Consciousness as the highest form of psyche
Consciousness is the highest level of mental reflection of objective reality, as well as the highest level of self-regulation inherent only to man as a social being.
From a practical point of view, consciousness appears as a continuously changing set of sensory and mental images that directly appear before the subject in his inner world. However, it can be assumed that similar or close to it mental activity in the formation of mental images also occurs in more developed animals: dogs, horses, dolphins, monkeys, etc. However, the main difference between humans and animals, first of all, is not the presence the process of formation of mental images based on the objective perception of objects in the surrounding reality, and in the presence of specific mechanisms for its occurrence. It is the mechanisms of formation of mental images and the peculiarities of operating with them that determine the presence in a person of such a phenomenon as consciousness.
Consciousness, like any other mental phenomenon, has certain characteristics .
- Consciousness is always active. The activity of consciousness is manifested in the fact that the mental reflection of the objective world by a person is not of a passive nature, as a result of which all objects reflected by the psyche have the same significance, but, on the contrary, differentiation occurs according to the degree of significance for the subject of mental images.
- Consciousness is intentional. Due to the fact that consciousness is active, it is always directed towards some object, object or image, that is, it has the property of intention (direction).
The presence of these properties determines the presence of a number of other characteristics of consciousness, allowing us to consider it as the highest level of self-regulation. These properties of consciousness include:
- ability for introspection (reflection);
- motivational-value nature of consciousness;
- the ability to determine goals and a program of action - to take steps towards achieving the goal.
In turn, these properties of consciousness determine the possibility of forming in the process of human ontogenesis an individual “I-concept”, which is the totality of a person’s ideas about himself and about the surrounding reality. “I-concept” is the core of the entire system of self-regulation, which consists of the totality of a person’s ideas about himself and about the surrounding reality. A person refracts all perceived information about the world around him through his system of ideas about himself and forms his behavior based on the system of his values, ideals and motivational attitudes. Therefore, it is no coincidence that the “I-concept” is very often called self-awareness.
A person’s self-awareness as a system of his views is strictly individual. People evaluate current events and their actions differently, and evaluate the same objects of the real world differently. Moreover, the assessments of some people are quite objective, that is, they correspond to reality, while the assessments of others, on the contrary, are extremely subjective. What does the adequacy of our consciousness depend on? In order to answer this question, one should name many factors that determine the adequacy of a person’s perceived image of the real world and his self-esteem. However, the root cause of most of the factors that determine the possibility of building an adequate “I-concept” is the degree of a person’s criticality.
In its simplest form, criticality is the ability to recognize the difference between “good” and “bad.” It is the ability to critically evaluate what is happening and compare the information received with one’s attitudes and ideals, and also, based on this comparison, to form one’s behavior, i.e., to determine goals and a program of action, to take steps towards achieving a set goal, that distinguishes a person from an animal. Thus, criticality acts as the main mechanism for controlling one’s behavior.
Consciousness and mental processes
Since ancient times, philosophers and thinkers have been intensely searching for the answer to consciousness. For many centuries, there have been debates around the essence of consciousness and the possibilities of its knowledge.
To understand the world around us, it is necessary to understand it; hardly anyone will argue with this position now. Unconscious - having written these words, I immediately imagined myself in a similar state, when I lose consciousness from the stuffiness, and, waking up after that, I cannot immediately understand what happened and the surroundings.
Without consciousness there can be no attention, memory, thinking, life continues, but this is a purely physical life, not even the life of an animal, but perhaps even a plant. This is a life about which we can say that it is more likely not to exist than to be there.
All mental processes, states and properties of a person are involved in consciousness; consciousness is the unity of all forms of cognition and experiences of a person and his attitude to the conscious. Consideration of attention in cognitive psychology without taking into account consciousness influencing mental processes is simply impossible.
The origin of consciousness in evolution
In the history of science, about 40 cases have been described in which children were fed animals from an early age. They did not show not only signs of consciousness (they completely lacked speech and thinking), but even such a physical property of a person as the vertical position of the body when walking. With the transition from animal existence to human society, two new factors in the formation of the human psyche arose: social labor, the use of tools and communication through words. With the advent of upright walking, a person’s hand was freed, his horizons expanded, and conditions arose for the intensive development of his orienting activity. This led to the emergence of tools and the labor process. A person begins to live in a world of permanent tools of labor, through which labor operations are transmitted from generation to generation. Making the simplest tool inevitably requires such conscious actions as a preliminary idea of its functions, shape, and material properties. Actions to manufacture a weapon must be planned in a certain order. They must be realized and remembered for its re-production. The production of tools is associated with the mental division of the whole into parts (analysis), with the isolation (abstraction) of individual properties of an object, as well as with the mental unification (synthesis) of isolated properties into imaginable integral tools. The improvement of labor processes and the production of more and more complex tools was associated with the improvement of the analytical and synthetic activity of the human cerebral cortex; The instrument of this activity—speech—was also improved. The social organization of work activity has led to the identification of individual actions that acquire meaning only through the work of other people. Thus, in work, conscious actions arise, divorced from the immediate biological goal, and a person’s abstract thinking and will are formed.
Development of consciousness
The simplest organisms, as well as plants, have developed the ability to “respond” to the influence of the external environment; this form of reflection is called irritability. Irritability is characterized by a certain selectivity - the simplest organism, plant, animal adapts to the environment. This stage of the psyche can be called sensory.
After many millions of years, organisms acquired the ability to sense, with the help of which a more highly organized living creature, based on the formed sense organs (hearing, vision, touch, etc.), acquired the ability to reflect individual properties of objects - color, shape, temperature, etc.
This was made possible because animals developed a nervous system, which made it possible to intensify their relationship with the environment. This is the perceptive stage of development.
The highest form of reflection in the animal world is perception, which allows you to imagine an object entirely. The psyche, as a result of the interaction of the brain with the outside world and mental activity, made it possible for animals not only to adapt to the environment, but also to a certain extent to show internal activity in relation to it and even change the environment.
Higher mammals already have elementary thinking. For example, monkeys are characterized by mental activity that is more complex than that of other animals. This stage of the psyche is called the stage of intelligence.
Having united all the listed stages of the psyche, a person “added” feelings, will, and on the basis of the mechanical memory of animals, he developed a logical, semantic memory, thus, all forms of mental reflection were combined into a single whole. This single, complex, highest form of reflection in the evolution of nature is consciousness.
Concept of consciousness
So, consciousness is the highest form of reflection of the real world, characteristic only of people and the function of the brain associated with speech, which consists in a generalized and purposeful reflection of reality, in the preliminary mental construction of actions and anticipation of their results, in the reasonable regulation and self-control of human behavior.
The core of consciousness, the way of its existence, is knowledge. Consciousness belongs to the subject, the person, and not to the surrounding world. But the content of consciousness, the content of a person’s thoughts is the whole world, all its aspects, connections, laws. Therefore, consciousness can be characterized as a subjective image of the objective world.
Consciousness is not an addition to the human psyche, but the subjective side of the psyche itself, awareness of the immediate sensory environment and awareness of a limited connection with other persons and things located outside the person beginning to become conscious of himself, and at the same time awareness of nature.
Phenomenon of consciousness
What is the secret of the phenomenon of consciousness? The consciousness of modern man is a product of the history of all mankind, the result of the development of an endless series of generations of people. Before understanding its essence, it is necessary to find out how it originated. Consciousness developed along with the evolution of the animal psyche. Over millions of years, conditions were created for the emergence of intelligent man; without this, the emergence of human consciousness would hardly have been possible.
At first, living organisms developed the initial basis of the psyche—reflection. Reflection reproduces the characteristics, properties and relationships of the reflected object. A living organism has irritability and sensitivity, and specific reflection properties.
Reflection is an information interaction, one leaves a memory of itself in the other. Information for a living organism is everything with which this organism interacts.
Everything in the world is in direct or indirect interaction of everything with everything, receding into infinity - everything carries information about everything. This presupposes a universal information field of the universe, which is a universal form of communication, a form of universal interaction and thereby the unity of the world: after all, everything in the world “remembers” everything! This follows from the principle of reflection as a universal property of matter.
Formation of consciousness in ontogenesis
In the process of formation of the human psyche, his external physical actions with material objects precede the formation of internal mental actions. Only on the basis of action with material objects does a person gradually move on to operating with their ideal images, to actions in the mind. This transition from external actions to internal actions is called internalization (“turning into internal”). Thanks to the ability to act with mental, ideal images of objects, a person begins to model various relationships between objects and anticipate the results of his actions. Interiorization is carried out on a verbal, speech basis. The word is used both as a means of designating objects and as a symbol of their general, essential properties. Having been formed on the basis of external actions, mental actions themselves begin to regulate external actions. All conscious actions of a person are an exteriorization (external manifestation) of his internal mental activity.
