Consciousness Origin and Essence Plan 1 The

Consciousness: Origin and Essence

Plan 1. The origin and essence of consciousness as a problem of philosophy, science and religion. 2. Consciousness as reflection and constructing of reality. The structure of consciousness. 3. Consciousness, language and communication.

1. Consciousness as a philosophical problem.

Ancient Greece Heraclitus Plato Aristotle (580 -480 BC) (427 -347 BC) (384 -322 BC) Man’s consciousness – his soul (psyche) is subordinated to Logos, that is “an awareness of mind which governs everything”. Three basics of man’s soul. Knowledge is a recollection. Soul is peculiar to all objects, which belong to the animate nature, i. e. to plants, animals and man. A sensible soul is that part of the soul, which thinks and cognizes.

The Middle Ages Augustine Aurelius (354 – 430) Man’s consciousness, his soul is a stable point in a constant, changeable and restless world. Thomas Aquinas (1225 – 1274) Soul is a forming principle, which acts in all life manifestations. Man’s soul is bodiless, it is a pure form without matter, a spiritual, independent from the matter substance.

The Renaissance Pietro Pomponazzi Giordano Bruno (1462 – 1528) (1548 – 1600) Soul is material and that is why it is mortal. We can only believe in the immortality of a soul. A man’s soul differs from that one of an animal by its structure that depends on the physical structure of the body organs. The purpose of mind is to penetrate into the depth of phenomena, that is its divinity.

The Modern Ages Francis Bacon (1561 – 1626) Man’s soul is divided into a mental soul and a sensitive one. The mental soul comes into the man by God’s will and thereby becomes the subject of theology. The sensitive one has all the bodily characteristics and is to be studied by philosophy. Descartes (1596 – 1650) Descartes was the first to use the term consciousness as a special ability of soul. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646 – 1716) Monads are souls able to have sensations to rely on them for better understanding. That is why souls are biological objects.

Classical German Philosophy Friedrich Hegel (1770 – 1831) Consciousness of the individual (the subjective spirit), being necessarily connected with the object, is determined by the historical forms of social life. Ludwig Feuerbach (1804 – 1872) Consciousness (psyche) is a manifestation of a specific energy of sense organs and mind, which gives rise to religion, that is love between people.

The Contemporary Philosophy Marxism Freudism Neopositivism Consciousness is a function of the human brain, the essence of which lies in the reflection and constructivecreative transformation of the world. Consciousness is vanquished by subconsciousness, the content of which is libido. Consciousness rises from the conflict between libido and the social sphere. Considers thinking as a spontaneous partition of the reality into its constituent parts and that is why it is unable to find out the objective truth.

Views on the problem of consciousness Idealism The problem of consciousness Consciousness is primary, matter is secondary Dualism Matter and consciousness are independent entities Vulgar materialism Consciousness is a kind of matter Hylozoism Consciousness is inherent to all matter Dialectic materialism Matter is primary, consciousness is secondary

Concept of Consciousness CONSCIOUSNESS The property of highlyorganized matter The governor of man’s goal-directed activity The highest form of reflection (an ideal image of the material world) The product of the social-historical development

Consciousness is the highest function of the brain characteristic only of man and connected with speech, a function whose essence is a generalized and purposeful reflection of reality, anticipatory mental construction of actions and foreseeing their results, and rational regulation and selfcontrol of behavior.

The Essence of Consciousness The phenomenon of consciousness is directly connected with such property of matter as reflection. But consciousness appears to be a social form of reflection. It defines man’s ability of ideal reflecting the reality and also the mode and forms of such a reflection. The consciousness of modern man is a product of world history, the sum total of the practical and cognitive activity of countless generations throughout the centuries. Consciousness has both: • a natural pre-history, the formation of its biological prerequisites in the course of the evolution of animal psyche • social history. Psyche has developed in living organisms with the possession of the property of reflection inherent in all matter.

Reflection is the universal capacity of matter to reproduce some features and relations of the object that are reflected.

Forms of reflection evolution Society Man Sensible organisms Simplest organisms Organic nature Inorganic nature Reflection in the form of consciousness Psychical reflection (sensations, perceptions – sensibility, psychics) Physiological reflection (irritability) Mechanical, physical and chemical reflection (traces)

The origin of Consciousness The main landmarks in the evolution of labor were reflected in the growth of brain matter: in chimpanzees the volume of the brain equaled 400 cm 3; in Australopithecus - 600 cm 3; in Pithecanthropus and Sinanthropus 850 -1, 225 cm 3; in Neanderthal man - 1, 100 -1, 600 cm 3; in modern man - 1, 400 cm 3.

The origin of Consciousness Karl Marx "A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality. At the end of every labor process, we get a result that already existed in the imagination of the laborer at its commencement. "

The physiological mechanisms of psychical phenomena are not identical with the content of the psyche itself, which is a reflection of reality in the form of subjective images. The essence of the brain processes is the formation of reflexes. The reflex concept reveals the interconnection and interaction of the organism with the external world, the causal dependence of the brain’s work on the objective world through the meditation of man’s practical activities. An important principle of reflex activity of the brain is the principle of reinforcement. Reflexes are reinforced by the actions themselves through the feedback mechanism. The task of feedback is to inform the brain constantly of the processes in the system it controls. Consciousness is a subjective image of the objective world. The subjective image as knowledge, as spiritual reality, and the physiological processes as its material substratum, are qualitatively different phenomena.

The Properties of Consciousness • • Universal reflection Goal-setting Motivational evaluation of actions Formation of some certain worldview directives, political, economical, moral, aesthetic and other orientations The ability of goal-setting is a cardinal characteristic of consciousness

THE STRUCTURE OF CONSCIOUSNESS Sensuous-emotional component Emotional-volitional component Abstract-logical component

Human Psyche Conscious Memory Unconscious Thinking Instincts Knowledge Emotions Will Intuition Selfconsciousness Attention Automatic actions

Functions of Consciousness Informative Cognitive Creative Estimative Goal-setting Sense-formative Organizing-Volitional Control-Regulative Self-educational

Consciousness. Language. Communication.

The essence of language is manifested in its dual function: it serves as a means of communication it serves as an instrument of thought.

Language and consciousness form a contradictory unity: • Language influences consciousness: its historically evolved norms, distinctly different in each nation, stress different features in identical objects. • thought is largely determined by its links with reality, while language can only partialy modify the form and style of thought.

Questions for express-control 1. Who was the first to make logic the correct thinking , the study about categories as a mental reflection of the reality? 2. What philosopher considered consciousness as the state of self-development of the Absolute Idea? 3. The universal capacity of matter to reproduce some features and relations of the object that is reflected is called… 4. What is the physiological mechanism of the brain process? 5. What is a cardinal characteristic of consciousness?