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Файл:Philosophy. Educational manual
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- practise tolerance to another views and points;
3) have:
- skills of logical construction of public speech (message,
report) structure;
- skills of abstraction in order to select the significant features,
specificities and relationships in studying issues and doctrines;
- skills of reasonable written presentation of their own points of
view;
- skills of comparing, generalizing, systematizing of
information for further goal and task setting.
Main lines
1. Main questions of the philosophy of consciousness.
Before talking about the characteristics of consciousness,
discussing the relationship between the conscious and the
unconscious components of our psyche, it is necessary to explain
why the problem of consciousness is one of the most difficult in
philosophy.
The problem of consciousness is so difficult for science,
because a person cannot exclude the "effect" of consciousness from
the process of cognition of any object of the surrounding reality. All
feelings, thoughts, explanations that a person gives to any object
always pass through consciousness. We say that a person is
conscious of something, and this means a person understands
something or explains something. Therefore, consciousness cannot
be presented as an independent subject of scientific research.
Consciousness exists only in a significant connection with the world
and a person simultaneously.
We discussed this feature of consciousness when you studied
Kant's theory of phenomenon and Noumenon. The Noumenal realm
is the realm of intelligible entities that exist outside of our sensory
perception. The human knowledge of this world is not available.
People deal only with phenomena. The surrounding reality appears
given to us in sensations (or through the prism of our consciousness).
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In addition, when studying an object, people compare it with
similar objects. For example, when we study human anatomy, we
compare our anatomical features with anatomical features of other
animals. But there is nothing to compare the effect of consciousness
with. Since consciousness is a unique ability inherent only to people.
Consciousness is variously defined as subjective experience, or
awareness, or wakefulness, or the executive control system of the
mind. It is an umbrella term that may refer to a variety of mental
phenomena. Consciousness is a quality of the mind generally
regarded to comprise qualities such as subjectivity, self-awareness,
sentience, sapience, and the ability to perceive the relationship
between oneself and one’s environment. Consciousness is
notoriously difficult to define or locate. Many cultures and religious
traditions place the seat of consciousness in a soul separate from the
body. Conversely, many scientists and philosophers consider
consciousness to be intimately linked to the neural functioning of the
brain.
Thus, consciousness can be seen as a subjective image of the
objective world, as the ability of the brain to reflect reality in perfect
images and operate these images in the process of thinking in order
to influence the outside world.
2. The evolution of ideas about consciousness.
The understanding of consciousness depended on the
worldview of people.
Philosophers of antiquity (Plato and Aristotle) understood
consciousness as a universal connection between people and reality.
They tried to illustrate the form of this connection using the
metaphor of a waxed tablet, on which the scribe scratched letters
with a special sharp stick. Letters are imprinted on wax in the same
way as objects are imprinted on the "tablet" of the mind.
Thus, the ancient philosophers discovered only one of the
features of consciousness — the focus of consciousness on the
subject.
Ancient philosophers were realists and believed that any object
exists objectively before it was perceived by our mind, and continues
to exist in the same form after the act of its perception. At the
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moment of the meeting of the mind and the object, the object leaves
a trace or imprint on the "tablet" of the mind. This is the effect of
consciousness.
In the Middle Ages, another attribute of consciousness was
discovered — its orientation not only outward (to the knowledge of
the object), but also inward (comprehension of one's own spiritual
experience). Particular attention was paid to practices of prayer,
confession, self-control, self-analysis.
Consciousness was associated with the soul of people, which
was an intermediary between God and the mind of an individual.
It is, however, with the work of Descartes, and his successors
in the early modern period of philosophy that consciousness and the
relationship between the mind and body took center stage. As we
shall see, Descartes argued that the mind is a non-physical substance
distinct from the body. He also did not believe in the existence of
unconscious mental states, a view certainly not widely held today.
Descartes defined "thinking" very broadly to include virtually every
kind of mental state and urged that consciousness is essential to
thought. Our mental states are, according to Descartes, infallibly
transparent to introspection.
J. Locke held a similar position regarding the connection
between mentality and consciousness, but was far less committed on
the exact metaphysical nature of the mind.
Perhaps the most important philosopher of the period explicitly
to endorse the existence of unconscious mental states was Leibniz.
Although Leibniz also believed in the immaterial nature of mental
substances (which he called "monads"), he recognized the existence
of what he called "petit perceptions", which are basically
unconscious perceptions. He also importantly distinguished between
perception and apperception, roughly the difference between outerdirected consciousness and self-consciousness.
In modern times, the attention of scientists was focused on the
natural scientific origin of mankind, and, therefore, consciousness is
considered as an evolutionary achievement due to natural selection.
Therefore, Kant called man the supreme legislator of nature.
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The most important detailed theory of mind in the early
modern period was developed by I. Kant. His main work Critique of
Pure Reason is as equally dense as it is important, and cannot easily
be summarized in this context. Although he owes a great debt to his
immediate predecessors, Kant is arguably the most important
philosopher Plato and Aristotle and is highly relevant today. Kant
basically thought that an adequate account of phenomenal
consciousness involved far more than any of his predecessors had
considered. There are important mental structures which are
"presupposed" in conscious experience, and Kant presented an
elaborate theory as to what those structures are, which, in turn, had
other important implications. He, like Leibniz, also saw the need to
postulate the existence of unconscious mental states and mechanisms
in order to provide an adequate theory of mind.
The development of consciousness in the course of natural
selection allowed humanity not only to occupy an exceptional place
among all living beings, but also to create a special non-natural
world (the world of human culture). The world of culture is such
a special world that depends on the structures of consciousness.
Beauty, love, harmony, society, honor, conscience — these are not
the concepts of the world of nature, but the world of culture (the
world of human relationships).
Non-classical interpretation of consciousness is represented by
the following theories. Freudianism (Z. Freud), based on the fact that
consciousness is influenced by unconscious experiences that are
caused by psychological and biological needs. The neofreudianism
(Jung) offered to abandon attempts to define consciousness,
believing that scientific means of consciousness it is impossible to
comprehend. Phenomenology (E. Husserl) considers consciousness
and subjectivity as a specific kind of being, as something inseparable
from the immediate reality of life. Existentialist tradition sees the
origins of consciousness in the world of human communication. In
psychology, with the notable exception of the virtual banishment of
consciousness by behaviorist psychologists, there were also those
deeply interested in consciousness and various introspective (or
"first-person") methods of investigating the mind.
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Consciousness in its essence is not so much a reflection as
a comprehension (foundation of meaning) of reality in the conditions
of a certain socio-cultural, linguistic, symbolic reality.
Contemporary science understands consciousness as a spiritual
phenomenon that characterizes the mental state of a person and his
socio-cultural, creative activity. This is the highest form of reflection
of reality in the form of images, concepts.
3. The problems of consciousness in philosophy.
The philosophy of consciousness is a philosophical discipline,
the subject of which, first of all, is the nature of consciousness, as
well as the relationship between consciousness and physical reality
(body).
The question of the relationship between mind and body, also
known as the psychophysical problem, is often considered the main
theoretical problem.
In its classical form, the psychophysical problem was
formulated by the 17th century French thinker René Descartes.
Descartes believed that the world consists of two kinds of
substances: material and spiritual. At the same time, the main
attribute of matter is extension, and the main attribute of spirit is
thinking. From this point of view, man is a combination of an
extended body and a thinking spirit. This position has become known
as psychophysical dualism. The psychophysical problem in the
formulation of Descartes is formulated as follows: "How does
a person relate to his body and spirit, how do they correlate with each
other"?
There are two main directions for solving the psychophysical
problem — these are dualism and monism.
Dualism proceeds from the assumption that consciousness has
a special nature, fundamentally irreducible to physical material
reality.
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Physical Realm —
Matter
Non-Physical Realm —
Spirit
Bodies
Minds
Have mass, density
Have no mass, density
Have location
Have no location
Have tactile properties
Have no tactile properties
Have taste, smell, etc.
No taste, smell, etc.
Have duration
No duration
They are physical
They are non-physical
Monism claims that consciousness is an element of material
reality. There is only the brain, and consciousness is its creation.
The main argument for dualism simply appeals to the common
sense of most people. If you ask what consciousness is, many will
say that it is something identical to their "I", or soul, or some other
similar entity, but at the same time they will surely abandon the idea
that consciousness is just a brain or part of it. Some modern
philosophers compare such common-sense intuitions to the belief
that the earth is flat. Intuitively, this seems obvious, but science has
long proven the mistake of this point of view.
A more modern argument for dualism is that the mental and the
physical have very different and perhaps incompatible properties.
Mental events have a certain subjective quality (qualia), while
physical events do not.
Qualia is some qualitative subjective experience. Different
mental states are subjectively experienced differently by different
people. For example, some people like the taste of menthol ice cream
while others don't. How can this difference be explained in terms of
the natural sciences? How can we fix how we imagine the taste of ice
cream?
Through qualia we can feel a certain amount of pain, see
a certain familiar shade of blue, and so on. The dualist thesis is that
such things cannot be reduced to anything physical.
Other equally important problems of the philosophy of mind
are the problems of the relationship between consciousness and
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language, conscious and unconscious, identity problem, as well as
the problem of free will.
4. The theories of consciousness in philosophy.
So, summing up our initial reasoning about consciousness, we
can identify several theoretical models of consciousness.
Historically, the first model of the philosophy of consciousness
was the substantial theory (Plato, Aristotle, R. Descartes, B. Spinoza,
Hegel, etc.).
According to this model, consciousness is considered as an
ideal beginning, in the primordial essence (substance) of the world.
In this model, consciousness as an absolute mind acts as a guarantor
of the unity and orderliness of being, the substantive basis that
ensures world order and harmony.
Individual human consciousness is considered as a separate
manifestation of the World Mind, the laws of organization of which
coincide with the logic of thinking, and the ideas through which the
essential properties of objects are constituted determine its content.
The functional theory (T. Hobbes, J. Locke, K. A. Helvetius,
D. Diderot) interprets consciousness as a function of material
systems, which in their initial characteristics does not contain
anything ideal or thinking. According to this model, consciousness is
provided by the functioning of the nervous system and the brain. At
the same time, consciousness is not a concretization of universal
conceptual constructions, but a subjective reflection of really existing
objects and connections of reality given to us in sensations. The
emergence of general ideal concepts is formed due to the inductive
generalization of sensory data.
Existential-phenomenological theory (E. Husserl,
M. Heidegger, J.-P. Sartre, M. Merleau-Ponty and others) focuses on
describing the experience of individual consciousness.
Consciousness in this theory is not so much a reflection as
a comprehension (creation of meaning) of reality. In this theory,
meaning is associated not so much with knowledge, which has a
source external to the person, but with an individual-personal
understanding of the situation. In this theory, consciousness is not
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reduced only to the mind, but is considered as a "stream" of thoughts,
feelings, associations, as a unity of internal and external.
5. The main characteristics of consciousness.
Consciousness is the most important category of philosophy
which denotes the human ability to reproduce reality perfectly.
Consciousness appears in two forms: individual (personal) and
social. Understanding the essence of consciousness directly depends
on the solution of the question of the relationship between spirit and
nature, matter and consciousness.
Based on the sum of all the above theories, we can name the
main characteristics of consciousness.
Recognition of the primacy of the ideal reality leads to the
transformation of consciousness into an independent entity that
creates the world. This approach is expressed in the period of
antiquity in the philosophy of Plato; in the Middle Ages — in
Christian philosophy (the bearer of higher consciousness is God), in
German classical philosophy — in the views of Hegel who poses his
Absolute Idea as the origin of the world.
In materialistic philosophy consciousness is considered as
a property of highly organized matter, as a subjective image of the
objective world, as ideal in contrast to the material and in unity with
it, as a conscious being, as the relation of Elusive Self to not-self.
The essence of consciousness as the highest form of reflection
is expressed in:
- the sensory reflection is filled with a deeper and more
conscious content. A kind of superstructure arises over it —
abstraction, which consists in the mental selection of a separate
object, relationship, property from the totality of objects, relations,
properties. Abstraction is a way of turning observations and
representations into concepts. It dismembers, breaks, schematizes an
integral mobile reality. In a single abstraction, the subject departs
from reality. But this is precisely what ensures the study of
individual aspects of the subject in its pure form and, thus,
penetration into their essence;
- the consciousness reflects the world not in sensually visual,
but in ideal images. What are these images? What is ideal? When
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considering the category "ideal", one must keep in mind that the ideal
characterizes, firstly, the epistemological relation of consciousness to
being, revealing the fundamental difference between reflection and
reflected, image and object. This difference lies in the fact that ideal
images, reflecting the properties of real objects, do not have these
properties themselves. The ideal image is not characterized by any
physical, chemical and other signs of material objects. They have
neither spatial dimensions, nor geometric shapes, nor volume, nor
mass, etc. The image of a rose does not smell, and you cannot even
light a cigarette from the image of fire. The ideal is that exists and
does not exist at the same time. It does not exist as a special
substance that exists along with matter, but it exists as a subjective
reality. Subjectivity means that the ideal always belongs to the
subject, person or group of people and does not exist without its
carrier, therefore, the content of the images and concepts of
consciousness reflects the features of the life experience of its carrier,
its interests, feelings, disposition, feelings, etc. Subjectivity also
means the incompleteness of reflection, which is due to the fact that
in sensations not a mirror copy is given, but a more or less
approximate reproduction of the properties of the object.
The human reflection is not adaptive but actively
transformative. A human is not satisfied with what is given by
nature, and he seeks to change this given so that it meets his needs.
This is realized, first of all, in his mind. The content of
consciousness, one way or another, is practically realized. But before
that, it acquires the character of a plan or idea. An idea is not only
knowing, but also planning what is possible. An idea is a concept
focused on practical implementation. A human creates it in his mind
initially, constructs something new — projects of buildings,
machines, technological processes, and then embodies them in reality
with the help of labor. Human needs, reflected in consciousness,
acquire the character of a goal, that is, an ideal model of the desired
future. Realized in practical activity, the goal materializes in the
objective form, in the forms of real-life objects that did not exist in
nature before.
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Ideality is a special, non-material essence of consciousness.
Consciousness is ideal, which means it is elusive, unknowable with
the help of material means.
This characteristic is based on the epistemological opposition
of consciousness as ideal to material. The fact is that the image
created in a person's head cannot be reduced either to the material
object itself, which is outside the person, or to those physiological
processes that occur in the brain.
Ideal is a philosophical concept that characterizes a specific
way of being an object, reflected, represented in the mental world
and the life of human consciousness. Consciousness is a subjective
image of the objective world. When we talk about the subjectivity of
consciousness, we first of all mean that it is not a distorted reflection
of reality, but that the reflection takes place in the forms of human
thinking.
The ideal always has a material carrier which is not only its
neuro-brain substrate but also cultural phenomena developed in the
process of human historical development (for example, language and
other sign systems). In the system of culture and thanks to the
products it creates (tools, art, science, law, etc.), various forms of the
ideal are formed so that they do not depend on individual
consciousness. But it is necessary to say that they cannot exist
outside the thinking activity of a person who is able to perceive and
contemplate them. Arising and developing in the depths of social
practice the ideal is not only generated by the material but is also
able to actively transform it.
Intentionality is a focus on an object. Consciousness cannot be
objectless. Intentionality implies the existence of an object of
consciousness (what consciousness "sees") and a form (how it
perceives an object).
Ideation as the ability to create and reproduce ideas is an
internal independent work of consciousness that goes beyond simple
reflection. The ability to express abstract ideas is the fundamental
difference between human consciousness and animal consciousness.
The result of this ability was the development of language as
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