, but they endowed all matter with the ability to feel and think, while these forms of reflection are characteristic only of certain types of it, for living and socially organized forms of being.

Under reflection understands the process and result of interaction in which some material bodies, with their properties and structure, reproduce the properties and structure of other material bodies, while preserving a trace of the interaction.

Reflection as a result of the interaction of objects does not stop after the completion of this process, but continues to exist in the reflecting object as a trace, an imprint of the reflected phenomenon. This reflected diversity of structures and properties of interacting phenomena is called information, understood as the content of the reflection process.

Etymologically, the concept of information means familiarization, clarification, communication, however, in philosophical discussions on the issue of the subject area of information, three positions have emerged: attributive, communicative and functional. From point of view attributive information concept As a reflected diversity of objects in relation to each other, information is universal in nature and acts as the content of the reflective process in both living and inanimate nature. It defines information as a measure of the heterogeneity of the distribution of matter and energy in space and time, accompanying all processes occurring in the world. Communication information concept as the transfer of information, messages from one person to another was the most popular in connection with the everyday practical meaning of the term and persisted until the mid-20s of our century. Due to the increase in the volume of transmitted information, the need for its quantitative measurement has arisen. In 1948, K. Shannon developed mathematical information theory. Information began to be understood as those messages transmitted by people to each other that reduce the uncertainty of the recipient. With the advent of cybernetics as the science of control and communication in living organisms, society and machines, the functional information concept as the content of reflection in self-developing and self-governing systems. In the context of a functional approach to the nature of information, the problem of the informational nature of human consciousness is posed and solved in a fundamentally new way.

The attributive concept of information as the necessary content of any reflection makes it possible to explain the development of living matter from non-living matter as the self-development of the material world. Probably, in this sense, it is justified to talk about different qualitative levels of manifestation of reflection and, accordingly, about different measures of information saturation of reflection. At each level of the systemic organization of matter, the property of reflection manifests itself as qualitatively different. Reflection inherent in phenomena and objects of inanimate nature has a fundamentally different intensity of information content than reflection in living nature. In inanimate nature, for interacting phenomena, firstly, the absolutely predominant volume of their mutual diversity remains unperceived, unreflected due to its “insignificance” for the given qualitative state of these phenomena. Secondly, due to the low organization of these phenomena, they have a very low threshold of sensitivity to this diversity. Thirdly, this same low level of organization of phenomena determines the weak ability to use the information content of reflection for self-organization. These are, for example, the forms of reflection available to rocks, minerals, etc., where in the sensually observed content of reflection it is impossible to grasp the constructive use of information as a factor of self-development. The destructive result of reflection dominates here, since these objects are not able to use its information content for increasingly complex self-organization, for acquiring new, more complex qualities and properties.

The emergence of organic nature forms a qualitatively new form of reflection. Phenomena of living nature have access to a higher degree of intensity of the information content of reflection and a significantly wider volume of it. So, if a mineral exhibits only the ability to accumulate changes in the external environment, then the plant reflects external diversity much more dynamically and actively. It actively reaches out to the sun, uses the information that appears in connection with this for a more dynamic mobilization of its resources in the process of photosynthesis and, ultimately, for self-development.

This increasing intensity and richness of information connections forms in living things the ability for more intensive growth and expanded self-reproduction of properties, the formation of new characteristics, their coding and inheritance. Thus, the complication of reflection forms expresses not only the fact of the development and complication of matter, but also the fact of the acceleration of this development. The increase in the intensity of information connections with the development of forms of reflection brings new qualitative characteristics to the spatiotemporal forms of existence of matter. The spatial parameters of the existence of matter are expanding, its development is accelerating.

The simplest level of reflection inherent in living matter manifests itself in the form of irritability. Irritability represents the body’s ability to make simple responses to environmental influences. This is already a selective response of living things to external influences. This form of reflection does not passively perceive information, but actively correlates the result of the reaction with the needs of the body. Irritability is expressed only in relation to vital influences: nutrition, self-preservation, reproduction. Gradually, irritability appears not only in relation to biologically important stimuli, but also to other phenomena significant for the body, signals that carry more indirect information about the environment. Irritability is already quite noticeable in many plants and simple organisms. This rather information-rich form of reflection determines the further development and complexity of organisms, their accelerating evolution. In the course of evolution, sensory organs that are in demand due to enrichment with reflection arise. In accordance with the functions performed by these sense organs, the process of formation of a specific material tissue (material substrate) - the nervous system, which concentrates the functions of reflection - proceeds in parallel. With the emergence of this specialized material instrument of reflection, the body’s connections with the external environment become even more complex and flexible.

The emergence of a set of receptors significantly enriches the information content of the reflection of the surrounding world. This level of reflection development is defined as sensual reflection. It has the ability to reflect individual properties of the external environment. The emergence of sensations is associated with the emergence of elementary forms of the psyche, which gives a new impetus to the evolution of living things.

Already at the level of relatively simple organisms, the nervous system significantly expands the possibilities of reflection, makes it possible to record the diversity of the environment in the individual “memory” of the organism and use this in rather complex adaptive reactions to changes in the environment. With the emergence of a special center of the nervous system - the brain, the information volume of reflection reaches a new qualitative level. Already in vertebrates perception arises - the ability to analyze complex complexes of simultaneously acting external stimuli and create a holistic image of the situation. Individual behavior appears, based on individual experience, on conditioned reflexes, in contrast to intuitive behavior based on unconditioned reflexes. A complex mental form of reflection, accessible to highly organized mammals. The mental form of reflection is characterized not only by a significantly greater richness of reflection of phenomena, but also by a more active “presence” of the reflector in the process of reflection. Here, the selectivity of reflection, the concentration and selection of the object of reflection or even its individual properties and characteristics increases significantly. Moreover, this selectivity is determined not only by the biophysical relevance for reflecting certain properties and characteristics, but also by emotional and mental preference.

It should be noted that the complication of the properties of mental reflection is directly related to the development of the brain, its volume and structure. At this level of development, memory resources expand, the brain’s ability to capture specific images of things and their inherent connections, and to reproduce these images in various forms of associative thinking. Based on associative thinking, animals (great apes, dolphins, dogs) demonstrate excellent abilities for anticipatory reflection when they first construct their actions and actions in an ideal model that anticipates the logic of events. They also have richer content channels of information connections, more complex sound and motor means of signaling, which act as the primary forms of substitution of the objects themselves.

And yet, no matter how complex the mental reactions of animals to the outside world may be, no matter how meaningful their actions may seem, animals do not possess consciousness or the ability to think. Consciousness represents a higher level of reflection, associated with a qualitatively new level of organization of the material world - society, a social form of being.

Thus, based on all of the above, we can state that consciousness is formed as a result of the natural-historical evolution of matter and its universal, attributive property - reflection. In the process of evolutionary development, matter, becoming more and more complex in its structural organization, gives rise to such a substrate as the brain. Outside the brain, which is capable of producing information not only to adapt to reality, but also to transform it, consciousness does not arise. Consequently, the appearance of a developed brain, a mental form of reflection, is the main result of the evolution of prehuman forms of reflection.

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The problem of consciousness in philosophy and science.

Definitions of the concept of ideal, spiritual in philosophy.
Consciousness as the highest form of reflection of reality: the concept of reflection, the main features of reflection, the evolution of forms of reflection in living, inanimate nature. Social and natural conditions emergence of consciousness. The difference between consciousness and the psyche of higher animals.
The structure of consciousness, self-awareness and its forms. Social activity of consciousness and creative character. Functions of consciousness.
Conscious and unconscious in the human psyche.

The category consciousness is the opposite of the category “matter”. This concept is associated in philosophy with the existence of the spiritual world and ideal phenomena. In the history of philosophy, the very concept of “consciousness” began to be used approximately with XVIII century, when the physiology of the brain began to be studied. Unlike science, philosophers designated all spiritual experiences, emotions, will, and values with the concept “ideal” or “spiritual,” and the very existence of spiritual acts was associated with the presence of a soul in a person.

Democritus also believed that knowledge, experience, and feelings are connected with the soul. For Plato, the ideal exists in itself (the world of ideas), but individual manifestations of the spirit (especially knowledge, feelings) are connected with the human soul. A similar point of view is characteristic of all objective idealism, which identifies the ideal as the fundamental basis of the universe (for example, Hegel believed that pure thought objectively exists).

With the development of science and natural science knowledge, extremely materialistic interpretations of the phenomenon of consciousness appeared. Thus, Descartes argued that all nature has thinking. This conclusion can be drawn based on his dualism: the world is based on two substances: material (has extension) and spiritual (has thinking), it follows that a stone can think. This position is called hylozoism.

In the XVIII to German physiologistsVogt, Meleschott, Buchner(the founders of vulgar materialism) argued that consciousness is a product of the physiological activity of the brain, that the brain secretes consciousness in the same way as the liver secretes bile.

Russian physiologists Pavlov, Sechenov, Bekhterev, Ukhtomsky, Anokhin, Bekhtereva made a special contribution to the explanation of consciousness and the ideal. Their work made it possible to explain that consciousness is a property of reflection that is characteristic of humans. The material substrate of consciousness is the human brain, i.e. consciousness is a special property of highly organized brain matter to reflect the objective world.

Reflection is characteristic of all nature: both living and inanimate.The main features of reflectionas a universal property of matter is:

Objectivity
Information content: reflection stores information about the reflected object.
Adequacy: reflects only what it interacts with.
Depends on the conditions, on the strength of interaction, on the complexity of interacting systems.

Biological reflection is the most complex reflection, especially the psyche of higher animals. Consciousness - social form reflections, but has a natural basis.The question of the emergence of consciousnesscontroversial. There are three main concepts in culture:

1. Theological : consciousness is a gift from God

2. Panspermic: consciousness came from Space

3. Evolutionary (labor, socio-historical): based on scientific discoveries and facts. This is anthropology, paleontology, which provide the basis to explain natural conditions and social factors emergence of consciousness: to the firstnatural conditionsinclude the presence of a certain genetic basis on which a person would develop. Such a basis is Australopithecus. The second factor is natural and climatic conditions, changes in which became the main reason for changes in human physicality: upright walking contributed to the formation of the cerebellum, the development of the hand contributed to the formation of the cerebral hemispheres, the transmission of information by sound changed the larynx, which also affected the change in the brain (centers responsible for memory).

Social conditions:

1. Life in society and communication led to the development of communication ties.

2. Appeared sign system language, the material shell of thought. Language has become an indicator of abstract thinking. Conceptual thinking develops through language and communication.

3. Labor plays a special role in the emergence of consciousness; it is the purposeful activity of a person to create the values he needs. In work, goals, values, an image of the desired result, and means of achieving these goals are formed: this is evidence of abstract thinking.

THE DIFFERENCE OF CONSCIOUSNESS FROM THE PEEK OF HIGHER ANIMALS:

Consciousness	First signaling system	Concrete thinking	Language, speech, writing	Reflection active	Change environment
Permanent residence permit	First and second signaling systems	Abstract thinking		Passive reflection	device

STRUCTURE OF CONSCIOUSNESS.

Consciousness includes the following as structural components:

Bodily-perceptualcomponents: sensation, perception, idea of the world, feelings.
Emotional : positive and negative emotions.
Motivational-volitional:will, motives, interests, needs.
Logical-conceptual: rational thinking, concepts, judgments, inferences, knowledge.

If you compare the structure of consciousness with the DP, you can find the following: these elements have a basis:


Consciousness	Bodily-perceptual component	Emotions	Motivational-volitional component	Knowledge, self-awareness
Permanent residence permit	Sensory perception	Unconscious Experiences	Unconscious urge to action	Conditioned and unconditioned reflexes

Self-awareness - awareness of one’s own “I”. If all components of human consciousness are embedded in the psyche and develop on social basis, then self-awareness refers exclusively to the social component. Self-awareness is formed on the basis of activity, in the system of social connections and relationships, starting from early childhood. The first form of SS is well-being. The second is self-identification (2_3 years). Next is self-control; self-respect. Later - self-realization, self-affirmation. Self-awareness determines a person’s personal qualities and, together with the personality, can atrophy under the influence of an unhealthy lifestyle, illness, and aging. Forms of self-awareness can change and reach extremes: egoism.

That. consciousness is a special highest form of reflection. Having a material substrate, consciousness is ideal. However, all components of consciousness can be objectified. For example, knowledge is expressed generally in the things that we create. Emotions will be reflected in actions. Conclusion: C not only reflects the world, but also creates it, is active and creative in nature, achievements in culture and culture itself are nothing more than the result of the activity of our consciousness.

On the one hand, consciousness is secondary in relation to matter, to the brain, to the world as a whole, but on the other hand, consciousness is capable of changing both the world and the person himself.

Consciousness is objective in its content, because it reflects the objective world, but on the other hand, in form, it is subjective, that is, consciousness is a subjective image of the objective world. These points express the inconsistency of consciousness.

BASIC FUNCTIONS OF CONSCIOUSNESS:

Reflective : when studying consciousness, one cannot limit oneself only to the physiology of the brain, because the brain modern man no different from the ancient one, but the consciousness is different. Consciousness also does not depend on gender, weight, etc. The content of consciousness is what is reflected by it.
Transformative: consciousness cannot be “empty”: it is always aimed at goals, which means change, transformation.
Communicative: thanks to consciousness, a person has the ability to establish communication connections and communication.

CONSCIOUS AND UNCONSCIOUS.

In the history of philosophy to the end XIX century, the rational capabilities of man were absolutized. It was believed that a reasonable person subjects all his actions, actions, and goal-setting to rational analysis.

At the beginning of the 20th century Schopenhauer, Marx, BergsonFor the first time, human rationalism was questioned. But a holistic scientific concept of the human psyche was presented Freud . He showed that it is common for a person not only to be aware of the world, to think, but also the phenomenon of the unconscious, which, according to Freud, plays the most main role. Freud argued that structure includes the psyche:

1. IT - the unconscious is like the underwater part of an iceberg. Includes all instincts, the most powerful - the death instinct tanatos and sexual instinct eros.

2. I - consciousness has reflective ability.

3. Superego - cultural prohibitions - morality, religion, traditions, ideals.

Freud believed that the superego limits the manifestation of the unconscious. The energy that is not realized goes into activity, creativity, science, otherwise a person worries and suffers, which leads to disorders and neuroses.

Freud subordinated consciousness to unconsciousness. The unconscious is active; this approach is biologizing, because the social essence of consciousness is not taken into account.

The conscious and unconscious are connected. The unconscious manifests itself in dreams, in hypnosis, and during anesthesia, but the content of the unconscious reflects conscious life. This is a structure of the human psyche that cannot be controlled by consciousness. For example, actions that a person has brought to automatism are subsequently not realized by him and go into the layer of the unconscious. This is important because the consciousness is unloaded, it is free for creativity.

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2297.		Man as a problem of philosophy	556.25 KB
	The main questions that affect the problem of man: What is the essence of man? What makes a man a man? How to determine the core of human existence. Definitions of the word man can be very diverse, but they may not affect the essence of man. The question arises: what is the essence of man? According to Plato, the essence of man is the idea of man, his soul. The main feature of the human soul is that it must comprehend eternal ideas and eternal truths. Only one person knows that...
1176.		The problem of (ir)rationality in philosophy	32.73 KB
	In the first sense, the irrational is such that it can be rationalized. In practice, this is an object of knowledge, which initially appears as the sought-after, unknown, unknown. In the process of cognition, the subject transforms it into logically expressed, universal knowledge.
13201.		Work motivation as a problem of social philosophy	159.03 KB
	Labor as a species human activity. Ethics focuses on hard work as a virtue. Cultural studies and religious studies analyze different cultures from the point of view of how they understand and evaluate work activity person.
14727.		The problem of being in German classical and postclassical philosophy	30.37 KB
	At first it was nature closely connected with the act of divine creation, as a result of which it often merged with God, such as God-nature in Spinoza. Experimental science seeks in philosophy its methodology for a way to adequately cognize the truth; at the same time, philosophy, by the own admission of many philosophers such as Fichte, for example, develops as a “scientific teaching,” i.e., as the methodology and logic of science. exists as a reflection on scientific knowledge always at the same time going beyond these boundaries, as can be seen already in the âCritique of the Practical...
3666.		States of Consciousness. Interpretation of dreams according to S. Freud	31.9 KB
	In modern psychology, the concept of “altered states of consciousness” has been introduced to characterize consciousness, which denotes a way of adapting consciousness to changes in external and internal conditions. Altered states of consciousness are divided into spontaneously occurring
8920.		Syndromes of disturbed consciousness. Paroxysmal disorders	13.83 KB
	METHODOLOGICAL DEVELOPMENT of a lecture on psychiatry Topic Syndromes of disordered consciousness. Jaspers to determine disordered consciousness: detachment, disorientation, thinking disorders, amnesia. Switch-off syndromes, decreased level of consciousness: obnubilation, somnolence, stunning, stupor, coma. Syndromes of clouding of consciousness: delirium oneiroid amentia twilight clouding of consciousness psychotic outpatient automatisms trances and fugues.
4722.		COMMUNICATION IN SCIENCE	15.49 KB
	Scientific communication is a set of types and forms professional communication in the scientific community, as well as the transfer of information from one of its components to another.
10337.		The concept of pedagogy as a science	14.84 KB
	Object subject tasks functions methods of pedagogy. Main categories of pedagogy: education upbringing teaching pedagogical activity pedagogical interaction educational technology pedagogical task. The main categories of pedagogy are: development, upbringing, education, training. Therefore, the objects of pedagogy are those phenomena of reality that determine the development of the human individual in the process of purposeful activity of society.
9879.		Problems of sleep and dreams in science	34.75 KB
	Physiological basis of sleep. By studying the phenomena occurring in the body during sleep, its beneficial effects were established. It has been experimentally proven that during sleep the body does not freeze but recovers after prolonged wakefulness.

The problem of consciousness in philosophy and science. Problems of consciousness in philosophy and science Problems of consciousness in modern philosophy and science

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The problem of consciousness in philosophy and science.

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The problem of consciousness in philosophy and science.

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