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. 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 in comparison with 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.
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 a transmitted part of the reflected diversity, that side of it that can be objectified and transmitted. 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.
Ideality and subjectivity are specific characteristics of consciousness; The ideal is always the subjective existence of individual consciousness, including in the social forms of 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 on the objective reality of material phenomena, for example, on the neurophysiological processes of the brain, on 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 “separateness” and thereby distinguish oneself from the environment. The subjectivity of consciousness is expressed in a person’s assimilation of the individuality of both the person himself and the objects of the external world. It is also determined by the individual’s inherent self-awareness, i.e. awareness of oneself as a Self, separate from others. Some authors generally interpret subjectivity as something that 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 “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.
Consciousness and its characteristics
The psyche as a reflection of reality is characterized by 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 the totality 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; it represents the emotions of assessing 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 motivated 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 has become 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 the environment and 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 (comprehension 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.
Consciousness is the highest level of mental reflection of objective reality, as well as the highest level of self-regulation inherent only to man as a social 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. However, it can be assumed that similar or close to it mental activity in the formation of mental images also occurs in more developed animals: dogs, horses, dolphins, monkeys, etc. However, the main difference between humans and animals, first of all, is not the presence the process of formation of mental images based on the objective perception of objects in the surrounding reality, and in the presence of specific mechanisms for its occurrence. It is the mechanisms of formation of mental images and the peculiarities of operating with them that determine the presence in a person of such a phenomenon as consciousness.
Consciousness, like any other mental phenomenon, has certain characteristics.
- Consciousness is always active. 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.
- Consciousness is intentional. Due to the fact that consciousness is active, it 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. These properties of consciousness include:
- ability for introspection (reflection);
- motivational-value nature of consciousness;
- the ability to determine goals and a program of action - to take steps towards achieving the goal.
In turn, these properties of consciousness determine the possibility of forming in the process of human ontogenesis an individual “I-concept”, which is the totality of a person’s ideas about himself and about the surrounding reality. “I-concept” is the core of the entire system of self-regulation, which consists of the totality of a person’s ideas about himself and about the surrounding reality. 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. Therefore, it is no coincidence that the “I-concept” is very often called self-awareness.
A person’s self-awareness as a system of his views is strictly individual. People evaluate current events and their actions differently, and evaluate the same objects of the real world differently. Moreover, the assessments of some people are quite objective, that is, they correspond to reality, while the assessments of others, on the contrary, are extremely subjective. What does the adequacy of our consciousness depend on? In order to answer this question, one should name many factors that determine the adequacy of the image of the real world perceived by a person and his self-esteem. However, the root cause of most of the factors that determine the possibility of building an adequate “I-concept” is the degree of a person’s criticality.
In its simplest form, criticality is the ability to recognize the difference between “good” and “bad.” 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, i.e., to determine goals and a program of action, to take steps towards achieving a set goal, that distinguishes a person from an animal. Thus, criticality acts as the main mechanism for controlling one’s behavior.
The most complex behavior is observed in humans, who, unlike animals, are capable of not only reacting to sudden changes in environmental conditions, but also the ability to form motivated (conscious) and purposeful behavior. The ability to carry out such complex behavior is due to the presence of consciousness in humans.
Like the concept of the psyche, the concept of consciousness has gone through a complex path of development and received different interpretations from different authors, in different philosophical systems and schools. In psychology, up to the present day, it is used in very different meanings, between which there is sometimes almost nothing in common. I will give one of the definitions of consciousness given by the Soviet psychologist A.G. Spirkin: “Consciousness is the highest function of the brain, peculiar only to humans and associated with speech, which consists in a generalized, evaluative and purposeful reflection and constructive and creative transformation of reality, in preliminary mental constructing actions and anticipating their results, in the reasonable regulation and self-control of human behavior.”
Consciousness is, first of all, a body of knowledge about the world. It is no coincidence that it is closely related to cognition. If cognition is consciousness in its active orientation outward, towards an object, then consciousness itself, in turn, is the result of cognition. A dialectic is revealed here: the more we know, the higher our cognitive potential and vice versa - the more we know the world, the richer our consciousness. The next important element of consciousness is attention, the ability of consciousness to concentrate on certain types of cognitive and any other activity, to keep them in its focus. Next, apparently, we should name memory, the ability of consciousness to accumulate information, store, and, if necessary, reproduce it, as well as use previously acquired knowledge in activities. But we not only know something and remember something. Consciousness is inseparable from the expression of a certain attitude towards the objects of cognition, activity and communication in the form of emotions. The emotional sphere of consciousness includes feelings themselves - joy, pleasure, grief, as well as moods and affects, or, as they were called in the past, passions - anger, rage, horror, despair, etc. To those mentioned earlier we should add such an essential component of consciousness as will, which is a person’s meaningful striving towards a certain goal and directs his behavior or action. Finally, the most important component of consciousness, which puts all its other components in one bracket, is self-awareness. Self-consciousness is a kind of center of our consciousness, integrating the beginning in it. Self-awareness is a person’s consciousness of his body, his thoughts and feelings, his actions, his place in society, in other words, awareness of himself as a special and unified personality. Self-awareness is a historical product; it is formed only at a certain, and rather high, stage of development of primitive society. And along with this, it is also a product of individual development: in a child, its foundations are laid at approximately the age of 2-4 years. Self-awareness is characterized by two interrelated properties - objectivity and reflectivity. The first property makes it possible to correlate our sensations, perceptions, ideas, and mental images with the objective world outside of us, which allows us to ensure that consciousness is focused on the outside world. Reflection is a side of self-awareness that, on the contrary, focuses attention on its very phenomena and forms.
Consciousness controls the most complex forms of behavior that require constant attention and conscious control, and is activated in the following cases:
when a person faces unexpected, intellectually complex problems that have no obvious solution;
when a person needs to overcome physical or psychological resistance in the path of movement of thought or bodily organ;
when it is necessary to realize and find a way out of any conflict situation, which cannot be resolved on its own without a strong-willed decision;
when a person unexpectedly finds himself in a situation that contains a potential threat to him if immediate action is not taken.
Situations of this kind arise in front of a person almost continuously.
Currently, the list of empirical signs of consciousness is more or less established and coincides among different authors. If we try to identify the general things that are most often indicated as features of consciousness, then they can be presented as follows:
- 1. A person who has consciousness distinguishes himself from the world around him, separates himself, his “I” from external things, and the properties of things from themselves.
- 2. Able to see himself in a certain system of relationships with other people.
- 3. Able to see himself as being in a certain place in space and at a certain point on the time axis connecting the present, past and future.
- 4. Able to establish adequate cause-and-effect relationships between phenomena of the external world and between them and his own actions.
- 5. Gives an account of his feelings, thoughts, experiences, intentions and desires.
- 6. Knows the peculiarities of his individuality and personality.
- 7. Able to plan his actions, foresee their results and evaluate their consequences, i.e. capable of carrying out deliberate voluntary actions.
All these signs are contrasted with the opposite features of unconscious and unconscious mental processes and impulsive, automatic or reflexive actions.
A prerequisite for the formation and manifestation of all the above specific qualities of consciousness is language. In the process of speech activity, knowledge is accumulated. “Language is a special objective system in which socio-historical experience or social consciousness is imprinted.” A.V. Petrovsky noted: “Having been mastered by a specific person, language in a certain sense becomes real consciousness.”
The followers of L. S. Vygotsky (A. N. Leontiev, A. R. Luria, A. V. Zaporozhets, P. I. Zinchenko, etc.) reoriented themselves to the problems of psychological analysis of activity. A return to the problem of consciousness in its fairly complete scope occurred in the second half of the 50s. primarily thanks to the works of S. L. Rubinstein, and then A. N. Leontiev.
In Soviet psychology, there was a generally accepted understanding of consciousness as the highest form of the psyche that arose in human society in connection with collective work, human communication, language and speech. This principle is set out in the works of S. L. Rubinstein, A. N. Leontiev and others. The essence of consciousness is usually seen in a person’s ability to abstract verbal thinking, the tool and means of which is the language that arose in human society, to cognition on this basis of the laws of nature and society. Abstract verbal thinking in many works is considered as the main characteristic of consciousness, with which many of its other features and manifestations are associated. But still, in Soviet psychology, the general understanding of the nature of consciousness receives very different specifications from different authors.
S.L. Rubinstein in his book “Being and Consciousness” writes that “consciousness, that is, awareness of objective reality, begins where an image appears in its own epistemological sense, that is, formation through which the objective content of an object appears before the subject.”
Let us turn to the structure of consciousness. One of the first ideas about the structure of consciousness was introduced by S. Freud. Its hierarchical structure is as follows: subconscious - consciousness - superconscious, and it has apparently already exhausted its explanatory material. But more acceptable ways to analyze consciousness are needed, and the subconscious and unconscious are not at all necessary as a means in the study of consciousness. More productive is the old idea of L. Feuerbach about the existence of consciousness for consciousness and consciousness for being, developed by L. S. Vygodsky. The problem of the structure of consciousness appeared for Vygotsky as one of the central ones at the final stage of his scientific activity. When analyzing the structure of consciousness, he separated its systemic and semantic structure.
By system structure, Vygotsky understood a complex set of relationships between individual functions, specific for each age level. He considered the semantic structure of consciousness as the nature of generalizations through which man comprehends the world. Vygotsky associated the emergence of a systemic and semantic structure of consciousness with the emergence of speech. Their development and functioning, according to Vygotsky, can only be studied in their mutual connection and mutual conditionality: “Changes in the system of relations of functions to each other are in direct and very close connection precisely with the meaning of words.” However, these relationships between the systemic (“external”) structure of consciousness and the semantic (“internal”) are not reverse: the internal determines the external, i.e. a change in the semantic structure (for example, associated with a violation of the function of concept formation) leads to a transformation of the entire previous system of mental functions (in this case, its destruction).
A. N. Leontiev identified 3 main constituents of consciousness: the sensory fabric of the image, meaning and meaning. And already N.A. Bernstein introduced the concept of living movement and its biodynamic fabric. Thus, when adding this component, we get a two-layer structure of consciousness. The existential layer is formed by the biodynamic fabric of living movement and action and the sensual fabric of the image. The reflex layer forms meaning and meaning.
In modern Western philosophy and psychology there is no general concept of consciousness, and understanding of its nature is very contradictory. Some see consciousness as a purely logical construct, a kind of abstraction from the many states of the subject, others as properties of individuality, and still others as an additional internal aspect of human activity, for which the activity of the brain and body is an additional external aspect. In the approach to the problem of consciousness, introspectionist tendencies are still strong, due to which many continue to believe that the main feature of consciousness is subjective experiences, the internal reality of the subject’s mental states. In this regard, in Western psychology, a distinction is not always made between the concepts of psyche and consciousness. Since Descartes, consciousness has been used as a synonym for the mental. In particular, until now, when discussing the question of the presence of consciousness in animals, the concept of consciousness often acts as identical to the concept of the psyche and means the presence of subjective images and experiences. Along with the long-term dominance of this interpretation, apparently, starting with Leibniz, another point of view began and developed, according to which consciousness constitutes only a part, and an external one, of mental processes. A necessary condition for consciousness is active selective attention, selectively directed towards certain phenomena of the internal (memory) and external world (images of perception).
Thus, having analyzed the literature on the problem of consciousness, we come to the conclusion that consciousness is the highest level of development of mental reflection associated with the use of speech. Consciousness is inherent only to humans and cannot be identified with the psyche, since animals do not have subjective images and experiences.
Consciousness– the highest level of adaptation to the surrounding world. This level is characterized by behavior not as a passive reaction to the influence of external stimuli, but in the form of purposeful and motivated behavior. A person acquires the ability of self-awareness, i.e. the ability to evaluate oneself and distinguish oneself from among one’s own kind, to see one’s place in the society of other people. Consciousness is considered as a socio-historical product of the development of the psyche, allowing not only to reflect the world, but also to transform it.
Consciousness- the highest form of reflection of the real world, characteristic only of people and a function of the brain associated with speech, which consists in a generalized and purposeful reflection of reality, in the preliminary mental construction of actions and anticipation of their results, in the reasonable regulation and self-control of human behavior.
The main feature of the human psyche is that, in addition to hereditary and personally acquired forms of behavior, a person possesses a fundamentally new, most important means of orientation in the surrounding reality - knowledge, which represents the concentrated experience of humanity, transmitted through speech.
"Consciousness" literally means "body of knowledge". The human psyche is formed and constantly enriched in the conditions of the social environment, in the process of assimilating social and public experience. If an animal raised in artificial, isolated conditions retains all its species qualities, then a person without a social environment does not acquire any human qualities. There are about forty cases in history where children were fed animals from an early age. They did not show not only signs of consciousness (they completely lacked speech and thinking), but even such a physical property of a person as the vertical position of the body when walking.
One of the features of the human psyche is its conditionality public consciousness. Social consciousness includes: 1) science; 2) morality; 3) law; 4) ideology; 5) art; 6) religion.
Changes in production and social relations, reflected in people's consciousness, lead to changes in the content of social consciousness.
The human psyche, his consciousness, is a system of his mental self-regulation, based on socially formed categories and value orientations.
In the structure of consciousness, domestic psychologists, following A.V. Petrovsky, consider four main characteristics.
1. Consciousness is the totality of knowledge about the world around us. In addition, it allows this knowledge to be shared among all people. The very word “consciousness” implies this: consciousness is a joint, cumulative knowledge, i.e. individual consciousness cannot develop separately from social consciousness and language, which is the basis of abstract thinking - the highest form of consciousness. Thus, the structure of consciousness includes all cognitive processes - sensation, perception, memory, thinking, imagination, with the help of which a person continuously expands his knowledge about the world and about himself. A violation of any of the cognitive processes automatically becomes a violation of consciousness as a whole.
2. A clear distinction between subject and object, between “I” and “not I” is recorded in consciousness. Man is the only creature that is capable of distinguishing itself from the rest of the world and opposing itself to it. At the initial stage of its development, human consciousness is directed outward. A person, endowed from birth with sense organs on the basis of data delivered by analyzers, recognizes the world as something separate from him, and no longer identifies himself with his tribe, with natural phenomena, etc.
In addition, only a person is capable of turning his mental activity towards himself. This means that the structure of consciousness includes self-awareness and self-knowledge - the ability to make a conscious assessment of one’s behavior, one’s individual qualities, one’s role and place in social relations. The identification of oneself as a subject and the development of self-awareness occurred in phylogenesis and occurs in the process of ontogenesis of each person.
3. Consciousness ensures the implementation of human goal-setting activity. At the end of the labor process, a real result is achieved, which in ideal form was already formed in the mind before the labor process was started. A person imagined in advance the final goal and product of his activity, thereby forming motivation. He planned actions in accordance with this idea, subordinated his volitional efforts to it, and adjusted activities already at the stage of its implementation so that the final result would maximally correspond to the original idea of it. Violation in the implementation of goal-setting activity, its coordination and direction is one of the types of disorders of consciousness.
4. The structure of consciousness also includes the emotional sphere of a person. It is responsible for the formation of emotional assessments in interpersonal relationships and self-esteem, emotional reactions to phenomena in the surrounding world, to internal phenomena. If a person’s emotional assessments and reactions are adequate, this helps regulate his mental processes and behavior, and correct relationships with other people. In some mental illnesses, a disturbance of consciousness is expressed by a disorder specifically in the sphere of feelings and relationships.
The main condition for the emergence and development of human consciousness is the joint productive instrumental activity of people mediated by speech. With the transition from animal existence to human society, two new factors in the formation of the human psyche arose: social work, use of tools and communication using words. With the advent of upright walking, a person’s hands were freed, his horizons expanded, and conditions arose for the intensive development of his orienting activity. This led to the emergence of tools and the labor process. A person begins to live in a world of permanent tools of labor, through which labor operations are transmitted from generation to generation.
Making the simplest tool inevitably requires such conscious actions as a preliminary idea of its functions, shape, and material properties. Actions to manufacture a weapon must be planned in a certain order. They must be realized and remembered for its re-production. The production of tools is associated with the mental division of the whole into parts (analysis), with the isolation (abstraction) of individual properties of an object, as well as with the mental unification (synthesis) of isolated properties into imaginable integral tools. Thus, the improvement of labor processes and the production of more and more complex tools was associated with the improvement of the analytical and synthetic activity of the human cerebral cortex. The instrument for this activity has also been improved - speech.
The social organization of work activity has led to the identification of individual actions that acquire meaning only through the work of other people. So, in labor conscious actions arise, divorced from the immediate biological goal, a person’s abstract thinking and his will are formed.
In the process of formation of the human psyche, his external physical actions with material objects precede the formation of internal mental actions. Only on the basis of acting with material objects does a person gradually move on to operating with their ideal images, to acting in the mind. This transition from external actions to internal actions is called interiorization(“transformation into internal”). Thanks to the ability to act with mental, ideal images of objects, a person begins to model various relationships between objects and anticipate the results of his actions. Interiorization is carried out on a verbal, speech basis. The word is used both as a means of designating objects and as a symbol of their general, essential properties.
Having been formed on the basis of external actions, mental actions themselves begin to regulate external actions. All conscious actions of a person are exteriorization(external manifestation) of his internal mental activity.
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