Lecture № 3 Consciousness

the study of consciousness.
2. Consciousness and its origin
3. Consciousness and

its structure

consciousness, so natural and direct human experience that does not

cause any problems and doubts. But when science and philosophy try to answer the question: "What is consciousness?", it is found that the essence of this phenomenon constantly eludes researchers. Why?

we must define the boundaries and essence of consciousness by

means of consciousness. It turns out that consciousness has adequate means to any rational definition of any physical, biological and social reality, any mental object (even а God), except that the subjectivity of consciousness.

consciousness. Despite the use of sophisticated instruments and rigorous methodologies,

will never be able to eliminate the effect of features of inner world of the scientist – his emotional and mental states, features his biography, the base of values and intellectual preferences and the specifics of the national-cultural environment.

"absence" of appropriate images, concepts and even words to characterize

and clarify the nature of consciousness. Consciousness is a continuum (continuous), and the language is discrete (intermittent) and are therefore unsuitable for describing the continuous flow of experiences.
Added to this is the inadequacy of language means for an external and impartial descriptions of the holistic system, an organic part of the inner being of which they themselves are.

in the human consciousness.

origin of consciousness. We consider the materialistic explanation of the

nature of consciousness through the theory of reflection.
From the standpoint of materialistic science, consciousness is a property of highly organized matter reflect the matter. Reflection is the ability of material objects to leave a trace of other material objects when interacting with them.

3) chemical
4) biological.
Irritability – the simplest form of biological reflection

– response of living organisms to the objects and phenomena of the surrounding world (living and nonliving). Example: folding of the leaves in the heat, the movement of the sunflower towards the Sun.

ability of living organisms to reflect the surrounding world in

the form of sensations.
Mental reflection – the ability of living organisms (animals, especially higher animals) to simulate the behavior in order to adapt to the environment.
Consciousness is the highest form of biological reflection, which is inherent in man is the most complete representation of the world and its understanding, the capacity for abstraction, reflection (selfconsciousness), the ability to subject practical activities.

factors as the invention of instruments of labour, objects of

culture, language and sign systems. Of these, the most important condition for the origin and development of human consciousness was the joint productive activity of people using the instruments of labor and a speech. This activity requires cooperation, communication and interaction of people with each other. It is impossible without a common goal, which is the expected product of a cooperative labor.

non-material essence of consciousness.
2) Intentionality refers to the availability

of subject of consciousness (what is consciousness "sees") and how it perceives the subject (forms of consciousness: perception, comprehension, evaluation, memory, fantasy, experience of reality).
3) Ideatory of consciousness, which means the ability to create and perceive ideas.

phenomenon of consciousness make it the object of research by

many Sciences, including philosophy, psychology, Biophysics, computer science, Cybernetics, law, psychiatry.
Among the philosophical-gnoseological concepts of consciousness it is noteworthy two concepts: Alexander Georgievich Spirkin and Andrei Vladimirovich Ivanov.

characteristic only of man and connected with speech, which consists

in the generalized, evaluation and purposeful reflection and constructive-creative transformation of reality, in preliminary mental construction of actions and foreseeing the results of these actions, reasonable regulation and self-control of human behavior.

he devided consciousness into 4 parts:
Sector 1 — it

is the area of bodily-perceptual abilities and the knowledge obtained on the basis of these abilities. These abilities include sensation, perception and the specific submission by which man receives initial information about the outside world. The primary objective and the regulator of this sector are the utility and practicability.

the scope of the General concepts, the analytic-synthetic mental operations

and the hard logical evidence. The primary objective and the regulator of this sector is the truth.

the sphere of personal, subjective psychological experiences, memories, foreknowledge about

situations and events. These include: instinctive-affective state (indistinct feelings, premonitions, obscure vision), emotions (anger, fear, joy), distinct feelings (pleasure, disgust, love, hate, sympathy, antipathy). The primary objective and the regulator of this sector is Freud's "pleasure principle".

and spiritual ideals of the individual, and the ability to

their formation and creative understanding in the form of imagination, productive imagination, of intuition, of various types. The purpose and the regulators of this sector of the beauty, truth and justice, i.e. values.

component of consciousness, which corresponds to the activity of the

left, the "language", analytic-discourse of the left hemisphere of the brain.
Sectors 3 and 4 form the value-emotional component of our consciousness, which corresponds to the integrative- intuitive function of the right hemisphere.
We can distinguish two segments in this scheme: the lower one, which corresponds to the unconscious, and the upper segment - is the superconsciousness.

consciousness
Animal intelligence
Origin of language
Animal language