The highest form of mental reflection of reality. Consciousness as the highest form of mental reflection of reality

Introduction

The problem of consciousness and its interaction with the unconscious gives rise to a variety of approaches to it, a great variety of views on its personal aspects. This is reflected in numerous psychological, psychiatric, cybernetic, physiological and other literature published in different countries of the world. Through the entire history of the development of psychological science, research in the field of this problem by such foreign psychologists as Descartes, Spinoza, Kant, Fechner, Wundt, James and others. Particular attention was paid to the problems of depth psychology by Z. Freud, K. Jung, A. Adler. Domestic psychologists Vygotsky, Leontiev, Zinchenko, Uznadze and many others also put forward scientific theories according to the problems of consciousness and the unconscious. .

The problem of consciousness and the unconscious has long been intensively developed all over the world. And now there are different points of view on the essence and structure of consciousness, on the origin of the unconscious and its interaction with consciousness. .

The essential difference between man and animals lies in his ability to reason and think abstractly, reflect on his past, critically evaluate it, and think about the future, developing and implementing plans and programs. All this is connected with the sphere of human consciousness.

Consciousness does not always control actions and feelings, determines the direction of our thoughts. There is also the unconscious. Often it is it that is the driving force and determines the style of human behavior. Motives and needs that are insufficiently realized by a person for various reasons can significantly affect conscious motivational attitudes. It is important to keep in mind that significant decisions that affect our future can arise and be formed at an unconscious level.

The relevance and significance of the problem of consciousness does not require proof and argumentation. This problem, according to V.P. Zinchenko, has already begun to be included among the global problems of our time.

The purpose of this work is to analyze the conscious and unconscious components of the human psyche, their formation, manifestation and significance.

Consciousness as the highest level of mental reflection of objective reality.

The most complex behavior is observed in humans, who, unlike animals, are able not only to respond to sudden changes in environmental conditions, but also the ability to form motivated (conscious) and purposeful behavior. The possibility of such a complex behavior is due to the presence in a person consciousness.

Like the concept of the psyche, the concept of consciousness has gone through a complex path of development, received different interpretations from different authors, in different philosophical systems and schools. In psychology, up to the present time, it has been used in very different meanings, between which sometimes there is almost nothing in common. I will give one of the definitions of consciousness given by the Soviet psychologist A. G. Spirkin: construction of actions and anticipation of their results, in reasonable regulation and self-control of human behavior” .

Consciousness is primarily a collection of knowledge about the world. It is no coincidence that it is closely related to knowledge. If cognition is consciousness in its active direction outward, toward an object, then consciousness itself is, in turn, the result of cognition. Dialectics is revealed here: the more we know, the higher our cognitive potentials 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 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 to the objects of cognition, activity and communication in the form of emotions. The emotional sphere of consciousness includes feelings proper - joy, pleasure, grief, as well as moods and affects, or, as they were called in the old days, passions - anger, rage, horror, despair, etc. To those mentioned earlier, one should add such an essential component of consciousness as the will, which is a meaningful aspiration of a person to a specific goal and directs his behavior or action. Finally, the most important component of consciousness, putting all its other components as if in one bracket, is self-consciousness. Self-consciousness is a kind of center of our consciousness, integrating the beginning in it. Self-consciousness 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-consciousness is a historical product, it is formed only at a certain, moreover, quite 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 about the age of 2-4 years. Self-consciousness is characterized by two interrelated properties - objectivity and reflectivity. The first property makes it possible to correlate our sensations, perceptions, ideas, mental images with the objective world outside of us, which makes it possible to ensure the focus of consciousness on the external world. Reflection is such a side of self-consciousness, which, on the contrary, focuses on its very phenomena and forms.

Consciousness controls the most complex forms of behavior that require constant attention and conscious control, and is included in the action in the following cases:

when a person faces unexpected, intellectually complex problems that do not have an obvious solution;

when a person needs to overcome physical or psychological resistance in the way of the movement of a thought or a bodily organ;

when it is necessary to realize and find a way out of any conflict situation, which cannot be resolved by itself without a strong-willed decision;

when a person suddenly finds himself in a situation that contains a potential threat to him if immediate action is not taken.

Situations like this come up almost all the time.

At present, the list of empirical signs of consciousness is more or less established and coincides with different authors. If we try to single out the common features that are most often indicated as features of consciousness, then they can be represented as follows:

1. A person with consciousness separates himself from the surrounding world, separates himself, his “I” from external things, and the properties of things from themselves.

2. Is able to see himself in a certain system of relations with other people.

3. Able to see himself as being in a certain place in space and at a certain point in the time axis that links the present, past and future.

4. Able to establish adequate causal relationships between the phenomena of the external world and between them and their own actions.

5. Gives an account of his feelings, thoughts, experiences, intentions and desires.

6. Knows the features of his individuality and personality.

7. Able to plan his actions, anticipate their results and evaluate their consequences, i.e. capable of performing intentional voluntary actions.

All these signs are opposed to the opposite features of unconscious and unconscious mental processes and impulsive, automatic or reflex 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, the language in a certain sense becomes a real consciousness.”

The followers of L. S. Vygotsky (A. N. Leontiev, A. R. Luria, A. V. Zaporozhets, P. I. Zinchenko and others) reoriented themselves to the problems of the psychological analysis of activity. The return to the problem of consciousness in its fairly complete scope occurred in the second half of the 1950s. first of all thanks to the works of S. L. Rubinshtein, and then A. N. Leontiev.

In Soviet psychology, a generally accepted understanding of consciousness as the highest form of the psyche has developed, which arose in human society in connection with collective labor, communication between people, language and speech. This principle is set forth in the works of S. L. Rubinshtein, A. N. Leontiev, and others. society. Abstract verbal thinking is considered in many works as the main characteristic of consciousness, with which many of its other features and manifestations are associated. Nevertheless, in Soviet psychology, the general understanding of the nature of consciousness receives very different concretizations from different authors.

S. L. Rubinshtein 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, education, through which the objective content of the 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 Z. Freud. Its hierarchical structure is as follows: subconsciousness - consciousness - superconsciousness, and it, apparently, has already exhausted its explanatory material. But more acceptable paths to the analysis of consciousness are needed, and the subconscious and the 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 shared its systemic and semantic structure.

Under the system structure, Vygotsky understood a complex set of relationships between individual functions, specific to each age level. He considered the semantic structure of consciousness as the nature of generalizations, through which a person comprehends the world. Vygotsky associated the emergence of the systemic and semantic structure of co-knowledge with the emergence of speech. Their development and functioning, according to Vygotsky, can be studied only in their mutual connection and mutual conditionality: “Changing the system of relations of functions to each other is in direct and very close connection precisely with the meaning of words.” However, these relations between the systemic (“external”) structure of consciousness and the semantic (“internal”) structure are not inverse: the internal conditions the external, i.e. a change in the semantic structure (for example, associated with a violation of the function of concept formation) leads to the transformation of the entire previous system of mental functions (in this case, its destruction).

A. N. Leontiev identified 3 main constituents of consciousness: the sensual fabric of the image, meaning and meaning. And already N. A. Bernshtein introduced the concept of living movement and its biodynamic tissue. 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.

There is no general concept of consciousness in modern Western philosophy and psychology, and the understanding of its nature is highly controversial. Some see in consciousness a purely logical construction, a kind of abstraction from the many states of the subject, others - the properties of individuality, others - an additional internal aspect of human activity, for which the activity of the brain and body is an additional external aspect. Introspectionist tendencies are still strong in the approach to the problem of consciousness, due to which many continue to believe that the main feature of consciousness is subjective experiences, an internal given to the subject of his mental states. In this regard, Western psychology does not always distinguish between the concepts of the 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 dominance of this interpretation, apparently starting with Leibniz, another point of view begins and develops, according to which consciousness is 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, after analyzing 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 in man and cannot be identified with the psyche, since animals do not have subjective images and experiences.

The fundamental characteristic of human existence is its awareness. Consciousness is an essential attribute of human existence. The problem of the content, mechanisms and structure of human consciousness to this day remains one of the fundamentally important and most complex.

This is connected, in particular, with the fact that consciousness is the object of study of many sciences, and the circle of such sciences is expanding more and more. Philosophers, anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists, educators, physiologists and other representatives of the natural and human sciences are engaged in the study of consciousness, each of which studies certain phenomena of consciousness. These phenomena are quite far from each other and do not correlate with consciousness as a whole.

In philosophy, the problem of consciousness is covered in connection with the relationship between the ideal and the material (consciousness and being), from the point of view of origin (a property of highly organized matter), from the position of reflection (reflection of the objective world). In a narrower sense, consciousness is understood as a human reflection of being, embodied in socially expressed forms of the ideal. The emergence of consciousness is associated in philosophical science with the emergence of labor and the impact on nature in the course of collective labor activity, which gave rise to an awareness of the properties and regular connections of phenomena, which was fixed in the language that was formed in the process of communication. Work and real communication is also seen as the basis for the emergence of self-awareness - awareness of one's attitude to the natural and social environment, understanding one's place in the system of social relations. The specificity of the human reflection of being is determined primarily by the fact that consciousness not only reflects the objective world, but also creates it.

In psychology, consciousness is considered as the highest form of reflection of reality, purposefully regulating human activity and associated with speech. The developed consciousness of the individual is characterized by a complex, multidimensional psychological structure. A.N. Leontiev singled out three main components in the structure of human consciousness: the sensual fabric of the image, meanings and personal meaning.

The sensory fabric of the image is the sensory composition of specific images of reality, actually perceived or emerging in memory, related to the future or only imaginary. These images differ in their modality, sensual tone, degree of clarity, stability, etc. consciousness, and outside his consciousness - as an objective "field" and an object of activity. Sensual images represent a universal form of mental reflection generated by the objective activity of the subject.

Meanings are the most important components of human consciousness. The bearer of meanings is a socially developed language, which acts as an ideal form of existence of the objective world, its properties, connections and relations. The child learns meanings in childhood in the course of joint activities with adults. Socially developed meanings become the property of individual consciousness and allow a person to build his own experience on its basis.

Personal meaning creates partiality of human consciousness.

He points out that individual consciousness is irreducible to impersonal knowledge. Meaning is the functioning of meanings in the processes of activity and consciousness of specific people. Meaning connects meanings with the reality of a person's life, with his motives and values.

The sensual fabric of the image, meanings and meaning are in close interaction, mutually enriching each other, form a single fabric of the personality's consciousness.

Another aspect of the psychological analysis of the category of consciousness in psychology is close to how consciousness is understood in the natural sciences: physiology, psychophysiology, and medicine. This way of studying consciousness is represented by studies of states of consciousness and their changes. States of consciousness are considered as a certain level of activation, against which the process of mental reflection of the surrounding world and activity take place. Traditionally in Western psychology, there are two states of consciousness: sleep and wakefulness.

Among the basic laws of human mental activity is the cyclical alternation of sleep and wakefulness. The need for sleep depends on age. The total sleep duration of a newborn is 20-23 hours per day, from six months to one year - about 18 hours, at the age of two to four years - about 16 hours, at the age of four to eight years - about 12 hours. the body functions as follows: 16 hours - wakefulness, 8 hours - sleep. However, experimental studies of the rhythms of human life have shown that such a relationship between the states of sleep and wakefulness is not mandatory and universal. In the USA, experiments were carried out on changing the rhythm: the cycle of 24 hours was replaced by a cycle of 21, 28 and 48 hours. According to the 48-hour cycle, the subjects lived during long stays in the cave. For every 36 hours of wakefulness, they had 12 hours of sleep, which means that on every ordinary, “earthly” day, they saved two hours of wakefulness. Many of them fully adapted to the new rhythm and retained their efficiency.

A sleep-deprived person dies within two weeks. As a result of a 60-80-hour lack of sleep, a person has a decrease in the rate of mental reactions, mood deteriorates, disorientation occurs in the environment, working capacity is sharply reduced, the ability to concentrate is lost, various motor disorders may occur, hallucinations are possible, sometimes memory loss and inconsistency of speech. Previously, it was believed that sleep is just a complete rest of the body, allowing it to restore strength. Modern ideas about the functions of sleep prove that this is not just a recovery period, and most importantly, it is not at all a homogeneous state. A new understanding of sleep became possible with the beginning of the use of psychophysiological methods of analysis: recording the bioelectrical activity of the brain (EEG), recording muscle tone and eye movements. It was found that sleep consists of five phases, changing every hour and a half, and includes two qualitatively different states - slow and fast sleep, which differ from each other in the types of electrical activity of the brain, vegetative indicators, muscle tone, eye movements.

Non-REM sleep has four stages:

1) drowsiness - at this stage, the main bioelectric rhythm of wakefulness disappears - alpha rhythms, they are replaced by low-amplitude oscillations; dream-like hallucinations may occur;

2) superficial sleep - sleep spindles appear (spindle-shaped rhythm - 14-18 oscillations per second); when the first spindles appear, consciousness is turned off;

3) and 4) delta sleep - high-amplitude, slow EEG fluctuations appear. Delta sleep is divided into two stages: at the 3rd stage, the waves occupy 30–40% of the entire EEG, at the 4th stage - more than 50%. This is deep sleep: muscle tone is reduced, eye movements are absent, breathing rhythm and pulse become less frequent, temperature drops. Awakening a person from delta sleep is very difficult. As a rule, a person awakened in these phases of sleep does not remember dreams, is poorly oriented in the environment, and incorrectly estimates time intervals (reduces the time spent in sleep). Delta sleep, the period of greatest disconnection from the outside world, prevails in the first half of the night.

REM sleep is characterized by EEG rhythms similar to those of wakefulness. Increased cerebral blood flow with strong muscle relaxation with sharp twitches in individual muscle groups. This combination of EEG activity and complete muscle relaxation explains the second name of this stage of sleep - paradoxical sleep. There are sharp changes in heart rate and breathing (a series of frequent inhalations and exhalations alternate with pauses), an episodic rise and fall in blood pressure. There are rapid eye movements with closed eyelids. It is the stage of REM sleep that is accompanied by dreams, and if a person is awakened during this period, he will tell in a rather connected way what he dreamed about.

Dreams as a psychological reality were introduced into psychology by Z. Freud (see 2.2). He viewed dreams as a vivid expression of the unconscious. In the understanding of modern scientists in a dream, the processing of information received during the day continues. Moreover, the central place in the structure of dreams is played by subthreshold information, to which due attention was not paid during the day, or information that did not become the property of conscious processing. Thus, sleep expands the possibilities of consciousness, streamlines its content, and provides the necessary psychological protection.

The state of wakefulness is also heterogeneous: during the day, the level of activation constantly changes depending on the influence of external and internal factors. It is possible to single out tense wakefulness, the moments of which correspond to periods of the most intense mental and physical activity, normal wakefulness and relaxed wakefulness. Tense and normal wakefulness are called extraverted states of consciousness, since it is in these states that a person is capable of full and effective interaction with the outside world and other people. The efficiency of the performed activity and the productivity of solving life problems are largely determined by the level of wakefulness and activation. Behavior is the more effective, the closer the level of wakefulness is to some optimum: it should not be too low and too high. At low levels, a person's readiness for activity is low and he may fall asleep soon; at high activation, a person is agitated and tense, which can lead to disorganization of activity.

In addition to sleep and wakefulness in psychology, a number of states are distinguished, which are called altered states of consciousness. These include, for example, meditation and hypnosis. Meditation is a special state of consciousness, changed at the request of the subject. The practice of inducing such a state has been known in the East for many centuries. At the heart of all types of meditation is concentration of attention in order to limit the field of extraverted consciousness and make the brain respond rhythmically to the stimulus on which the subject has focused. After a meditation session, there is a feeling of relaxation, a decrease in physical and mental stress and fatigue, mental activity and overall vitality increase.

Hypnosis is a special state of consciousness that occurs under the influence of suggestion (suggestion), including self-hypnosis. In hypnosis, something is revealed in common with meditation and sleep: like them, hypnosis is achieved by reducing the flow of signals to the brain. However, these states should not be identified. The essential components of hypnosis are suggestion and suggestibility. A report is established between the hypnotized and the hypnotizing person - the only connection with the outside world that a person retains in a state of hypnotic trance.

Since ancient times, people have used special substances to change the state of their consciousness. Substances that affect behavior, consciousness and mood are called psychoactive or psychotropic. One of the classes of such substances includes drugs that bring a person into a state of "weightlessness", euphoria and create a feeling of being outside of time and space. Most drugs are made from plants, most notably the poppy, from which opium is derived. Actually, drugs in the narrow sense are called opiates - derivatives of opium: morphine, heroin, etc. A person quickly gets used to drugs, he develops physical and mental dependence.

Another class of psychotropic substances are stimulants, aphrodisiacs. Minor aphrodisiacs include tea, coffee, and nicotine—many people use them to cheer themselves up. Amphetamines are stronger stimulants - they cause a surge of strength, including creative ones, excitement, euphoria, self-confidence, a feeling of limitlessness of one's possibilities. The aftereffect of the use of these substances may be the appearance of psychotic symptoms, hallucinations, paranoia, loss of strength. Neurodepressants, barbiturates and tranquilizers reduce anxiety, calm, reduce emotional stress, some act as sleeping pills. Hallucinogens and psychedelics (LSD, marijuana, hashish) distort the perception of time and space, cause hallucinations, euphoria, change thinking, and expand consciousness. The content, structure and states of human consciousness are very diverse. They are of keen interest and have undoubted practical significance, but they have been studied very little. Consciousness is still the biggest mystery of mankind.

For more than two and a half millennia, the concept of consciousness has remained one of the fundamental concepts 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 primarily due to the fact that the philosophy of consciousness is the methodological basis for solving the main theoretical and practical issues of virtually all 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 private scientific studies.

When presenting the philosophical theory of consciousness, we will confine ourselves to discussing only some, in our opinion, the most important, global issues of the topic.

One of the main characteristics of the mental, 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 features, the properties and features of each other. Reflection is both the process of interaction between the reflected and the reflecting, and its result. The changes in the structure of the displaying object resulting from the interaction are determined by its features 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 capable 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 character, then adaptive activity of various levels is already characteristic of biological forms of reflection, starting with irritability as the simplest ability of a living being to selectively respond to environmental influences. At a higher level of the evolution of the living, reflection takes the form of sensitivity. We can talk about the mental form of the interaction of a living organism with the environment when the reflection content adequate to the displayed object appears, which is not reducible to the living organism's own biological properties. It is the mental form of reflection that carries out the regulative reflective interaction of the organism with the environment, which consists in targeting the living organism to the activity that reproduces the biological conditions of its existence.

Motivation of the 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, according to some researchers, with the help of visual-effective and visual-figurative thinking on the basis of conditioned and unconditioned reflexes.

What has been said is fundamentally related to the human psyche. However, a person cannot be reduced to the totality of the biological conditions of his existence. A person exists in the space of society, reflection and regulation of interaction with which is carried out mainly with the help of consciousness.

niya. If the animal psyche reflects only the simple, external properties of things in sensual images, then the human consciousness is the essence of things and phenomena, hidden behind their external characteristics. In other words, mental reflection at the level of the animal is carried out by identifying 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.W.F. Hegel).

In the human mind, on the contrary, the objects and phenomena of the external world are separated from the experiences of the subject themselves, i.e. they become a reflection not only of the object, but of the subject itself. This means that the content of consciousness is always represented not only by the object, but also by the subject, his own nature, which provides a qualitatively new level of adaptive reflection in comparison with the animal psyche based on goal setting. "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, of the phylogeny 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" involves several levels of "figurative" reflection: direct, indirectly generalized reflection at the level of the individual and indirectly generalized reflection as the result of the entire history of society. Consciousness is the highest form of mental purposeful reflection of reality by a socially developed person, a form of sensory images and conceptual thinking.

1 See: Smirnov S.N. Dialectics of reflection and interaction in the evolution of matter. M., 1974. S. 54-66.

2 Zhukov N.I. Philosophy: Textbook for universities. M., 1998. S. 154.

Consciousness, being an expedient, ordered, regulatory reflection, is the highest type of information processes. The informational characteristic of consciousness makes it possible to clarify its understanding as the highest form of reflection of reality.

Information is not identical to display, since in the process of transmitting reflection, part of its content is lost, because information is a transmitted part of the reflected manifold, that side of it that lends itself to objectification.

reading, transmission. In addition, reflection depends on its material carrier in the most direct way: reflection is often impossible to transfer to another material carrier - like music in color or a painting in musical rhythms - i.e. hard to recode. Information is always recoded from one material carrier 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 transmitter of information - they have their own characteristics and individuality, they are subjective. The common between them will be only in certain transmitted information. The subjective image obtained as a result of the transmission of information turns out to be necessarily richer than the received information itself, since it is not its passive reproduction, but the interaction of the recipient subject with the information itself.

1 See: Ursul A.D. Reflection and information. // Lenin's theory of reflection in the light of the development of science and practice. Sofia, 1981. T. 1. S. 145-160.

2 See: There. same. S. 154.

3 See: Ibid.

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 defies the usual description in the coordinates of space and time, its subjective-ideal content has no existence in the physical and physiological sense of the word. At the same time, feelings, thoughts, ideas of a person exist no less realistically than material objects and phenomena. But how, how? Philosophers speak of 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 opposite 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. The reality of the ideal understood in this way allows us to draw a conclusion about the functional, and not the substantial, nature of its existence.

In other words, the subjective reality of consciousness does not have an ontologically independent existence, it always depends

from the objective reality of material phenomena, for example, from the neurophysiological processes of the brain, from interaction with objects of the material world as prototypes of images of consciousness. It can be said 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 a person’s head 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 the subject, whether it is a person, a group of people or society as a whole. That is, the subjectivity of consciousness implies 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 body as a whole, the quality of his individual life and experience, the level of mastery of knowledge accumulated by mankind, 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 sensual, visual, visually similar to their original, but also conceptual, the similarity of which with objects of objective reality is of an internal nature, expressing only essential types of connections and properties of objects.

Consciousness, understood as the subjectivity of the reflection reflected in it and the subjectivity of the process of reflection itself, is due to the ability of a person to distinguish between an image and an object, to think the latter in the conditions of its absence, and also to separate oneself from the object, to feel and understand one’s own “from-

"delnost" and thereby distinguish oneself from the environment. The subjectivity of consciousness is expressed in the assimilation by a person of the separateness of both the person himself and the objects of the outside world. It is also determined by the self-consciousness inherent in the individual, i.e. awareness of oneself as I, separate from others. Some authors generally interpret subjectivity as something that separates us from the outside world.

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: the images reflect the objects of the objective world always with a certain degree of approximation to them, through distinction, generalization and selection, are the result of the creative freedom of the individual, his practical-active attitude to the world. Noting the "incompleteness", one must also say about the "overcrowding" of the subjective image through analogies, a conjectured subjective experience, which, of course, is wider than the displayed object.

3. Ideality of consciousness. Its structure

Ideality is the most important property of consciousness. For many centuries, the problem of the ideal has remained one of the most urgent and complex in world philosophy. It is from the opposite attitude towards nature and the ideal in philosophical thought that the opposition of materialism and idealism is born, as well as various "readings" of the ideal and the material in various philosophical schools.

The philosophical interpretation of the ideal evolves from the question of the relationship between consciousness, ideas and matter, objects of the real world. The idealistic tradition considers the ideal as a constructive and transforming essence of reality, an impulse for change and development of the material world, and the world of material phenomena as a sphere of realization, expression and manifestation of the ideal. As rightly noted by E.V. Ilyenkov, "the objectivity of the "ideal form" is not a mistake of Plato and Hegel, but an indisputable fact of a sober statement of the existence of the ideal in the space of human culture, independent of the will and consciousness of individuals" .

1 See: Smirnov S.N. The emergence and essence of consciousness // Lenin's theory of reflection in the light of the development of science and practice. Sofia, 1981. T. 1. S. 135.

2 Ilyenkov E.V. The problem of the ideal // Questions of Philosophy. 1979. No. 7. S. 150.

Ideality as non-spatiality, inaccessibility to sensory perception, immateriality, invisibility, inaudibility, etc. sensory images and sign-symbolic thinking exists only in the perception, imagination, thought of a feeling and thinking social subject. This is the fundamental difference between the reality of consciousness and the reality of the material, the reality of the mental, subjective from the reality of the physical, objective.

"Ideal" denotes both the process itself and the result of this process, namely the process of idealization, a mental reflection of reality that forms the image of an object, which, in turn, is "an ideal form of being an object in a person's head". Initially, ideal images arise and form as a moment of a person's practical relationship to the world, mediated by the forms created by previous generations of people.

The ideal, being a world of images and concepts, has its own logic, the relative independence of its own functioning, a certain level of freedom, expressed in the ability of the ideal to generate a new or something in general that does not directly occur in reality and is the result of spiritual activity.

1 Spirkin A.G. Consciousness and self-awareness. M., 1972. S. 70.

2 It must be borne in mind that in the early stages of its development, the ideal is directly woven into material activity, becoming further more and more independent. With the increase of the "ideal space", the logic of thinking as a reproduction of objects of the surrounding world is honed, the level of anticipatory reflection of reality, the level and quality of creative imagination rises.

The ideal always remains a personal phenomenon, a subjective manifestation of human brain processes. The latter update information for the individual in the form of subjective experiences, knowledge, etc. Non-actualized for the individual (potential) information stored in various structures of the brain, recorded in cultural monuments, works of art, books, engineering structures and developments, cannot be correlated with the concept of the ideal until it becomes relevant for the consciousness of the individual.

The ideal always remains identical to individual consciousness, which in turn determines and forms social consciousness. Only in the process of actualization, deobjectification of forms of social consciousness by the consciousness of specific individuals, does social consciousness become an ideal, subjective reality of the consciousness of these individuals.

In philosophical literature, there is also a point of view on the ideal as creativity in the broad sense of the word, i.e. its activity, constructiveness, focus of thought on the new, selective intentionality, anticipatory nature of the reflection of reality, etc. In this sense, the ideal, as the creativity of consciousness, is a purposeful, controlled and controlled by the personality reflection of the external and internal world. That is why the ideal includes in its content emotional-volitional components, intuition, value structures that determine the assessment of the phenomena of reality and, accordingly, the choice of the desired future. The ideal becomes a mental "replay" of future options for action, constantly ahead of the structures of future practice in its ideal structures.

1 See, for example: Morozov M.N. Creative activity of consciousness. Methodological analysis of natural science aspects. Kyiv, 1976.

So, the ideal is polysemantic in its essential characteristics, which also determines the variety of philosophical classifications of the ideal content of consciousness.

Often in the literature there are three levels of functioning of the ideal: a) the ideal in the mental activity of animals; b) the ideal human psyche; c) ideal in cultural values.

Particular difficulties arise in the analysis of the specific nature of the functioning of the ideal in the sphere of culture. Indeed, texts, symbols and cultural objects are something in the eyes of the individual and society only because they carry ideal meanings, values and meanings. They have an ideal content to the extent that they are generally significant elements of social culture and are reproduced by its bearers. At the same time, in the process of perception and "decoding" of the ideal content of cultural objects, a dialogue is carried out between each individual and the author of cultural values and meanings, their "appropriation" and understanding. Some authors, such as K. Popper, generally come to the conclusion that the functioning of social and cultural values cannot be attributed to either the material or the ideal sphere, that this is something third, stored in cultural objects.

Depending on the content and functions of the ideal, it can also be classified into: a) cognitive (scientific and other theories, hypotheses, ideas); b) axiological (moral, aesthetic ideals); c) psychological (subjective experiences in emotions and feelings); d) praxeological (concrete ideas, goals and objectives of everyday practical activities of people) and other forms of functioning of the ideal.

It is customary to distinguish between such types and forms of the ideal as practical and theoretical, concrete and abstract, real and formal, utopian and realistic, etc.

The structure of consciousness. Recall that the concept of "consciousness" is ambiguous. The definition of consciousness depends on its broad or narrow interpretation, the ontological or epistemological aspect of its consideration, and other approaches to its analysis.

In a broad sense, consciousness refers to a person's mental reflection of reality, regardless of the level at which it is carried out - sensual or rational. In a narrow and special sense, the concepts under consciousness mean the highest conceptual form of reflection of reality.

Consciousness is structurally organized, it is an integral system of various elements that are in structural and procedural relations with each other. Consciousness is studied both in terms of the organization of its content and in terms of the dynamic development of its characteristics - the process of mental reflection of reality, characteristic of a socialized individual.

Most often, the structure of consciousness (psyche) of a person is considered as a three-level one, consisting of the spheres of the unconscious (the subconscious mind adjoins it), consciousness and superconsciousness. Each of these elements of consciousness in the broad sense of the word plays an important role in the implementation of the main functions of consciousness: a) obtaining information about the external and internal world of a person; b) transformation and improvement of the inner and outer world of a person; c) ensuring communication, "dialogue understanding" of people; d) management of life and behavior of people, etc.

The sphere of consciousness primarily concerns the reflection of reality in distinct forms of sensibility and thinking. Consciousness as a process is usually characterized by the term "awareness" as the inclusion of the reflected object in the knowledge system

and referring it to a certain class of related phenomena, as an awareness of the meaning of what is perceived in the context of real events.

But consciousness in the narrow sense is also not an unambiguous phenomenon. It is always awareness not only of the surrounding and inner world in certain feelings and logical conclusions, but also of one's personal relationship to the world and one's place in it. And for this reason, human knowledge, being the core of consciousness, is emotionally colored, i.e. reflect objects of awareness in the form of experiences, evaluative attitude towards them. In the emotional sphere of consciousness, elementary emotions are distinguished - hunger, fatigue; feelings - love, grief, joy; affects - rage, despair; various kinds of emotional moods and well-being, stress as a state of special emotional tension. Strong emotions are able to optimize or, conversely, disorganize the processes of awareness, raise or lower their level, orient and direct them.

1 See: Spirkin A.G. Consciousness and self-awareness. S. 82.

In other words, in the structure of consciousness, two interconnected processes of awareness and experience are most clearly distinguished as a person's relationship to the content of what is realized. Sensations, perceptions, ideas, concepts and thinking in judgments and conclusions form the core of consciousness. However, they do not exhaust all its structural completeness: consciousness also includes acts of attention, will, memory, various feelings and emotions as necessary components. It is thanks to goal setting, strong-willed efforts to achieve it, concentration and value interest that a certain circle of objects is in the focus of attention, is realized by the subject.

Consciousness as a complex information-regulatory process of awareness, recollection, recognition also includes memory, i.e. processes that ensure the fixation of past experience - imprinting, saving, reproduction (reproduction) and recognition (identification) of information.

A very common concept of the nature of memory today is the holographic theory, which considers memory as a set of holograms that interact in a certain way with each other. Just as a part of a hologram preserves the image of the entire object, so any neuron of the brain

the brain carries information about all the states of other neurons, i.e. acts only as a participant in the general process of storing and reproducing information, but a full-fledged participant, containing information accumulated in the brain, - as "everything about everything."

Will as the basis of intentionality (orientation) of consciousness acts as an effort that determines the vector of a person's mental energy, the conscious regulation of his behavior and activities. The will, as it were, strengthens the dominant human need, weakening others that compete with it, and counteracting the negative emotions that accompany the need to achieve the dominant goal, the dominant of a person’s life activity or his “super task” (K.S. Stanislavsky).

So, consciousness is able to adequately function only in the volitional form of emotions, i.e. intentional-value experience by a person of the space "I am the world". In this sense, the qualitative characteristics of will, memory and emotions are decisive factors in the regulation of human activity, since they not only form the basis of the processes of awareness of what is important and significant for the individual, but also give purposefulness to the actions of the subject of awareness. Therefore, the problem of consciousness is inseparable from the problem of freedom as a characteristic of a voluntarily made choice in setting goals and implementing actions.

In this regard, some philosophers, such as M. Mamardashvili, define consciousness as a moral phenomenon, deriving the terms "consciousness" and "conscience" from the same root. Consciousness is moral in its essence, since it expresses the ability of a person to be guided by causally unprovoked motivation. Consciousness is the sphere of free moral choice and responsibility for it, there is "something between our heads". Thanks to this, the meeting and "mutual identification of consciousness" in different people is realized. Thus, consciousness is understood as an information field, thanks to which one person understands another, namely, in the coexistence of two points of this "field", giving an additional effect of consciousness.

1 See: Mamardashvili M. Paradoxes of Consciousness // Secrets of Consciousness and the Unconscious: A Reader. Minsk, 1998. S. 20.

2 Ibid. S. 25.

3 See: Ibid. pp. 12-30.

Yu.M. Borodai believes that consciousness in its genesis comes from morality, because the essence of the primary ideal-communal ties of people (their first language is myth) is everywhere ideas about what should be, and not about what is true. Morality retains the trace of its birthright in the consciousness of a modern person - anyone! Morality as the essential basis of consciousness is manifested in the ability to arbitrarily assess everything that is perceived by the individual, including self-assessment, as good or evil. It is morality that ensures the unity of the value orientation of many I included in the human community, through their identification with some ideal essence.

1 See: Borodai Yu.M. Erotica. Death. Taboo. The tragedy of human consciousness. M., 1996. S. 188.

2 See: Ibid. S. 190.

The problem of the boundary between sensory-figurative and conceptual-symbolic consciousness is often assessed as one of the "world riddles", a possible solution to which is the understanding of the genetically initial process of "compact folding" of sensory images into logical-conceptual signs.

So, consciousness is based on memory, the emotional sphere, volitional effort and is an intentional-arbitrary process of reflecting reality, implemented at the sensory and conceptual levels. Is it possible to assume that everything that a person observes and hears is realized by him? Of course not. Only that which becomes the object of human attention is realized. In this sense, consciousness works as an act (voluntary or involuntary) of attention, i.e. Consciousness is always intentional, directed towards something.

The program of action is developed, undoubtedly, under the control of consciousness. However, when actions are repeated many times, their performance is already stereotyped, the action becomes a habit, then it is controlled at a different level of consciousness, lying "below the field of consciousness" (Z.P. Zinchenko), at the subconscious level. The sphere of the subconscious includes everything that was conscious or can become conscious under certain conditions - skills brought to automatism, rooted in the mind of the individual, social norms and rules, etc. The subconscious acts as an assistant to consciousness, protecting it from excessive overwork of constant control over the entire set of actions directed

received and regulated by the human psyche. As A.G. Spirkin, "a person could neither think productively nor act effectively if all the elements of his life activity simultaneously required awareness" .

Therefore, the subconscious is defined as a set of mental phenomena, states, reflexes that are not the center of meaningful activity at a given time, not subject to the control of consciousness, at least at a given moment, i.e. unconscious mental acts performed automatically-reflexively. In other words, not all, but rather a relatively small part of mental activity is realized by a person, its predominant part remains outside the focus of consciousness. Of course, the boundary between the conscious and the unconscious is quite flexible: the previously unconscious can be realized later, and vice versa, which is the subject of careful reflection, eventually goes into the subconscious.

It can be said that a well-developed subconscious serves as the foundation for a clear work of consciousness, and vice versa. It is no coincidence that the subconscious is assessed as "acquired involuntarily, unconscious research experience, as if imposed by those objects with which one had to act" . "Where is the second phrase when I pronounce the first? - In the waiting room" (i.e., the subconscious), - said the outstanding French mathematician Adamer.

As for the unconscious, which is usually referred to as dreams, hypnotic states, somnambulism, states of insanity, etc. as some released relic forms of prelogical thinking, it is always present in the human psyche. What can be included in the sphere of consciousness through the efforts of memory does not belong to the unconscious, unlike instincts (although the feelings generated by instincts sooner or later become the area of consciousness).

1 Spirkin A.G. Consciousness and self-awareness. S. 171.

2 Ponomarev Ya.A. Psychic and intuition. M., 1987. S. 244.

3 See: Grimakh L.P. Reserves of the human psyche. Introduction to the psychology of activity. M., 1987. S. 32.

The problem of the unconscious has troubled human thought since ancient times. The unconscious has been interpreted in different ways: both as the highest level of knowledge, the intuition of the inner voice (Socrates), and as inner hidden knowledge (Plato), and as an interior hidden from consciousness (Augustine), and

as the lowest form of spiritual activity, dormant ideas are small perceptions (Leibniz), and as sensory images not illuminated by the light of consciousness, intuition (Kant), and as will (Schopenhauer), and as an elemental "life force" (Hartmann), and, finally , as complexes of unconscious drives, libido (Freud) and archetypes of the "collective unconscious" (Jung).

There are four main forms of manifestation of the unconscious: 1) supra-individual samples typical of the community, of which the subject is a member - "archetypes of the collective unconscious" by C. Jung, "collective representations" by E. Durkheim, etc.; 2) unconscious stimuli of activity (motives and semantic attitudes of the personality) - "dynamic repressed unconscious" 3. Freud, post-hypnotic suggestion by J. Burnham, etc.; 3) unconscious operational attitudes and stereotypes of automated behavior, for example, "unconscious inferences" by G. Helmholtz, "properceptions" by W. James, "preconscious" by 3. Freud, "hypotheses" by D. Bruner, "dynamic stereotypes" by I.P. Pavlova, "action acceptors" P.K. Anokhin; 4) unconscious subsensory perception of some stimuli - the sensitivity range of I.M. Sechenov, "anticipation" by W. Neisser, "subsensory area" by G.V. Gershuni - as zones of stimuli (inaudible sounds, invisible light signals, etc.) that cause an involuntary, objectively recorded reaction and can be realized when they are given a signal value.

1 See: Philosophical Encyclopedic Dictionary. M., 1989. S. 58-59.

One of the varieties of the unconscious, following K.S. Stanislavsky and M.G. Yaroshevsky is called superconsciousness or supraconsciousness. The work of superconsciousness, generating at one stage or another new, previously non-existent information by recombining ideas received from outside, is not controlled by conscious volitional effort. Only the results of the unconscious activity of the superconsciousness are presented to the analysis of consciousness, and these results are characterized by a certain probability of their correspondence to reality. It is in the sphere of superconsciousness that the birth of hypotheses, conjectures takes place, and intuitive insight occurs.

Superconsciousness acquires material for recombination work (associations, analogies, etc.) from the conscious

experience and reserves of the subconscious. And yet in the superconsciousness there is something precisely "super-" than the actual consciousness or the unconscious, namely, new information that does not follow directly from previously acquired information. Therefore, superconsciousness is understood as the highest stage of the creative process of reflecting the world or intuition.

The activity of the superconsciousness is directed by the steadily dominant need of the subject (A.A. Ukhtomsky's dominant principle). But unlike the subconscious, the activity of the superconscious is not realized under any conditions, only its results are realized.

The recombination work of the superconsciousness is manifested in inspiration as an intense manifestation of feelings leading to the anticipation of the result of mental activity: imagination, intuitive insight. Intuition, being a vivid manifestation of the sphere of superconsciousness, is an emotional-rational process of conjecture or "direct discretion" of the truth, a process that does not require special logical justification and proof. To comprehend intuitively means to “guess”, “figure out”, “suddenly understand”, etc.

Structural understanding of the human psyche is also based on the distinction between consciousness and self-consciousness, i.e. a person's awareness of the surrounding world and himself, or the self-reference of the I with myself.

Self-consciousness as knowledge of oneself implies the inclusion of self-observation, self-knowledge, self-esteem, self-control, self-analysis, etc. in its content. All of these forms of self-consciousness serve as a means of self-control, self-government and self-identification of a person.

In the initial stages, self-consciousness arises as an identification of oneself with the people around the individual, objects and phenomena that he perceives as directly related to him and identifies them with his Self. For example, almost any person emotionally reacts to a positive or negative assessment of the profession, circle of people, settlements, etc., to which he himself belongs. The self-consciousness program is formed in the course of constant repetition of acts of comparing oneself with some samples stored in memory and, as it were, "merged" with one's own Self, and the correlation of the system of these comparisons with new external or internal experience.

So, individual consciousness has a complex structure. But no less complex organization of its content is assumed by the transpersonal consciousness of society, which constitutes a system of dialectically interconnected forms and levels.

Social consciousness functions, on the one hand, as a result of the objectification of personal (individual) consciousness in language, objects and processes of culture, scientific concepts and research methods, etc., and on the other hand, as a source of individual consciousness, the content of which, by its nature, is also socially, as well as public consciousness. Social consciousness develops through the consciousness of individual people, being only relatively independent of the latter: "undeciphered writings in themselves do not yet contain mental content, only in relation to individual people the book wealth of the world's libraries, monuments of art, etc. have a spiritual meaning wealth".

In other words, the consciousness of society does not have consciousness in the sense in which it is possessed by a separate individual: the consciousness of society does not exist in the form of a transpersonal substrate carrier separate from specific people - the brain or some other instrument of consciousness. It exists as a fact of consciousness only through its participation in the really functioning consciousness of the individual. It turns out that the individual and the public - as different levels and ways of organizing consciousness - exist as a subjective reality only in constant interaction with each other.

Consciousness and language. The content of consciousness is expressed through language (speech), i.e. objectified with the help of language, which serves as the material design of the ideal content of consciousness. Mental, and to a certain extent, sensory processes of consciousness are always carried out in some language.

1 Philosophical Encyclopedia. T. 5. S. 47.

2 Language is considered as a material system of meaningful (ideologically) significant sign forms, as a direct reality of consciousness. Or as a system of signs that serves as a means of human communication, thinking and expression (see: Philosophical Encyclopedia. Vol. 5. S. 604), and speech (speech activity) - as one of the types of specific human activity, which is usually understood as communicative activity mediated by the signs of the language as a means of carrying out speech activity (see: Philosophical Encyclopedia, vol. 4, p. 506).

Language is as ancient as consciousness: in the process of the formation of consciousness, mental activity is "dressed" in a verbal shell. Initially, speech is formed to designate (name) things and phenomena necessary in the process of communication.

nications. As the memory is fixed, the mechanisms for highlighting categorical features are formed. They begin to be fixed in long-term memory as words. Further evolution of concepts is the result of the processes of mental compaction of information. This is how the formation of a system of concepts, judgments, etc. is carried out. as ideal images of reality and their corresponding conventional signs, models, etc.

The word is not only a fixer, but also an operator of all mental processes, since both the formation of concepts and their operation are impossible outside of verbal signs, which in this case act as an internal mechanism of thinking.

So, the word as the basic elementary unit of the language is the unity of the material sign and the ideal meaning, or semantic content (concept). A visual representation of the contradictory unity of the word and the concept is given by the "semantic triangle", the vertices of which correspond to the displayed object, the word and the concept adequate to them: the concept in a mediated and generalized form displays the object, and the word expresses the concept and designates the object (in semiotics and information theory, the word will be correspond to a sign and a signal, and to a concept - meaning and information).

1 See: F. Clique, Awakening Thinking. The author considers the formation of concepts that require speech naming in the process of a number of stages of abstracting compression and reduction of information (pp. 278-287).

2 According to L.S. Vygotsky, the word is also an operator of thought because the thought in the word is not simply expressed, but is accomplished in it, because thanks to the word its further course is directed. Therefore, there can be no rigid connection between language and thinking, between the word and the concept. Although thoughts may appear as if in pre-linguistic expression, they acquire their distinctness precisely through language.

3 Philosophical understanding of the difference between the word and the concept, thinking and speech is outlined already in Plato's dialogue "Theaetetus".

4 See: Zhukov N.I. Philosophy: Textbook. M., 1998. S. 170-171.

The information encoded with the help of natural language is expressed not only in the external form of linguistic signs, but also in the internal form that structures thought processes. Therefore, the word in different contexts of thinking and communication carries a different information load.

Language performs important functions for the implementation of human life - communicative, tool-thinking, cognitive, regulatory, broadcasting, etc.

In addition, the language, having relative independence, its own logic of functioning and development, has an impact on the nature of the flow of sensory and thought processes, on the formation of a particular style of thinking in a particular linguistic culture.

Language functions in the forms of external and internal speech. Inner speech is abbreviated compared to outer speech. It omits non-basic words, restored by context, only the key words and topics are spoken. Inner speech, expressed in key words, concentrating the meaning of the whole phrase, sometimes the whole text, becomes the language of "semantic strongholds" or "semantic complexes". And in the case of intuitive insight, thinking is based on these internal speech complexes.

They also talk about the language of animals. We only note that the language of an animal serves as an expression of a situational state caused by hunger, thirst, fear, etc., or a call for some specific action, a warning about danger. The language of an animal never involves the indirect reproduction of objective reality through generalization, it functions with the help of an unconditioned reflex mental activity.

There are points of view on the existence, along with natural and artificial languages, of the language of the ancient, primordial and almost forgotten by modern man - the mythological language of dreams, symbols as the language of inner experiences and feelings, the language of the unconscious. E. Fromm believes that "the language of symbols is such a language with the help of which internal experiences, feelings and thoughts take the form of clearly tangible events of the external world, this is a language whose logic is different from the one by whose laws we live in the daytime; logic , in which the dominant categories are not time and space, but intensity and associativity. The author clarifies: "This is the only language invented by mankind, the same for all cultures throughout history. It is a language with its own grammar and syntax, which must be understood if you want to understand the meaning of myths, fairy tales and dreams."

1 Korshunov A.M., Mantatov V.V. The theory of reflection and the heuristic role of signs. M., 1974. S. 131.

2 Fromm E. Forgotten language: the meaning of dreams, fairy tales and myths // Secrets of consciousness and the unconscious. Minsk, 1998. S. 367-368.

Indeed, not all feelings and experiences of a person find their expression in an exact linguistic form, remaining the sphere of the unconscious. Fromm is right in arguing that often the language and logic of conceptual thinking act as a kind of social filter that does not allow certain feelings to reach consciousness. And yet, if the sensual life of the sphere of the unconscious is identified with language, then the very ability to symbolize and mythologically interpret the world should be legally placed in the sphere of the unconscious. It seems that the so-called language of myths and dreams becomes a language as a system of signs expressing even the most "ancient" and illogical experiences only when it becomes a form of consciousness, i.e. acquires a certain ideal value. In other words, when experiences are realized, they take on the form of language.

LITERATURE

Alekseev P.V., Panin A.V. Philosophy. M., 1996.

Vinogradovsky V.G. Social organization of space. M., 1988.

Ivanov A.V. Consciousness and thinking. M., 1994.

Ilyenkov E.V. Ideal // Philosophical Encyclopedia. M., 1962. T. 2. S. 219-227.

Ilyenkov E.V. The problem of the ideal // Questions of Philosophy. 1979. No. 6, 7.

Prigozhy I., Stengers M. Burden, chaos, quantum. M., 1997.

Spirkin A.G. Consciousness and self-awareness. M., 1972.

Secrets of Consciousness and the Unconscious: A Reader. Minsk, 1998.

Heidegger M. Time and being. M., 1993.

TEST QUESTIONS

1. What are the features of the understanding of matter within the framework of metaphysical materialism?

2. What is the essence of the Marxist understanding of matter?

3. What properties of objective reality are expressed using the categories of space and time?

4. What are the features of the substantial and relational concepts of space and time?

5. What new things did A. Einstein bring to the understanding of space and time?

6. What is common between matter and consciousness, objective and subjective reality, making the opposition between them relative?

7. How do you imagine the structural content of consciousness?

8. Is it possible to speak about the ideality of social consciousness?

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abstract

on the topic: “Consciousness as the highest form of mental reflection. Conscious and Unconscious »

Performed by Tatarova K.V.

Checked by: Azieva Yu.A.

Introduction

mentally conscious person

The purpose of this work is to analyze the conscious and unconscious components of the human psyche, their formation, manifestation and significance.

I. Consciousness as the highest level of mental aboutreflections of objective reality

The most complex behavior is observed in humans, who, unlike animals, are able not only to respond to sudden changes in environmental conditions, but also the ability to form motivated (conscious) and purposeful behavior. The possibility of implementing such a complex behavior is due to the presence of consciousness in a person.

Consciousness controls the most complex forms of behavior that require constant attention and conscious control, and is included in the action in the following cases:

when a person faces unexpected, intellectually complex problems that do not have an obvious solution;

when a person needs to overcome physical or psychological resistance in the way of the movement of a thought or a bodily organ;

when it is necessary to realize and find a way out of any conflict situation, which cannot be resolved by itself without a strong-willed decision;

when a person suddenly finds himself in a situation that contains a potential threat to him if immediate action is not taken.

Situations like this come up almost all the time.

1. A person with consciousness separates himself from the surrounding world, separates himself, his “I” from external things, and the properties of things from themselves.

2. Is able to see himself in a certain system of relations with other people.

3. Able to see himself as being in a certain place in space and at a certain point in the time axis that links the present, past and future.

4. Able to establish adequate causal relationships between the phenomena of the external world and between them and their own actions.

5. Gives an account of his feelings, thoughts, experiences, intentions and desires.

6. Knows the features of his individuality and personality.

7. Able to plan his actions, anticipate their results and evaluate their consequences, i.e. capable of performing intentional voluntary actions.

All these signs are opposed to the opposite features of unconscious and unconscious mental processes and impulsive, automatic or reflex actions.

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, education, through which the objective content of the object appears before the subject.”

Under the system structure, Vygotsky understood a complex set of relationships between individual functions, specific to each age level. He considered the semantic structure of consciousness as the nature of generalizations through which a person 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: “Changing the system of relations of functions to each other is in direct and very close connection precisely with the meaning of words.” However, these relations between the systemic (“external”) structure of consciousness and the semantic (“internal”) structure are not inverse: the internal conditions the external, i.e. a change in the semantic structure (for example, associated with a violation of the function of concept formation) leads to the transformation of the entire previous system of mental functions (in this case, its destruction).

II. Unconscious manifestation in the psyche and behavior of a person

Along with conscious forms of reflection and activity, a person is also characterized by those that are, as it were, beyond the “threshold” of consciousness. The terms "unconscious", "subconscious", "unconscious" are often found in scientific and fiction literature, as well as in everyday life. Everyday experience acquaints us with the thoughts that pop up in our head, and it is not known where and how they arise.

The unconscious began to be studied especially actively at the beginning of the CC. Various scientists dealt with this problem, but already the results of the first studies showed that the problem of the unconscious is so vast that all the information conscious of a person is only a small part of a huge whole.

The totality of mental phenomena, states and actions that are not represented in the mind of a person, lying outside the sphere of his mind, unaccountable and not amenable, at least at the moment, to control, is covered by the concept of the unconscious. The unconscious appears sometimes as an attitude, instinct, attraction, sometimes as sensation, perception, representation and thinking, sometimes as intuition, sometimes as a hypnotic state or dream, a state of passion or insanity. The unconscious phenomena include both imitation and creative inspiration, accompanied by a sudden “enlightenment” with a new idea, born, as it were, from some kind of push from within, cases of instantaneous solution of problems that have not succumbed to conscious efforts for a long time, involuntary memories of what seemed to be firmly forgotten, and other .

The general idea of the unconscious is found in the ancient Indian teachings of Potanjali, in which this concept was interpreted as the highest level of knowledge, as an institution and even as the driving force of the universe. The problem of the unconscious is reflected in Plato's doctrine of knowledge as a memory, closely related to the idea and the presence in the soul of hidden, unconscious knowledge, of which the subject himself may not even suspect anything at all.

Other philosophers (Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Kant, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, etc.)

Psychologists such as Fechner, Wundt, and others initiated the psychological study of the problem of the unconscious.

Wundt believed that perception and consciousness are based on conscious logical processes. He tried to establish a connection between the laws of the logical development of thought and unconscious phenomena, asserted the existence of not only a conscious, but also an unconscious “We”. A significant impetus in the study of the unconscious was the experiments in the field of psychiatry, primarily by the French psychiatrists Charcot and Janet, who began to use hypnotic methods of influencing the sphere of consciousness for therapeutic purposes.

Sechenov spoke directly against concepts that identified the mental and the conscious. Pavlov associated the phenomenon of the unconscious with the study of those parts of the brain that have minimal excitability.

All unconscious mental processes are usually divided into three classes: unconscious mechanisms of conscious actions, unconscious stimuli of conscious actions, and “supraconscious” processes.

In turn, the first class - unconscious mechanisms of conscious actions - includes three classes: unconscious automatisms, unconscious attitudes, unconscious accompaniments of conscious actions.

Unconscious automatisms usually mean actions or acts that are performed without the participation of consciousness, as if “by themselves”. They are of a twofold nature. Some processes constitute a group of primary automatisms. This group includes actions that are congenital or formed in the first year of life: sucking movements, blinking and convergence of the eyes, grasping objects, walking, and much more. Others are called skills. This group of actions includes those that were initially conscious, but then, as a result of repeated repetition and improvement, their implementation ceased to require the participation of consciousness, they began to be performed automatically. For example, learning to play musical instruments.

Set is the readiness of an organism or subject to perform a certain action or reaction in a certain direction [11].

Unconscious accompaniments of conscious actions are understood as involuntary movements, tonic tension, facial expressions and pantomimics, as well as a large class of vegetative movements accompanying human actions and states. For example, a person listening to music shakes his head to the beat.

The second class - unconscious stimuli of conscious actions - includes: dreams, erroneous actions, neurotic symptoms. Such a division came from the theory of Z. Freud.

The third class of unconscious processes is formed by "supraconscious" processes. This category includes the processes of formation of a certain integral product as a result of a large conscious (as a rule, intellectual) work. For example, we are trying to solve some complex problem, but we are not succeeding. And suddenly, unexpectedly, somehow by itself, and sometimes using some insignificant reason, we come to the solution of this problem.

In Soviet psychology, the problem of the unconscious was developed mainly by the school of D. N. Uznadze in Georgia, whose adherents conduct research on the unconscious in the form of an attitude. Uznadze defined: “Installation is the readiness, predisposition of the subject to perceive future events and actions in a certain direction; provides a stable purposeful nature of the course of the corresponding activity, serves as the basis for the expedient selective activity of a person.

The phenomenon of attitude permeates practically all spheres of mental life. Installation - not a private mental process, but something holistic, bearing a central character. This is manifested in the fact that, being formed in one sphere, it passes to others. The setting arises when an individual interacts with the environment, when a need “meets” with a situation of its satisfaction. On the basis of an attitude that expresses the state of the subject as such, activity can be activated in addition to the participation of his emotional and volitional acts. But activity in terms of an “impulsive” attitude is characteristic of a person, but does not reflect his essence.

There are different types of installation: motor installation - readiness to perform a specific action; mental attitude, which consists in the readiness to solve intellectual problems using known and accessible methods; perceptual attitude - readiness to perceive what is expected to be seen, etc. .

The installation is very important for a person, because it ensures that in case of a sudden need, a pre-planned action is performed. Such readiness, even when exposed to another, not expected stimulus, can cause the performance of a previously proposed action, which, of course, is very often a mistake. This phenomenon is called “installation errors”.

As a result of a whole series of experiments, D.N. Uznadze and his collaborators came to the conclusion that the installation is indeed unconscious.

Thus, unconscious attitudes do exist and are of great importance for the formation of conscious actions.

From the above facts it follows that the problem of the unconscious requires a detailed and in-depth study, and this is indisputable. Researchers in the field of the unconscious concentrated around the central figure - Sigmund Freud. It was this Austrian psychiatrist who most of all insisted on the need to study the sphere of the unconscious, its place and role in human behavior, especially in the course of various kinds of mental illness.

According to Freud's theory, there are three spheres or areas in the human psyche: consciousness, preconsciousness and the unconscious. He attributed to the category of consciousness everything that is realized and controlled by a person. Freud attributed hidden or latent knowledge to the area of preconsciousness. This is the knowledge that a person has, but which is currently absent in the mind. They are initiated when an appropriate stimulus occurs.

Thus, we can conclude that the psyche is much wider than consciousness. “Consciousness is only the visible part of the iceberg, and most of it is hidden from the conscious control of a person.”

The area of the unconscious, according to Freud, has completely different properties. The first property is that the content of this area is not recognized, but has an extremely significant impact on our behavior. The area of the unconscious is active. The second property is that information located in the area of the unconscious hardly passes into consciousness. This is explained by the work of two mechanisms: displacement and resistance.

According to Freud, a person's mental life is determined by his drives, the main of which is sexual (libido). The baby already has it, but due to the existence of many prohibitions, sexual experiences are forced out of consciousness and live in the unconscious. They (inclinations) have a large energy charge, but they are not allowed into consciousness, since consciousness resists them. However, they periodically break through into the conscious life of a person, taking a distorted or symbolic form.

In his theory, Freud singled out three main forms of manifestation of the unconscious: Dreams, erroneous actions, neurotic symptoms. To study the manifestations of the unconscious within the framework of the theory of psychoanalysis, methods for studying them were developed - the method of free associations, where hidden experiences and the method of dream analysis are manifested. The need to analyze dreams, according to Freud, is due to the fact that during sleep the level of consciousness control decreases and a person sees dreams caused by a partial breakthrough into the sphere of consciousness of his drives, which are blocked by consciousness in the waking state.

Freud paid special attention to neurotic symptoms. According to his ideas, neurotic symptoms are traces of repressed traumatic circumstances that form a highly charged focus in the sphere of the unconscious and from there perform destructive work to destabilize the mental state of a person.

Suppressed sexual desire, according to Freud, is the cause of neurotic disorders, but there are other reasons - these are various unpleasant experiences that accompany everyday life. As a result of displacement into the sphere of the unconscious, they also form strong energy centers, which manifest themselves in the so-called "erroneous actions." Freud attributed the forgetting of certain facts, intentions, names, as well as typos, reservations, etc. to erroneous actions, and said that they contain the true intentions of a person, carefully hidden from others.

In the theory of Z. Freud, several shortcomings can be identified:

1) the representation of the unconscious as the very psychic principle, which lives separately in the human soul, is isolated and constantly at war with the conscious;

2) the exaggerated role of the unconscious in general and sexual drives in particular. Freud's error lies not in posing problems, but in the way they are solved;

3) the scientific failure of Freudianism is manifested in the belittling of the role of reason and the biologization of social phenomena. According to Freud's teaching, it follows that blind instincts and primitive drives are ahead of logic, ideals and reason. Attraction, and not external influences, are the real engines of individual and social progress; they are the leading stimuli of activity subject to the principle of pleasure.

Nevertheless, Freud's concept, despite its inconsistency, had a huge, decisive influence on the disclosure and development of the problem of the unconscious.

Carl Gustav Jung was one of Freud's students who was critical of the idea of pansexualism and created his own system, which he called "analytical psychology".

According to Jung, the human psyche includes three levels: consciousness, personal unconscious, collective unconscious. The decisive role in the structure of a person's personality is played by the collective unconscious, which is formed from traces of memory left by the entire past of mankind. The collective unconscious is universal. It is determined by the national, racial and universal heritage. Thus, by Jung's definition, the collective unconscious is the mind of our ancient ancestors, the way they thought and felt.

The collective unconscious manifests itself in individuals in the form of archetypes. These are some general forms of mental representations, including a significant element of emotionality and even perceptual images.

In addition to the collective unconscious, according to Jung, there is a personal unconscious, but it is not separated from consciousness. The personal unconscious consists of experiences that were once conscious, and then forgotten or repressed from consciousness. They become conscious under certain conditions.

Jung's generalizations are often not based on sufficient logical grounds, although he pays attention to the main science-oriented proof.

Psychophysiological aspects of the unconscious have been widely studied in modern science in connection with the analysis of sleep and hypnotic states of cortical and subcortical formations. Recently, the possibilities of using cybernetic concepts and methods of modeling the unconscious have been discussed. With all this, a holistic theory that combines the mechanism and structure of the unconscious has not yet been built.

Thus, the human psyche is extremely complex and includes not only consciousness, but also processes that are not controlled by the subject, the so-called unconscious. The unconscious is something lurking in the hidden depths of the psyche, something that opposes consciousness and lives according to its own special, peculiar laws that are not characteristic of consciousness.

Conclusion

So, the analysis of the literature on the problem of consciousness and the unconscious in the psyche showed that the psyche is a complex phenomenon that has a hierarchical structure, namely the main 4 levels: irritability, sensitivity (sensations), behavior of higher animals (externally conditioned), human consciousness (self-determined behavior). Consciousness is the highest level of development of mental reflection associated with the use of speech, inherent only to man.

But in the human psyche there are not only conscious processes, but also processes that are not controlled by the subject, the so-called unconscious ones. They oppose consciousness, but at the same time are inextricably linked with it.

Summarizing the literature data analyzed in this work, we can draw the following conclusions.

The essence of consciousness, as the highest form of development of the psyche, mental reflection, is usually seen in the ability of a person to abstract verbal thinking, the tool and means of which is the language that arose in human society, to knowledge on this basis of the laws of nature and society.

It is necessary to take into account the significant, often decisive influence of the unconscious on decision-making, when performing certain actions. Consciousness is inextricably linked with the unconscious.

Bibliography

1. Bassin F.V. “The problem of the unconscious”, Moscow, 1968.

2. Vygotsky L.S. “Early Childhood”, Collected Works. T.4., Moscow, 1984

3. Zinchenko V. P. “Worlds of consciousness and the structure of consciousness”, questions of psychology, No. 2, 1991.

4. Leontiev A.N. “Activity, Consciousness, Personality”, Moscow, 1975.

5. Maklakov A.G. “General psychology”, St. Petersburg, 2002.

6. Nemov R.S. “Psychology”, book 1, Moscow, 1998.

7. “General psychology” Course of lectures, Moscow, 1995.

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Levels of mental reflection

Mental reflection serves to create a structured and integral image from dissected objects of reality. Soviet psychologist Boris Lomov identified three levels of mental reflection:

Sensory-perceptual. It is considered the basic level on which mental images are built, which in the process of development arise in the first place, but do not lose their relevance later. A person is based on the information that comes through his senses and builds an appropriate strategy of behavior. That is, the stimulus causes a reaction: what happened in real time affects the behavior of a person.
Presentation layer. In order for a person to have an image, it is not at all necessary that he be present here and now and that it be stimulated with the help of the senses. For this, there is figurative thinking, and imagination. A person can cause the representation of an object if it has appeared several times before in his field of vision: in this case, the main features are remembered, while the secondary ones are discarded. The main functions of this level are: control and correction of actions in the internal plan, planning, drawing up standards.
Verbal-logical thinking and speech-thinking level. This level is even less related to the present time, it can even be called timeless. A person can operate with logical methods and concepts that have developed in his mind and the minds of mankind during its history. He is able to abstract from the first level, that is, not to be aware of his feelings and at the same time fully concentrate, relying on the experience of mankind.

Despite the fact that often the three levels function as if on their own, in fact they smoothly and imperceptibly flow into each other, forming a mental reflection of a person.

Forms of mental reflection

The elementary forms of reflection are: mechanical, physical and chemical. The main form of reflection is biological reflection. Its specificity is that it is characteristic only of living organisms.

In the transition from the biological form of reflection to the psychic, the following stages are distinguished:

Perceptual. It is expressed in the ability to reflect a complex of stimuli as a whole: orientation begins with a set of signs, a reaction is also observed to biologically neutral stimuli, which are only signals of vital stimuli (sensitivity). Sensations are an elementary form of mental reflection.
touch. Reflection of individual stimuli: the subject reacts only to biologically significant stimuli (irritability).
intellectual. It manifests itself in the fact that in addition to the reflection of individual objects, there is a reflection of their functional relationships and connections. This is the highest form of mental reflection.

The stage of intellect is characterized by very complex activity and equally complex forms of reflection of reality.

Is our mental reflection immutable, or can we influence it? We can, but on condition that we develop, with the help of which we are able to change perception and even sensations.

Self-regulation

Self-regulation is the ability of a person, despite the circumstances, to maintain internal stability at a certain, relatively constant level.

A person who does not know how to manage his mental state consistently goes through the following stages:

Situation: The sequence begins with a situation (real or imagined) that is emotionally relevant.
Attention: Attention is directed to the emotional situation.
Evaluation: The emotional situation is evaluated and interpreted.
Answer: An emotional response is generated resulting in loosely coordinated changes in the experimental, behavioral and physiological response systems.

If a person is developed, he can change this behavior pattern. In this case, the model will look like this:

Choosing a situation: a person decides for himself whether this situation is necessary in his life and whether it is worth emotionally approaching it if it is inevitable. For example, he chooses whether to go to a meeting, a concert or a party.
Changing the Situation: If the situation is unavoidable, then the person makes a conscious effort to change its impact. For example, he uses or physically moves away from an object or person that is unpleasant to him.
Attentive deployment: involves directing attention towards or away from an emotional situation. For this, distraction, reflection and suppression of thoughts are used.
Cognitive change: modification of how one evaluates a situation in order to change its emotional meaning. A person uses strategies such as overestimation, distance, humor.
Response Modulation: Attempts to directly influence experimental, behavioral, and physiological response systems. Strategies: expressive suppression of emotions, exercise, sleep.

If we talk about specific practical methods, then the following are distinguished:

Neuromuscular relaxation. The method consists in performing a set of exercises consisting in alternating maximum tension and relaxation of muscle groups. This allows you to relieve tension from individual parts of the body, or from the entire body.
Ideomotor training. This is a consistent tension and relaxation of the muscles of the body, but the exercises are performed not really, but mentally.
Sensory reproduction of images. This is relaxation through the representation of images of objects and holistic situations associated with relaxation.
Autogenic training. This is learning the possibilities of autosuggestion or autosuggestion. The main exercise is saying affirmations.

As you can see, a person can decide how to relate to a particular situation. However, given that the will is an exhaustible resource, it is necessary to obtain energy through sleep, rest, exercise, proper nutrition, as well as specific techniques.