Historical development of consciousness in humans. II The emergence of human consciousness
The development of sciences, especially history and biology, has raised the question of the origin of man and his consciousness.
The main prerequisite for the emergence of consciousness in humans was the complication of the living conditions of anthropoid humanoid creatures. Their central nervous system, under the influence of living conditions, acquired a complex structure and certain functions. In the cerebral hemispheres, over time, the parietal, temporal and frontal lobes developed, which carried out higher adaptive functions.
Labor had a great influence on the development of the parietal, temporal and frontal lobes. Thus, in a monkey these lobes make up 0.4% of the cerebral hemispheres, in chimpanzees and orangutans - 3.4%, and in humans - 10%.
In the course of the biological development of the psyche, the prerequisites for the formation of a higher, specifically human form of the psyche—consciousness—appeared. The process of human development in different types activity gradually formed specific, consciously directed cognitive activity, as well as imagination, feelings, and various mental properties that differ significantly from the instinctive mental activity of an animal.
The social way of life and work are the basic prerequisites for the development of human consciousness as the highest form of the psyche, in which a person’s attitude to the world around him and the ability to change and adapt nature to his needs are manifested. Animals do not have such mental characteristics; they are passively adapted to the environment and do not differentiate themselves from it.
Human consciousness did not immediately become what it is today. It has come a long way in socio-historical development. The first people were not very different from animals; their consciousness was limited and had a staged nature, which was explained by the low level of production activity and their relationships in society. What was the way of life, such was the consciousness.
The development of ways to earn a living and produce material goods gave impetus to the development of people's consciousness. To meet the needs that arose in connection with changing living conditions, people invented fire and switched from using stone tools to bronze and iron.
Together with hunting, cattle breeding, and fishing, agriculture arose, and then crafts. Then people switched to machine production and today we are entering the era of information technology.
Along with the development of tools, human relationships among themselves became more complex and changed, the people themselves, their needs, life experience, consciousness, abilities and other mental properties developed. The developing mental properties of people were, on the one hand, a result, and on the other, a necessary prerequisite for the improvement and development of their practical activities.
The historical development of human consciousness has occurred, is occurring and will continue to occur because each previous generation passes on its cultural and industrial acquisitions to the next generation.
Each new generation of people, starting their life journey, masters the results of the activities of their ancestors, develops them further and passes them on to their descendants. The continuity of human relationships plays a vital role in the development of both the person himself and his consciousness.
In the process of his development, man, through his labor, created new conditions for life, and along with them he changed. The more a person learned the world and improved his tools, the more he became the master of this world.
The historical development of human consciousness was expressed, first of all, in the enrichment of its content, which is a reflection of objective reality, as well as in the expansion of its horizons. Along with the enriched content of human consciousness, its forms gradually developed, and a variety of certain features arose that are characteristic of modern man.
In the process of development of man and his consciousness, direct sensitive reflections of the world appeared, human vision became more perfect, the ability to subtly distinguish the spatial properties of objects, feel the diversity of their signs, the beauty of forms and proportions appeared.
Human hearing also acquired sophistication, the reason for this was linguistic communication with other people, as well as the emergence and development of song and musical creativity.
With the enrichment of the content of the psyche, new, uniquely human forms and types of memory have developed, which consist of linguistic voluntary memorization and reproduction. The need to change and improve the world around us in the process of work was reflected in the development of the ability to transform it into images, imagine objects and work on their implementation.
Forms of human thinking have developed that are inextricably linked with language, with its rich vocabulary and grammatical structure, as well as human mental actions, giving him the opportunity to act, choose appropriate modes of behavior, plan, and foresee immediate and long-term results.
The labor process allowed people to create new goals and motives, to form various production, technical, cognitive, scientific and other needs and interests.
With the development of people's lives, their emotions also developed, and specific human feelings were formed. New activities created by man contributed to the development of new and diverse abilities.
By studying nature, man acquired the ability to study himself, realize his responsibilities as a member of society and regulate his activities. The process of development of human consciousness was at the same time a process of development of self-awareness.
A person’s consciousness is determined by his social existence, therefore, in order to understand the essence of a person’s consciousness, it is necessary to take into account the social conditions of his life.
Human consciousness has common features, characteristic of him at all stages of development. It also acquires its own specific historical characteristics at each stage of development. The contradictory social relations of people determine the contradictory nature of the development of their consciousness.
The process of historical development of human consciousness occurs through a successive change of generations. Thanks to which I become possible development the human race and its history. Along with this, the historical development of people creates the prerequisites for the individual development of the human personality and its consciousness.
Story human life exerts its influence on human development through the hereditary prerequisites from which individual development begins and through changes in social conditions in which this development and it happens.
A person is born with hereditary, natural capabilities for his further development. He realizes these possibilities in the course of his life under certain conditions of his existence. A person lives and acts in a society in which he receives upbringing and education, enters into relationships with people, assimilates material and spiritual wealth that were created by previous generations and forms himself as a conscious personality.
1. Conditions for the emergence of consciousness
The transition to consciousness represents the beginning of a new, higher stage in the development of the psyche. Conscious reflection, in contrast to the mental reflection characteristic of animals, is a reflection of objective reality in its separation from the subject’s existing relations to it, i.e.
E. reflection, highlighting its objective stable properties.
In consciousness, the image of reality does not merge with the subject’s experience: in consciousness, what is reflected appears as “what is coming” to the subject. This means that when I am conscious, for example, of this book or even just my thought about the book, then the book itself does not merge in my consciousness with my experience relating to this book, and the very thought of the book does not merge with my experience of this thought.
The identification of reflected reality in a person’s consciousness as objective has as its other side the identification of the world of internal experiences and the possibility of developing self-observation on this basis.
The task that faces us is to trace the conditions that give rise to the highest form of the psyche - human consciousness.
As is known, the reason that underlies the process of humanization of human animal-like ancestors is the emergence of labor and the formation of human society on its basis. “...Labor,” says Engels, “created man himself.” Labor also created human consciousness.
The emergence and development of labor, this first, basic condition of human existence, led to a change and humanization of his brain, the organs of his external activity and senses. "Labor comes first,
This is what Engels says about it - and then, along with it, articulate speech were the two most important stimuli, under the influence of which the monkey’s brain gradually turned into the human brain, which, for all its similarities with the monkey’s, far surpasses it in size and perfection.” The main organ of human labor activity is his hand
She could achieve her perfection only through the development of work itself. “Only thanks to labor, thanks to adaptation to ever new operations... the human hand reached that high level of perfection at which it was able, as if by the power of magic, to bring to life the paintings of Raphael, the statues of Thorvaldsen, the music of Paganini.”
If we compare the maximum volumes of the skull of apes and the skull of primitive man, it turns out that the brain of the latter exceeds
The brain size of the most highly developed modern species of monkeys is more than double (600 cm3 and 1400 cm3).
The difference in the size of the brain of monkeys and humans becomes even more pronounced if we compare its weight; the difference here is almost 4 times: the weight of the orangutan brain is 350 g, the human brain weighs 1400 g.
The human brain, compared to the brain of higher apes, has a much more complex, much more developed structure.
Already in Neanderthal man, as shown by casts made from the inner surface of the skull, new fields, not completely differentiated in apes, are clearly visible in the cortex, which then reach their full development in modern man. These are, for example, fields designated (according to Brodmann) by numbers 44, 45, 46 - in the frontal lobe of the cortex, fields 39 and 40 - in its parietal lobe, 41 and 42 - in the temporal lobe (Fig. 1).
It is very clearly visible how new, specifically human features are reflected in the structure of the cerebral cortex when studying the so-called projection motor field (in Fig. 1 it is indicated by the number 4). If you carefully irritate various points of this field with electric current, then from the contraction of various muscle groups caused by irritation you can accurately imagine what place the projection of a particular organ occupies in it. W. Penfield expressed the result of these experiments in the form of a schematic and, of course,
conventional figure, which we present here (Fig. 2). From this drawing, made on a certain scale, it is clear what a relatively large surface is occupied in the human brain by the projection of such organs of movement as the arms (hands), and especially the organs of sound speech (muscles of the mouth, tongue, organs of the larynx), the functions of which have developed especially intensively in the conditions of human society (work, verbal communication).
The human sense organs also improved under the influence of labor and in connection with the development of the brain. Like the organs of external activity, they acquired qualitatively new features. The sense of touch became refined, the humanized eye began to notice more in things than the eyes of the most far-sighted bird, and hearing developed, capable of perceiving the subtlest differences and similarities in the sounds of human articulate speech.
In turn, the development of the brain and sense organs had the opposite effect on work and language, “giving both more and more new impetuses to further development”1.
Individual anatomical and physiological changes created by labor are necessary
due to natural interdependence, they entailed the development of organs and changes in the organism as a whole. Thus, the emergence and development of labor led to a change in the entire physical appearance of a person, to a change in his anatomical and physiological organization.
Of course, the emergence of labor was prepared by the entire previous course of development. The gradual transition to a vertical gait, the rudiments of which are clearly observed even in living apes, and the formation in connection with this of especially mobile forelimbs adapted for grasping objects, increasingly freed from the function of walking - all this created the physical prerequisites for the ability to produce complex labor operations.
The labor process was also prepared from the other side. The appearance of labor was possible only in animals that lived in whole groups and in which sufficiently developed forms existed life together, although these forms were, of course, still very far from even the most primitive forms of human, social life. The interesting studies of N. Yu. Voitonis and N. A. Tikh, conducted at the Sukhumi nursery, demonstrate how high levels of development can be achieved by forms of living together in animals. As these studies show, in a herd of monkeys there is an already established system of relationships and a kind of hierarchy with a correspondingly very complex system of communication. At the same time, these studies make it possible once again to be convinced that, despite all the complexity of internal relationships in a herd of monkeys, they are still limited to directly biological relationships and are never determined objectively by the substantive content of the animals’ activities.
Finally, an essential prerequisite for work was also the presence among the highest representatives of the animal world, as we have seen, of highly developed forms of mental reflection of reality.
All these moments together constituted the main conditions thanks to which, in the course of further evolution, labor and a human society based on labor could arise.
What is that specifically human activity called labor?
Labor is a process that connects man with nature, the process of man’s influence on nature. “Labor,” says Marx, “is, first of all, a process taking place between man and nature, a process in which man, by his own activity, mediates, regulates and controls the exchange of substances between himself and nature. He himself opposes the substance of nature as a force of nature. in order to appropriate the substance of nature in a form suitable for his own life, he sets in motion the natural forces belonging to his body: arms and legs, head and fingers.By influencing and changing external nature through this movement, he at the same time changes his own nature. He develops the forces dormant in it and subordinates the play of these forces to his own power."
Labor is characterized primarily by the following two interrelated features. One of them is the use and manufacture of tools. “Labor,” says Engels, “begins with the making of tools.”
Another characteristic feature of the labor process is that it takes place in conditions of joint, collective activity, so that in this process a person enters not only into certain relationships with nature, but also with other people - members of a given society. Only through relationships with other people does a person relate to nature itself. This means that labor appears from the very beginning as a process mediated by a tool (in the broad sense) and at the same time mediated socially.
The use of tools by humans also has a natural history of its preparation. Already in some animals there exist, as we know, the rudiments of instrumental activity in the form of the use of external means with the help of which they carry out individual operations (for example, the use of a stick in apes). These external means - the “tools” of animals - are, however, qualitatively different from the true tools of man - the tools of labor.
The difference between them is not at all that animals use their “tools” in rarer cases than primitive people. Their difference can even less be reduced to differences in their external form. We can reveal the real difference between human tools and the “tools” of animals only by turning to an objective examination of the very activity in which they are involved.
No matter how complex the “tool” activity of animals is, it never has the character of a social process, it is not performed collectively and does not determine the communication relations of the individuals carrying it out. No matter how complex, on the other hand, the instinctive communication between the individuals who make up the animal community may be, it is never built on the basis of their “productive” activity, does not depend on it, and is not mediated by it.
In contrast, human labor is an inherently social activity, based on the cooperation of individuals, presupposing at least a rudimentary technical division of labor functions; labor, therefore, is a process of influencing nature, connecting its participants with each other, mediating their communication. “In production,” says Marx, “people enter into a relationship not only with nature. They cannot produce without uniting in a certain way for joint activity and for the mutual exchange of their activities. In order to produce, people enter into certain connections and relationships, and only within the framework of these social connections and relations, their relationship to nature exists, production takes place"1.
To understand the specific significance of this fact for the development of the human psyche, it is enough to analyze how the structure of activity changes when it is carried out in conditions of collective work.
Already at the earliest stage of the development of human society, a division of a previously unified process of activity inevitably arises between individual participants in production. Initially, this division appears to be random and unstable. In the course of further development, it takes shape in the form of a primitive technical division of labor.
It now falls to the share of some individuals, for example, to maintain the fire and process food on it, while to others it falls to the share of obtaining the food itself. Some participants in a collective hunt perform the function of chasing game, others - the function of waiting for it in ambush and attacking.
This leads to a decisive, radical change in the very structure of the activities of individuals - participants in the labor process.
We saw above that any activity that directly carries out the biological, instinctive relationship of animals to the nature around them is characterized by the fact that it is always aimed at objects of biological need and is stimulated by these objects. In animals there is no activity that would not meet one or another direct biological need, which would not be caused by an influence that has a biological meaning for the animal - the meaning of an object that satisfies its given need, and which would not be directed by its last link directly to this object . In animals, as we have already said, the subject of their activity and its biological motive are always fused, always coincide with each other.
Let us now consider from this point of view the fundamental structure of an individual’s activity in the conditions of a collective labor process. When a given team member carries out his work activity, he also does this to satisfy one of his needs. So, for example, the activity of a beater, a participant in a primitive collective hunt, is motivated by the need for food or, perhaps, the need for clothing, which the skin of a killed animal serves for him. What, however, is his activity directly aimed at? It can be aimed, for example, at scaring away a herd of animals and directing it towards other hunters hiding in ambush. This, in fact, is what should be the result of the activity of a given person. At this point, the activities of this individual participant in the hunt cease. The rest is completed by other participants in the hunt. It is clear that this result - scaring away game, etc. - does not and cannot lead in itself to satisfying the beater’s need for food, animal skin, etc. What these processes of his activity are aimed at, therefore, does not coincide with by what motivates them, that is, does not coincide with the motive of his activity: both are separated here. We will call such processes, the subject and motive of which do not coincide with each other, actions. We can say, for example, that the beater's activity is hunting, while frightening off the game is his action.
How is it possible for the birth of an action, that is, the separation of the subject of activity and its motive? Obviously, it becomes possible only in conditions of a joint, collective process of influencing nature. The product of this process, which generally meets the needs of the collective, also leads to the satisfaction of the needs of the individual, although he himself may not carry out those final operations (for example, a direct attack on prey and its killing) that directly lead to mastery of the object of this need . Genetically (i.e. by its origin) separation of subject and motive individual activities is the result of the ongoing separation of individual operations from the previously complex and multiphase, but unified activity. These individual operations, now exhausting the content of the individual’s given activity, turn into an independent action for him, although in relation to the collective labor process as a whole they continue, of course, to remain only one of its private links.
The natural prerequisites for this separation of individual operations and their acquisition of a certain independence in individual activity are, apparently, the following two main (although not the only) points. One of them is the often joint nature of instinctive activity and the presence of a primitive “hierarchy” of relationships between individuals, observed in communities of higher animals, for example, among monkeys. Another the most important moment- this is the identification in the activity of animals, which still continues to retain all its integrity, of two different phases - the preparation phase and the implementation phase, which can significantly move away from each other in time. For example, experiments show that a forced break in activity at one of its phases makes it possible to delay the further reaction of animals only very slightly, while a break between phases gives the same animal a delay that is tens and even hundreds of times greater (experiments A .V. Zaporozhets).
However, despite the presence of undoubted genetic connection There is a huge difference between the two-phase intellectual activity of higher animals and the activity of an individual person, which is included in the collective labor process as one of its links. It is rooted in the difference in those objective connections and relationships that underlie them, to which they respond and which are reflected in the psyche of acting individuals.
The peculiarity of the two-phase intellectual activity of animals is, as we have seen, that the connection between both (or even several) phases is determined by physical, material connections and relationships - spatial, temporal, mechanical. In the natural conditions of animal existence, these are also always natural, natural connections and relationships. The psyche of higher animals is accordingly characterized by the ability to reflect these material, natural connections and relationships.
When an animal, making a detour, first moves away from the prey and only then grabs it, then this complex activity is subject to the spatial relations of the given situation perceived by the animal; the first part of the path - the first phase of activity naturally leads the animal to the opportunity to carry out its second phase.
The form of human activity we are considering has a decidedly different objective basis.
The frightening of the game by the beater leads to the satisfaction of his need for it not at all due to the fact that these are the natural relationships of a given material situation; rather, on the contrary, in normal cases these natural relationships are such that frightening the game destroys the opportunity to take possession of it. What, then, connects the immediate result of this activity with its final result? Obviously, it is nothing more than the relationship of a given individual to other members of the collective, by virtue of which he receives from their hands his share of the spoils - part of the product of joint labor activity. This relationship, this connection is realized through the activities of other people. This means that it is the activity of other people that forms the objective basis of the specific structure of the activity of the human individual; This means that historically, that is, by the way it arises, the connection between the motive and the subject of the action reflects not natural, but objective social connections and relationships.
So, the complex activity of higher animals, subject to natural material connections and relationships, turns into activity in humans, subject to connections and relationships that were originally social. This constitutes the immediate cause due to which a specifically human form of reflection of reality arises - human consciousness.
Isolating an action necessarily presupposes the possibility of a mental reflection by the acting subject of the relationship between the objective motive of the action and its subject. Otherwise, the action is impossible; it is deprived of its meaning for the subject. So, if we turn to our previous example, it is obvious that the action of the beater is possible only if he reflects the connection between the expected result of the action he personally performs and end result the entire hunting process as a whole - an ambush attack on a fleeing animal, killing it and, finally, consuming it. Initially, this connection appears to a person in its still sensually perceived form - in the form of real actions of other participants in the work. Their actions convey meaning to the subject of the beater’s action. Likewise, and vice versa: only the actions of the beater justify, give meaning to the actions of people waiting for game in ambush; if not for the actions of the beaters, then the ambush would be meaningless and unjustified.
Thus, here again we encounter such an attitude, such a connection, which determines the direction of activity. This relation, however, is fundamentally different from those relations to which animal activity is subject. It is created in the joint activity of people and is impossible outside of it. What the action that is subject to this new relationship is aimed at may in itself not have any direct biological meaning for a person, and sometimes even contradict it. For example, flushing away game in itself is biologically meaningless. It acquires meaning only in conditions of collective labor activity. These conditions give action human rational meaning.
Thus, along with the birth of action, this main “unit” of human activity, the main, social in nature “unit” of the human psyche arises - a reasonable meaning for a person of what his activity is directed towards.
It is necessary to dwell on this specifically, because this is a very important point for a concrete psychological understanding of the genesis of consciousness. Let us explain our idea once again.
When a spider rushes in the direction of a vibrating object, its activity is subject to a natural relationship that connects the vibration with the nutritional quality of the insect caught in the web. Due to this relationship, vibration acquires the biological meaning of food for the spider. Although the connection between the insect’s property of causing vibration in the web and the property of serving as food actually determines the spider’s activity, as a connection, as a relationship it is hidden from him, it “does not exist for him.” That is why, if you bring any vibrating object to the web, for example a sounding tuning fork, the spider still rushes towards it.
The beater, scaring away the game, also subordinates his action to a certain connection, a certain relationship, namely the relationship that links the escape of the prey and its subsequent capture, but the basis of this connection is no longer a natural, but a social relationship - the labor connection of the beater with other participants in the collective hunting.
As we have already said, the sight of game itself, of course, cannot induce it to be flushed away. In order for a person to take on the function of a beater, it is necessary that his actions be in a relationship that connects their result with the final result of collective activity; it is necessary that this relationship be subjectively reflected by him, so that it becomes “existent for him”; it is necessary, in other words, for the meaning of his actions to be revealed to him, to be realized by him. Consciousness of the meaning of an action occurs in the form of reflection of its object as a conscious goal.
Now the connection between the subject of the action (its goal) and what motivates the activity (its motive) is revealed to the subject for the first time. It reveals itself to him in its directly sensual form - in the form of the activity of the human labor collective. This activity is reflected in a person’s head no longer in subjective unity with the object, but as an objective-practical attitude of the subject towards it. Of course, under the conditions under consideration, this is always a collective subject, and, therefore, the relations of individual labor participants are initially reflected by them only to the extent that their relations coincide with the relations of the labor collective as a whole.
However, the most important, decisive step turns out to be already taken. The activities of people are now separated for their consciousness from objects. It begins to be recognized by them precisely as their relationship. But this means that nature itself - the objects of the world around them - now also stands out for them and appears in its stable relation to the needs of the collective, to its activities. Thus, food, for example, is perceived by a person as an object of a certain activity - searching, hunting, cooking, and at the same time as an object that satisfies certain needs of people, regardless of whether a given person has a direct need for it and whether it is now the subject of his own activities. Consequently, it can be distinguished by him from other objects of reality not only practically, in the activity itself and depending on the existing need, but also “theoretically,” that is, it can be retained in consciousness, it can become an “idea.”
2. Formation of thinking and speech
Above we traced the general conditions under which the emergence of consciousness is possible. We found them in conditions where people work together. We have seen that only under these conditions does the content of what a person’s action is directed toward stand out from its unity with his biological relations.
Now we are faced with another problem - the problem of the formation of those special processes with which the conscious reflection of reality is associated.
We have seen that consciousness of the purpose of a labor action presupposes a reflection of the objects to which it is directed, regardless of the subject’s existing relationship to them.
Where do we find the special conditions for such reflection? We find them again in the labor process itself. Labor not only changes the general structure of human activity, it not only gives rise to purposeful actions; In the process of labor, the content of activity, which we call operations, changes qualitatively.
This change in operations occurs in connection with the emergence and development of tools. Human labor operations are remarkable in that they are carried out with the help of tools and means of labor.
What is a weapon? “A means of labor,” says Marx, “is a thing or a complex of things that a person places between himself and the object of labor and which serves for him as a conductor of his influence on this object.”1 A tool is, therefore, an object with which a labor action or labor operation is carried out.
The production and use of tools is possible only in connection with the awareness of the purpose of the labor action. But the use of a tool itself leads to awareness of the object of influence in its objective properties. The use of an ax not only meets the purpose of practical action; at the same time, it objectively reflects the properties of the object - the object of labor on which its action is directed. The blow of an ax subjects the properties of the material of which the object is made to an unmistakable test; this carries out a practical analysis and generalization of the objective properties of objects according to a certain feature, objectified in the tool itself. Thus, it is the tool that is, as it were, the bearer of the first real conscious and reasonable abstraction, the first real conscious and reasonable generalization.
It is further necessary to take into account one more circumstance that characterizes the weapon. It lies in the fact that a tool is not only an object that has a certain shape and has certain physical properties. A tool is at the same time a social object, that is, an object that has a certain method of use, which is socially developed in the process of collective labor and which is assigned to it. For example, an ax, when we consider it as a tool, and not just as a physical body, is not only two parts connected to each other - the part that we call the ax handle, and the one that is the actual working part. At the same time, this is a socially developed method of action, those labor operations that are materially formalized, as if crystallized in it. Therefore, to own a tool does not just mean to possess it, but it means to own the method of action for which it is the material means of implementation.
The animal “tool” also carries out a certain operation, but this operation is not assigned or fixed to it. At the very moment when the stick has fulfilled its function in the hands of the monkey, it again turns into an indifferent object for him. She does not become a permanent carrier of this operation. Therefore, by the way, animals do not specifically make their tools and do not store them. On the contrary, human tools are what are specially made or found, what are stored by a person and themselves store the method of action carried out by him.
Thus, only by considering tools as instruments of human labor activity do we discover their real difference from the “tools” of animals. The animal finds in the “tool” only a natural opportunity to carry out its instinctive activity, such as, for example, attracting a fetus to itself. A person sees in a tool a thing that carries within itself a certain socially developed method of action.
Therefore, even with artificial specialized human tools, the monkey acts only within the limited limits of its instinctive modes of activity. On the contrary, in the hands of a person, often the simplest natural object becomes a real tool, that is, it carries out a truly instrumental, socially developed operation.
In animals, the “tool” does not create any new operations; it obeys their natural movements, in the system of which it is included. In man, the opposite happens: his hand itself is included in a socially developed and fixed system of operations in a tool and is subordinate to it. Modern research shows this in detail. Therefore, if in relation to a monkey we can say that the natural development of its hand determined its use of a stick as a “tool”, then in relation to a person we have every reason to assert that the tool activity itself created the specific features of his hand.
So, a tool is a social object, it is a product of social practice, social labor experience. Consequently, that generalized reflection of the objective properties of objects of labor, which it crystallizes in itself, is also a product not of individual, but of social practice. Consequently, even the simplest human knowledge, which takes place in directly practical labor action, in action through tools, is not limited personal experience of a person, but is accomplished on the basis of his mastering the experience of social practice.
Finally, human cognition, which initially occurs in the process of labor and instrumental activity, is capable, in contrast to the instinctive intellectual activity of animals, of transforming into genuine thinking.
Thinking in the proper sense of the word we call the process of conscious reflection of reality in its objective properties, connections and relationships, which include objects inaccessible to direct sensory perception. For example, a person does not perceive ultraviolet rays, but he nevertheless knows about their existence and knows their properties. How is such knowledge possible? It is possible in an indirect way. This path is the path of thinking. In its general principle, it consists in the fact that we subject things to the test of other things and, being aware of the established relationships and interactions between them, judge by the change we perceive about the properties of these things that are directly hidden from us.
Therefore, a necessary condition for the emergence of thinking is the identification and awareness of objective interactions - the interactions of objects. But awareness of these interactions is impossible within the instinctive activity of animals. Again, it is first accomplished only in the process of labor, in the process of using tools with the help of which people actively influence nature. “But the most essential and immediate basis of human thinking,” says Engels, “is precisely the change of nature by man, and not nature alone as such, and the human mind developed in accordance with how man learned to change nature.”1
In this way, human thinking is radically different from the intelligence of animals, which, as special experiments show, only adapts to the existing conditions of the situation and cannot otherwise change them randomly, since their activity as a whole always remains aimed not at these conditions, but at that or another item of their biological need. It's a different matter for humans. In a person, the “phase of preparation”, from which his thinking grows, becomes the content of independent, purposeful actions, and subsequently can become an independent activity, capable of turning into an entirely internal, mental activity.
Finally, thinking, like human cognition in general, is fundamentally different from the intelligence of animals in that its origin and development are also possible only in unity with the development of social consciousness. Not only are the goals of human intellectual action social by nature; As we have already seen, its methods and means are also socially developed. Subsequently, when abstract verbal thinking arises, it can also be accomplished only on the basis of a person’s mastery of socially developed generalizations - verbal concepts and socially developed logical operations.
The last question that we must specifically focus on is the question of the form in which a person’s conscious reflection of the reality around him occurs.
A conscious image, idea, concept has a sensory basis. However, the conscious reflection of reality is not only a sensory experience of it. Already the simple perception of an object is a reflection of it not only as having shape, color, etc., but at the same time as having a certain objective and stable meaning, for example, as food, a tool, etc. Therefore, there must be a special form conscious reflection of reality, qualitatively different from the directly sensory form of mental reflection characteristic of animals.
What is the specific form in which people actually become conscious of the objective world around them? This form is language, which represents, according to Marx, the “practical consciousness” of people. Consciousness is therefore inseparable from language. Like human consciousness, language arises only in the process of labor and with it. Like consciousness, language is a product of human activity, a product of the collective and at the same time its “self-speaking being” (Marx); only for this reason does it exist also for the individual person.
“Language is as ancient as consciousness; language is practical, existing for other people and only thereby existing for myself, real consciousness...”
The emergence of language can only be understood in connection with the need that arose in people in the process of work to say something to each other.
How were speech and language formed? In work, as we have seen, people must enter into relationships with each other, into communication with each other. Initially, their actual labor actions and their communication represent a single process. Human labor movements, affecting nature, also affect other participants in production. This means that under these conditions a person’s actions acquire a dual function: a direct production function and a function of influencing other people, a communication function.
In the future, both of these functions are divided among themselves. For this, it is enough for experience to tell people that in those conditions when the labor movement does not lead to a practical result for one reason or another, it is still capable of influencing other participants in production, for example, it is able to attract them to jointly carry out a given action. Thus, movements arise that retain the form of the corresponding labor movements, but are deprived of practical contact with the subject and, therefore, also deprived of the effort that turns them into genuine labor movements. These movements, together with the accompanying sounds of the voice, are separated from the task of influencing an object, are separated from the labor action and retain only the function of influencing people, the function of verbal communication. They, in other words, turn into a gesture. A gesture is nothing more than a movement separated from its result, that is, not applied to the object at which it is directed.
At the same time, the main role in communication moves from gestures to vocal sounds; sound articulate speech appears.
This or that content signified in speech is fixed and consolidated in the language. But in order for a given phenomenon to be designated and to be reflected in language, it must be highlighted, realized, and this, as we have seen, initially occurs in the practical activities of people, in production. “...People,” says Marx, “actually began by appropriating objects of the external world for themselves as means for satisfying their own needs, etc., etc.; later they come to what they verbally designate them as a means of satisfying their needs - which they already serve for them in practical experience - as objects that “satisfy” them.
The production of language, as well as consciousness and thinking, is initially directly woven into production activity, into the material communication of people.
The direct connection of language and speech with the labor activity of people is the most important and basic condition under the influence of which they developed as carriers of an “objectified”, conscious reflection of reality. By denoting an object in the labor process, the word singles out and generalizes it for individual consciousness precisely in this objective-social relation, i.e., as a social object.
Thus, language acts not only as a means of communication between people, it also acts as a means, as a form of human consciousness and thinking, also not yet separated from material production. It becomes a form, a bearer of a conscious generalization of reality. That is why, along with the subsequent separation of language and speech from directly practical activity, there also occurs an abstraction of verbal meanings from a real object, which makes it possible for them to exist only as a fact of consciousness, that is, only as a thought, only ideally.
Considering the conditions of the transition from the pre-conscious psyche of animals to human consciousness, we found some features that characterize the characteristics of this highest form of mental reflection.
We have seen that the emergence of consciousness is possible only in conditions when the attitude to human nature becomes mediated by his labor relations with other people. Consciousness, therefore, is precisely an “original historical product” (Marx).
We further saw that consciousness becomes possible only in conditions of active influence on nature - in conditions of labor activity with the help of tools, which is at the same time a practical form of human knowledge. Consequently, consciousness is a form of active-cognitive reflection.
We have seen that consciousness is possible only in the conditions of the existence of language, which arises simultaneously with it in the process of labor.
Prerequisites for the emergence of consciousness
With the development of science, especially history and biology, views about the origin of man and his consciousness gradually formed.
The main prerequisite for the emergence of human consciousness was the difficult conditions for the existence of humanoid creatures - anthropoids. Under the influence of living conditions, their central nervous system became much more complex in structure and function. In the area of the cerebral hemispheres, the parietal, temporal and especially frontal lobes gradually developed, which carried out higher adaptive functions.
They developed quite noticeably in humans under the influence of labor. This is evidenced by the fact that in a monkey the frontal lobes make up 0.4 percent of the volume of the cerebral hemispheres, in orangutans and chimpanzees - 3.4 percent, and in humans - 10 percent.
At the biological stage of the development of the psyche, the prerequisites arose for the emergence of higher, purely human, forms of the psyche - consciousness. Knowledge of the biological stage of development of the psyche as the prehistory of human consciousness makes it possible to scientifically explain its occurrence.
Throughout development, in various types of human activity, specifically human, consciously directed cognitive activity, imagination, human feelings and qualities of will, and various mental properties were gradually formed, which differ significantly from the instinctive mental activity of animals.
Work and social way of life are the main factors in the historical development of human consciousness as the highest form of the psyche; it reveals a person’s attitude to his environment, the ability to change nature, adapt it to his needs.
These features are absent in the psyche of animals. They do not separate themselves from the environment and passively adapt to its changes.
Knowledge of the conditions for the emergence and development of human consciousness among the masses is of great importance for its formation.
Historical development of human consciousness
Human consciousness did not immediately become what it is now, but overcame long haul its socio-historical development.
The first people who emerged from the animal world differed little from their animal ancestors; their consciousness was limited. It represented a person's awareness of his immediate environment and his limited connection with other people. Man felt helpless before nature.
The consciousness of primitive man was still largely gregarious in nature.
The level of consciousness predetermined low level development of people's production activities and their social relations. Whatever a person’s way of life was, such was his consciousness.
With the development of people's methods of earning a living, methods of producing material achievements, their consciousness also developed. In an effort to satisfy their needs, which arose as a result of changes in living conditions, people invented fire and gradually moved from using stone tools, which they had used for hundreds of thousands of years, to bronze and iron tools.
Along with hunting, fishing, and cattle breeding, agriculture arose, and then handicrafts; from handicrafts people moved to machine production, etc.
And the change in the tools of labor led to complications in human relationships; people themselves, their needs, life experiences, their consciousness, abilities and other mental properties developed. The development of people’s mental properties was both a result and a necessary prerequisite for the improvement and development of their practical activities.
The historical development of human consciousness was and is possible due to the fact that each previous generation not only physically gives birth to the next generation, but also transfers to it its industrial and cultural heritage.
Each new generation begins its life activity by assimilating the results of the activities of previous generations, develops it further and passes on its achievements to descendants. For the connection of human generations, it is of great importance:
a) transfer of the tools themselves, technology created by people and material assets created with its help;
b) transmission by means of language of human experience (in the process of training and education), the results of cognitive activity, scientific achievements, etc.
Thanks to this, the historical progress of humanity and the development of human consciousness becomes possible.
Throughout history, humanity through its labor has created new conditions for its existence. At the same time, people themselves changed. Circumstances created people as much as people created these circumstances. How more people They learned about the world around them and improved the tools of their work, the more power they acquired over life’s circumstances.
The historical development of human consciousness turned out to be primarily in the enrichment of its content, reflecting objective reality, in the expansion of people's worldview. Along with the enrichment of the content of consciousness, its forms gradually developed, acquiring the diversity and specific features characteristic of modern people.
Over the course of history, direct sensory forms of man's reflection of the world have developed. Human vision becomes more perfect, especially its ability to subtly distinguish the spatial properties of objects, to grasp their various signs, to note the beauty of their forms and proportions, which distinguishes human vision from the vision of animals.
An eagle, flying above the clouds, sees its prey in the grass. A person is not capable of noticing such distant objects in space, but she sees what the eagle does not see, she has improved her vision through technology and art. Advantages and vision are found in the thoughtful perception of the proportions of objects, works of painting, sculpture and architecture. Human hearing has also acquired extraordinary sophistication, which is the result verbal communication with other people, the emergence and development of song and musical creativity.
Thanks to labor and other activities, the human hand has achieved such perfection that it was able, as if by magical power, to bring to life masterpieces of fine art.
Other forms have also undergone qualitative changes sensory knowledge world by man.
Enriching the content of the human psyche also means the development of new, purely human types and forms of memory, which consist in the voluntary memorization and reproduction of data from previous experience mediated by language. The need to transform reality in the process of work has led to the development in man of the ability to transform it into images, to imagine the objects for which he works.
The forms of human thinking have developed and are inextricably linked with the development of speech, with its rich vocabulary and developed grammatical structure. Prerequisites for human mental activity arose, giving it the opportunity to apply its results in practical activities, select the most appropriate methods of action, plan actions, and foresee not only their immediate but also long-term results.
In the process of labor and on its basis, a person arose a new goal and motives for activity, various production, technical, cognitive, scientific, aesthetic and other needs and interests were formed. New types of human activities have developed, including mental, spiritual and other activities.
With the development of people's lives, their emotions and feelings have also become richer.
Purely human feelings were formed, conditioned various types human activity, the form of their social relations. The emergence of new types of human activity contributed to the development of his natural abilities. During work, these abilities were not only demonstrated, but also formed. It is known that all the abilities that distinguish a person from an animal have developed and continue to develop in the process of labor.
By conquering nature, man has developed the ability to control himself, to be aware of his responsibilities as a member of society and to be guided by this awareness in his activities. Learning surrounding nature and other people, she recognized herself. The historical development of human consciousness was simultaneously the development of its self-awareness.
A person's consciousness determines his social existence.
Therefore, it is possible to correctly understand the essence of consciousness only by taking into account the social conditions of human life.
Human consciousness has common features that are inherent in it at all stages of development. At the same time, it acquires its own specific historical features at each degree, depending on the social conditions of people's lives and their relations of production.
Thus, some traits were inherent in a person of the primitive communal type of society, when humanity confronted nature together, when the main means of production and its products were public property.
The contradictory social relations of people also determine the contradictory nature of the development of their consciousness.
The historical development of human consciousness occurs sequentially, with changes in human generations. Thanks to this, it becomes possible to continue the development of the human race, its history, which consists of numerous stories of the development of individual people of each new generation.
At the same time, the historical development of people creates the prerequisites for the individual development of the human personality and its consciousness.
The influence of the history of human life on human development is determined, firstly, by the hereditary prerequisites that are the starting points for individual development, and, secondly, by changes in the social conditions in which this development occurs.
A person is born with hereditary, innate capabilities for his further development. These possibilities are realized in certain social conditions of its existence. She lives and acts in society, in it she receives a certain upbringing and education. By entering into relationships with other people, assimilating material and spiritual achievements created by previous generations of people, she herself is formed as a conscious personality.
Rental block
The significant difference between man as a species and animals is his ability to reason and think abstractly, reflect on his past, critically assessing it and think about the future, developing and implementing plans and programs designed for it. All this taken together is connected with the sphere of human consciousness.
The emergence of human consciousness was a qualitatively new stage in the development of the psyche and represents the highest level of development of the psyche. Consciousness is the highest, uniquely human, form of mental reflection of objective reality, mediated by the socio-historical activities of people. Its development is determined by social conditions. Human consciousness is always purposeful and active.
The main prerequisite and condition for the emergence of human consciousness was the development of the human brain. The formation of human consciousness was a long process, organically connected with social and labor activity. The emergence of work has radically changed man's relationship to the environment.
The above allows us to say that the leading factor influencing the development of consciousness was labor activity based on the joint use of tools. Labor is a process that connects man with nature, the process of man’s influence on nature. Labor is characterized by: the use and manufacture of tools; implementation in conditions of joint collective activity. The basis for the transition to human consciousness was the work of people, which represents their joint activity aimed at a common goal and significantly different from any actions of animals.
In the process of work, the functions of the hand developed and consolidated, which acquired greater mobility, and its anatomical structure improved. However, the hand developed not only as a grasping tool, but also as an organ of cognition. Labor activity led to the fact that the active hand gradually turned into a specialized organ of active touch.
Further development of the psyche at the human level, according to the materialistic point of view, occurs mainly through memory, speech, thinking and consciousness due to the complication of activities and the improvement of tools that act as a means of exploring the surrounding world, the invention and widespread use of sign systems. In a person, along with the lower levels of organization of mental processes that are given to him by nature, higher ones also arise.
The accelerated mental development of people was facilitated by three main achievements of mankind: the invention of tools, the production of objects of material and spiritual culture, and the emergence of language and speech. With the help of tools, man gained the opportunity to influence nature and understand it more deeply. The first such tools - an ax, a knife, a hammer - simultaneously served both purposes. Man made household items and studied the properties of the world that were not given directly to the senses.
The improvement of tools and labor operations performed with their help led, in turn, to the transformation and improvement of the functions of the hand, thanks to which it turned over time into the most subtle and precise of all tools of labor activity. Using the example of the hand, I learned to understand the reality of the human eye; it also contributed to the development of thinking and created the main creations of the human spirit. With the expansion of knowledge about the world, man’s capabilities increased; he acquired the ability to be independent of nature and, according to his understanding, to change his own nature (meaning human behavior and psyche).
Objects of material and spiritual culture created by people of many generations did not disappear without a trace, but were passed on and reproduced from generation to generation, improving. The new generation of people did not need to reinvent them; it was enough to learn to use them with the help of other people who already knew how to do it.
The following generations assimilated the knowledge, skills and abilities developed by the previous ones, and thereby also became civilized people. Moreover, since this process of humanization begins from the first days of life and gives its visible results quite early, the individual retained the opportunity to make his own personal contribution to the treasury of civilization and thereby increase the achievements of mankind. So, gradually, accelerating, from century to century they improved Creative skills people, their knowledge about the world expanded and deepened, raising man higher and higher above the rest of the animal world.
If we imagine for a moment that a worldwide catastrophe occurred, as a result of which people with the appropriate abilities died, the world of material and spiritual culture was destroyed and only small children survived, then in its development humanity would be thrown back tens of thousands of years, since there is no one and nothing to teach children to become people.
The most significant invention of mankind, which had an incomparable impact on the development of people, was sign systems. They gave impetus to the development of mathematics, engineering, science, art, and other areas of human activity. The emergence of alphabetic symbols led to the possibility of recording, storing and reproducing information. There is no longer a need to keep it in the head of an individual; the danger of irretrievable loss due to memory loss or the death of the information keeper has disappeared.
It should be noted that consciousness is the highest level of mental reflection. However, the realm of the psyche is wider than the realm of the conscious. These are those phenomena, techniques, properties and states that arise, but are not realized by a person. The motivation for actions and actions performed by a person can be unconscious. The unconscious principle is represented in almost all mental processes, properties and states of a person. There are unconscious visual and auditory sensations, unconscious images of perception can manifest themselves in phenomena associated with recognizable previously seen things, in a feeling of familiarity. What is unconsciously remembered often determines the content of a person’s thoughts. At present, the question of the relationship between the unconscious and the conscious remains complex and is not resolved unambiguously.
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INTRODUCTION
The dynamic processes occurring in modern society require objective assessment and analysis. This is the prerogative of human consciousness.
The world is known and realized by man through the prism of social relations, the production process, tools, language, ethical and aesthetic standards. Therefore, a person’s consciousness is ultimately determined by his being, i.e. real life in specific historical conditions.
One of the most important problems modern life is the problem of changing consciousness, since interpersonal and interethnic relations directly depend on the development and level of consciousness of the individual.
Relevancethe chosen topic “Development of human consciousness” is determined by the role that consciousness plays at this stage of transformation modern society. Every day we learn quite complex connections and patterns of the world around us, we respond adequately to a variety of life factors and do not even think about why this all happens. Society is interested in forming a consistent view of its past and its connection with the present and future. Holistic historical consciousness acts as one of the factors of social stability, performs the function of integration, consolidation of different generations, social groups and individuals based on awareness of the commonality of their historical destiny.
Today we are witnessing a restructuring of public consciousness. It is important to understand the interdependence and interdependence of individual and collective consciousness. By studying the stages of development of consciousness, we can explain the nature of herd consciousness or the psychology of the crowd.
Consciousness is the toolkit with which a person is aware not only of the external world, but also of himself, his sensations, images, ideas and feelings. Consciousness allows a person to make decisions and control his behavior in accordance with the situation.
Attention should be paid to the issue of self-awareness as a necessary condition for constant self-improvement of the individual<#"justify">1.Consider possible options for the emergence of human consciousness.
.Identify the stages of development of human consciousness.
.Compare the periods of development of consciousness in ontogenesis with the historical stages of the development of human consciousness.
.Determine the basic qualities, levels of knowledge and characteristics of human consciousness.
.Establish the relationship between the processes occurring in the human brain and consciousness.
Methodresearch: theoretical analysis of literary primary sources.
Structureworks: The total volume of the main text is 31 pages. The list of used literature includes 24 literary primary sources. The course work consists of an introduction, two sections, five subsections, and conclusions.
SECTION 1. EVOLUTION OF HUMAN CONSCIOUSNESS
.1 History of the emergence of consciousness
Consciousness cannot arise innately; only the possibility of consciousness arising can appear innately.
There are several theories about the emergence of human consciousness:
Mutation theory (De Vries, V. Howell, V.I. Kochetkova, etc.). According to this theory, the emergence of man is the result of large single abrupt hereditary changes that occurred in the body of an animal close to man, then, as a result of the presence of favorable conditions, these changes strengthened and developed. At the same time, the role of natural set is denied.
One version of neo-Lamarckian theories considers the origin of man as the result of the efforts of a certain “superconsciousness.” (Jung’s theory of the collective unconscious is the theory of the superconscious personality of the neo-Lamarckists).
The evolutionary theory of Charles Darwin and the labor theory of anthropogenesis developed by F. Engels. This is the most likely version.
However, if we say that consciousness arose when a person begins to realize and distinguish himself and other people from nature, then it is possible that consciousness began to develop when a person began to develop higher feelings.
Change (development) of animals occurs through the mechanism of hereditary adaptability, under the influence external force- this is copying, a reflection of the changing external environment.
The essence of the development of a living organism is that external environment, changing, upsets the balance in which a given species of individuals is located; on the other hand, the mechanism of adaptability - heredity strives to restore the disturbed balance and achieves it, but at a qualitatively different level.
Influenced by their lifestyle, which requires the hands to perform different functions than the legs, the monkeys began to wean themselves from using their hands to walk on the ground and began to adopt an increasingly upright gait. The decisive step had been taken, the hand became free and could now acquire more and more new skills, and the greater flexibility acquired by this was passed on and increased from generation to generation.
But in order for the monkey to change and turn into a human, the external environment - the habitat - must finally change. And these changes should be of such a nature that the monkey community, in order to survive and adapt to the environment, would need the emergence of consciousness.
Global cooling is the natural cataclysm that gave impetus to the emergence of consciousness in the first ancestral people. Global cooling was approaching the great apes. Due to the impending cold snap, there were frequent collisions of warm and cold air fronts, which generated lightning and fire. Meanwhile, the weather became colder and colder and the monkeys finally began to realize that the heat they needed came from the fire. Meanwhile, the monkey population has been steadily declining, as the occasional fire was no cure for the cold. But one day, one monkey unintentionally threw a branch into the fire. The smartest of the rest began to notice (realize) that a branch thrown into the fire burns. This moment, according to the author of the article on the topic “The Emergence of Consciousness” I. Kushatov, was the moment of the emergence of consciousness. But we want to follow the history of the primordial people a little further.
Having managed to maintain the fire, people could move it to another place, which makes it possible to develop new territories. In order to maintain the fire, it was necessary to prepare firewood, which leads to various manipulations of wood. As a result of this activity, the forelimbs of the monkeys are transformed into human hands, and an ordinary thick branch in the hands turns into a club, which serves as a weapon.
Meanwhile the climate is getting colder and colder, and hard labour maintaining a fire becomes a necessity, and such work requires additional energy expenditure. And here antagonism arises - the desire to take away food. In this regard, quarrels and fights break out, and the first man begins to use a thick branch as a club for the first time; in connection with these circumstances, cannibalism arises. Only after some time does their aggression spread to the rest of the living world. Proto-human becomes a hunter as a result of cannibalism.
As the anthropogenic impact on nature progressed, man adapted it for himself - at that moment he began to distinguish himself from nature, to realize his attitude towards it and other people. His activity also became conscious, since labor required foreseeing the result of labor, which means that labor activity was carried out in accordance with a specific goal. Gradually, special sensory areas in the human brain began to develop, which led to the development of higher senses and perfect movements. We believe that it was the manifestation of the highest feelings of primitive people towards their neighbors that became the moment of the emergence of consciousness.
A strong capacity for compassion and respect for the dead of one's community is seen in Late Paleolithic burials. Let us give as an example one of the burials found in Crimea, which illuminates the spiritual life of this era: at the bottom of the grave lay 2 skeletons of teenagers (a girl 7-8 years old and a boy 12-13 years old), their heads pressed tightly against each other. Very long spindle-shaped rods, made from split and straightened mammoth tusks, lay like spears along the buried ones. A thin slotted disk made of tusk was found at the girl’s right temple; straps were attached to the slots of these beautiful and fragile decorations, which served as ceremonial appearances and had ceremonial significance; a similar one was found in the boy. The hands of the buried were wearing plate bracelets and rings. It is not difficult to imagine how much hard, painstaking and petty work was done by people who cut small beads from tusks, or how much effort was spent by those who at that time knew the amazing technique of splitting and straightening mammoth tusks - hard labor. During the Late Paleolithic period, the spiritual and material culture of this era began to develop.
It can also be assumed that cave paintings prove the existence of the psyche, simple shapes human thinking and consciousness. After all, it’s no accident wild cats and other animals of Paleolithic times, possessing a psyche similar to that of a human, did not leave rock paintings or signs of their presence behind. And people in ancient times attached sacred meaning to paintings; they believed that they were helping themselves in the future.
Conclusion: Nature did not reward the proto-man with consciousness from the very beginning of the existence of mankind, but it did not deprive him of a brain and a form of psyche that was in no way different from an animal one. Man's consciousness arose when he began to distinguish himself and other people from nature, when cave paintings appeared on the walls of his shelter, when higher feelings began to develop in man. Human consciousness of a higher order is associated with abstract thinking and speech - processes without which the existence of collective and individual consciousness is impossible.
1.2 Stages of development of consciousness
The development of consciousness is a movement towards the most approximate form of reflection of objective reality.
The first prerequisite for the development of human consciousness was the development of the human brain. Based on the changing input of the evolution of the lifestyle, the body develops, functioning, meanwhile, its psyche is formed in the process of life. Our task is to understand what structure of consciousness a person had at certain stages of his life.
To understand the structures of consciousness of primitive people, we suggest familiarizing yourself with the forms of consciousness.
There are (according to K.K. Platonov) several forms of consciousness:
) individual, including attributes of consciousness (attitude, cognition, experience), levels of clarity (creative insight, inspiration, clarity of consciousness, unconscious phenomena, confused consciousness), dynamics of consciousness (personality properties, states of consciousness and processes of consciousness) and functions of consciousness (memory, will, feelings, perception, thinking, sensations, emotions);
) group consciousness, manifested in public mood, competition, panic, etc.;
)social consciousness - in the form of religious, moral, aesthetic, legal, political and philosophical views.
When we talk about social consciousness, we abstract from everything individual; social consciousness is progressive and continuous; it is characterized by stability and inertia. In the public consciousness, theories and ideas tested by time and practice always prevail, but this never happens spontaneously. Individual consciousness is born and dies with the birth and death of a given person; its movement is intermittent, chaotic, and distinguished by its unpredictability. The consciousness of an individual is characterized by such properties as sensory and logical thinking and their forms. It is at the level of abstract thinking that the individual’s consciousness breaks out beyond the boundaries of social consciousness, pushing its boundaries, enriching it, making the products of his knowledge of existence the property of everyone.
Now we propose to consider the following stages of consciousness development:
) the psyche of animals and pre-humans;
) herd mentality;
) consciousness of a reasonable person;
) consciousness of a person in a tribal society and the emergence of self-awareness.
The psyche of animals and pre-humans was practically no different. One can only say that the first pre-humans differed from the “smart” monkeys only in that they had a social consciousness. And it can be assumed that the social consciousness of the first primordial people consisted of only one thought, an idea, common to all; this thought, one for all, was supposed to give impetus to the further development of consciousness.
Herd consciousness excluded the concept of “individual”, i.e. the herd was controlled by a leader. Otherwise they could not live, because society must have a hierarchical management structure. Within the herd of monkeys there were complex relationships, which means there was a “language” of communication. The essence of the herd consciousness was that the more common interests and goals the representatives of the herd had, and the larger the size of the herd itself, the easier it was to achieve goals about seizing territory or about the possibility of survival, because in the herd an individual felt more protected. People of this level have just emerged from the animal kingdom, because they began to bury their relatives and fellow tribesmen.
We can say that throughout the long millennia of their history, Homo Sapiens sought to understand themselves and the world around them. The development of the consciousness of Homo sapiens occurred consistently and logically with the help of discoveries. As the nervous system grew and developed, man, interacting with nature, thought, thanks to which he began to become aware of himself and navigate his environment.
And finally, the stage of development of human consciousness in tribal society and the emergence of self-awareness. Tribal community - historically the first form public organization people - (community<#"justify">Conclusion: The development of consciousness is possible only when it is replenished with new knowledge about the world around us and about the person himself. Human consciousness is the result of a long evolution. As the higher functions of the brain improved, the understanding based on the fundamental principles of its operation became more complete.
1.3 Development of consciousness in ontogenesis
consciousness brain human ontogenesis
There is a hypothesis that the consciousness of an individual person is an abbreviated repeating course of development of all humanity. In this subsection we will try to compare the periods of development of consciousness in ontogenesis with the stages of development of human consciousness.
In ontogenesis, individual human consciousness arises and begins to develop. For its formation, joint activity and active communication between an adult and a child, identification, awareness and verbal designation of the purpose of interaction are also necessary. In the same way, from the very beginning of human evolution, labor had a general character and was built on cooperation and division of labor operations. In the process of labor, people became more closely united as members of society, and more clearly realized the benefits of joint action. Collective work aroused in them the need for speech, since without verbal communication it could not be carried out. From the very beginning of the phylogenetic and ontogenetic emergence and development of human consciousness, speech becomes its subjective carrier, which first acts as a means of communication, and then becomes a means of thinking.
Before becoming the property of individual consciousness, the word and the content associated with it must receive general meaning for the people who use them. Having received its universal meaning, the word then penetrates the individual consciousness and becomes its property in the form of meanings and meanings. Therefore, first there appears collective and then individual consciousness. Individual human consciousness is formed on the basis and subject to the existence of collective consciousness through its appropriation.
In the ontogenesis of the child's psyche, the main stages of biological evolution and stages of cultural and historical development of man are reproduced. In ontogenesis, the development of the human psyche and consciousness is determined by the social environment. The development of the individual’s psyche follows the path of historical development of previous generations; this process can hardly be influenced by the child’s perception and learning.
Based on the biogenetic law, Sigmund Freud argued that the mental development of an individual person is an abbreviated repeating course of development of all humanity, and extended the conclusions of psychoanalytic practice to the history and culture of mankind.
Speech is included in all human mental processes. But speech is impossible without language with its vocabulary and characteristic grammatical formulas. Language is a social phenomenon. It exists and develops objectively, as the creation not of individual people, but of the entire society. His words reflect the experience of mental activity not of an individual person, but of all humanity.
The mere fact that a person has speech radically changes the nature of his mental processes.
The most elementary form of the psyche - sensation - has a different character in humans than in animals, because it belongs to a social being. The animal senses the green color of the leaves and, based on the shade of this color, is the first signal to navigate certain circumstances that occur in the environment. A person also feels the green color of foliage, but at the same time he always designates the perceived color and its features that are important for practical activity in words, which is completely absent in animals. A person’s sensation, being essentially a primary signal, is also a secondary signal. This allows a person to reflect in his sensations not exclusively individual, as in animals, but universal human experience.
Speech contributed to the development of abstract thinking in a person in concepts in which the universal human experience of knowing reality is expressed. This led to a more correct, richer and more complete reflection of objective reality in human thinking.
At the same time, thanks to speech, the social nature of human activity and his conscious volitional actions were consolidated and improved. When a person performs one or another labor operation, ideas about the goal to which he strives and the plan of his work are not his personal, individual invention; they reflect the labor experience of all humanity.
Thanks to speech, the development of human self-awareness became possible. Only a person, thanks to speech, for the first time begins to be aware of his mental world, to be aware of the content, nature and meaning of his subjective mental experiences. This became possible only because man’s subjective reflection of reality began to be expressed in objective phenomena - words. Thus, thanks to speech, a person’s psyche turns into consciousness.
By contacting objects and phenomena of the material world, in the process of communication with other people and collective work, especially through speech, a person learns in ontogenesis to actively cognize objective reality (sensation, perception), creatively (thinking) to transform it (voluntary activity) for better satisfaction your needs. The brain is not the source of consciousness, but its organ, that part of our body in which the object influencing it is transformed and receives a subjective form of existence, becoming consciousness - a subjective image of the objective world.
Conclusion: The peak for the emergence of human consciousness came when man’s subjective reflection of reality began to be expressed in objective phenomena - words. Already in adolescence a person can express himself in words. And, if we look for parallels between the stages of development of consciousness and its development in ontogenesis, this may mean that the evolution of the development of consciousness is not over - there are further stages of development after the emergence of speech. We will review the stages of development of human consciousness through the prism of the development of human consciousness in ontogenesis. And if already in adolescence children speak words, then in the prime of life (at 30-45 years old) a person can do much more. The above makes it possible to assume that in billions of years (assuming the existence of humanity - which is practically impossible) human consciousness will develop at qualitatively new levels. However, the development of the human psyche declines with the aging of the body, so after a burst of development everything will decline.
Conclusion to section 1: Consciousness presupposes a person’s awareness not only of the external world, but also of himself, his sensations, images, ideas and feelings. The images, thoughts, ideas and feelings of people are materially embodied in the objects of their creative work and with the subsequent perception of these objects they become conscious. Therefore, creativity is the path and means of self-knowledge and development of human consciousness through the perception of his own creations. The consciousness of modern man is the product of a gradual, complex process of development of cognitive activity of all previous generations, the result of the historical progress of social practice accumulated by man due to necessity, and then thanks to an active desire to transform the external world. New elements and higher forms of consciousness enriched and complicated the cognitive process, which ultimately led to the improvement of consciousness itself.
SECTION 2. STRUCTURE AND FEATURES OF HUMAN CONSCIOUSNESS
2.1 Structure of consciousness
Consciousness invariably appeared in psychology as something external, only as a condition for the flow of mental processes. This was, in particular, Wundt's position. “Consciousness,” he wrote, “lies in the fact that we find any mental states in ourselves, and therefore we cannot know the essence of consciousness. All attempts to define consciousness lead either to a tautology or to definitions of activities occurring in consciousness, which are not consciousness because they presuppose it.” We find the same idea in even sharper expression in Natorp: “consciousness is devoid of its own structure, it is only a condition of psychology, but not its subject. Although its existence is a basic and completely reliable psychological fact, it cannot be defined and can only be deduced from itself.”
However, if we still adhere to materialistic ideas about consciousness, then we can consider the elements of consciousness.
Personal consciousness is determined by the qualities of dynamism and constancy:
Ø dynamism is the property of consciousness to change and develop, which is caused by rapidly changing short-term processes, which, in turn, can change the personality;<#"justify">Ø cognition;
Ø experience;
Ø attitude.
Ø Consciousness is impossible without knowledge. Attention and memory are necessary attributes of human cognitive activity.
Ø <#"justify">Øactivity;
Øintegrity;
Ø continuity;
Ø clarity.
The lowest level of lucidity is “confused” consciousness - when a person has just woken up. This condition also happens to people when they are overworked.
Consciousness usually manifests itself in activity, therefore its structure in a certain period of time corresponds to the structure of human activity in this period of time.
Conclusion: Throughout life, a person acquires knowledge about the world around him and about himself. Thinking<#"center">2.2 Consciousness and the brain
A person’s consciousness is, in essence, his life, consisting of an endless change of impressions, thoughts and memories. The mystery of our brain is multifaceted and affects the interests of many sciences that study the mysteries of existence.
The brain is an organ of consciousness, and consciousness, in turn, is one of the functions of the brain.
The new functions that the human brain had to assume in connection with the development of labor were reflected in changes in its structure. A radical change in the nature of activity - with the transition from life activity to work activity, the increasingly complex nature of this activity and, accordingly, the increasingly deepening nature of cognition, led to the development of zones rich in associative fibers that serve for more complex syntheses. A comparison of the human brain with the brain of a monkey clearly reveals these shifts: in humans, the primary visual field, so developed in monkeys, noticeably decreases, and at the same time, the fields with which complex syntheses of visual perception are associated (secondary visual field) increase significantly.
Since in humans the organ of conscious activity is the cortex, the question of the relationship between the psyche and the brain focuses primarily on the question of the relationship between the psyche and the cerebral cortex. The localization theory developed as a result of the fact that a building of hypotheses and theories was erected above the positive factual data of the study, reflecting the same methodological trends that dominated psychology at that time. The idea of the brain as a collection of individual centers connected to each other by associative pathways reflected the concept of associative psychology, from which the classical localization theory proceeded. The idea that each mental function, including the most complex ones, corresponds to a specific center is a unique implementation in the physiology of the brain of the theory of psychophysical parallelism.
The study of the phylogeny of the brain has shown that in the phylogenetic series there is an increasing anatomical differentiation of the cortex, and those areas that are carriers of especially high functions are increasingly developing.
The study of the ontogenetic development of cortical architectonics also provides significant results. The principle of division of the cortex, first applied by K. Brodmann, based on the study of its ontogenetic development, was further developed by a number of Soviet scientists. Research by I.N. Filimonova, G.I. Polyakova, N.A. Popov showed that already at early stages ontogenetic development favors division of the cortex big brain into three main zones: isocortex; allocortex, including archicortex and paleocortex; the interstitial region that defines the allo- and isocortex. The presence of this division already in the early stages of ontogenesis gives reason to conclude that it is of significant importance.
The classical localized theory has now been thoroughly shaken by the researchers of H. Jackson, G. Head, and the works of K. Monakov, H. Goldstein, K. Lashley and others. It turned out that new clinical data on the diverse forms of aphasia, agnosia, and apraxia do not fit into the classical localization scheme. On the one hand, damage to the speech zone in the left hemisphere, upon closer examination, turns out to be associated with a disorder not only of speech, but also of other intellectual functions. On the other hand, speech impairment and various forms of aphasia are associated with damage to various areas.
The more complex the brain is organized and the more developed it is, the higher the level of consciousness. The connection between the brain and consciousness is characterized, first of all, by the fact that the level of reflective-constructive ability of consciousness also depends on the level of complexity of the organization of the brain. The brain of primitive, gregarious man was poorly developed and could serve only as an organ of primitive consciousness. The modern human brain, formed as a result of long-term biosocial evolution, is a complex organ. The dependence of the level of consciousness on the degree of organization of the brain is also confirmed by the fact that the consciousness of a child is formed, as is known, in connection with the development of his brain, and when the brain of a very old man becomes decrepit, the functions of consciousness also fade away. A normal psyche is impossible without a normally functioning brain. As soon as the refined structure of the organization of brain matter is disrupted, and even more so destroyed, the structures of consciousness are also destroyed.
Consciousness is inseparable from the brain: it is impossible to separate thought from the matter that thinks.
The brain with its complex biochemical, physiological, and nervous processes is the material substrate of consciousness. Consciousness is always associated with these processes occurring in the brain:
Ø consciousness is the highest form of reflection of the world and is associated with articulate speech, logical generalizations, abstract concepts, which is inherent only to man;
Ø the core of consciousness, the way of its existence is knowledge;
Ø work develops consciousness;
Ø speech (language) shapes consciousness;
Ø consciousness is a function of the brain;
Ø consciousness is multicomponent, but constitutes a single whole;
Ø consciousness is active and has the ability to influence the surrounding reality.
The development of increasingly sophisticated senses was inextricably linked with the development of increasingly specialized sensory areas in the human brain, mainly those in which higher senses are localized, and the development of increasingly sophisticated movements was inextricably linked with the development of an increasingly differentiated motor area that regulates complex voluntary movements. The increasingly complex nature of human activity and, accordingly, the increasingly deepening nature of his cognition led to the fact that the sensory and motor zones themselves, i.e. the projection zones in the cerebral cortex, which are directly connected with the peripheral and effector apparatuses, seem to have parted, and zones rich in associative fibers have received special development in the human brain. By uniting various projection centers, they serve for more complex and higher syntheses, the need for which is generated by the complication of human activity. In particular, the frontal region receives special development, playing a particularly significant role in higher intellectual processes. At the same time, the predominance of the right hand, which is common in most people, is associated with the predominant importance of the opposite left hemisphere, in which the main centers of the higher mental functions, in particular speech centers.
Thanks to tools and speech, human consciousness began to develop as a product of social labor. On the one hand, tools as socialized labor transmitted in embodied form the experience accumulated by man from generation to generation, and on the other hand, this was the transfer of social experience, its communication was accomplished through speech.
Functional asymmetry of the brain led scientists to believe that there are two types of consciousness: spatial knowledge in the right hemisphere, and language knowledge in the left. This assumption has led to a large number of studies and classifications of levels of consciousness.
The left and right hemispheres play different roles in perception and image formation.
The right hemisphere is characterized by high speed of recognition, its accuracy and clarity. It most likely compares the image with some standards available in memory on the basis of identifying similar informative features in the perceived object.
The left hemisphere carries out a mainly analytical approach to image formation, associated with the sequential selection of its elements according to a certain program. However, if left hemisphere will work in isolation, then it will not be able to integrate the perceived and selected elements into a holistic image. With its help, phenomena are classified and assigned to a specific category through the designation of a word. Thus, both hemispheres of the brain simultaneously take part in any psychological process.
Each sensory modality has its own levels of consciousness. Sensations from each level enter the cognitive system, but we are not aware of them until we direct our attention to them.
If we consider consciousness from the perspective of Engels’ theory, then from the above we can conclude that we can easily control our consciousness, but due to the fact that it acts on different levels, this is not easy to do.
Many neuroscientists have approached the study of the brain-consciousness connection from a scientific point of view.
John Eccles developed the theory that our brains are not conscious per se, but that consciousness is able to communicate with nerve cells through the quantum effects of the release of synaptic transmitter molecules that transmit nerve impulses in these structures, dendrons. These are processes of pyramidal cells of the cerebral cortex that come together, which serve as modules for the entry of spirit and consciousness, contact with the physical body.
According to the famous English mathematician and physicist R. Penrose, consciousness cannot be reduced to calculations, since a living brain differs from a computer in that it has the ability to understand. He argued that intelligent processes are not explained by the computational properties of the nervous system, and therefore consciousness must have some special properties through quantum effects.
Anokhin said that consciousness is a process occurring in the brain, an instrument of the brain and is the activity of nerve cells organized in a certain way. This activity is not outside the brain, it is not between us and between brains, it is in space.
Darwin also thought deeply about the origins of brain intelligence and consciousness and its biological basis, just as he thought about the biological basis of evolution.
And the outstanding psychophysiologist and neurophysiologist Alexey Mikhailovich Ivanitsky proposed such a scheme for understanding what happens at the moment of awareness, which he called the “circle of sensations”. When sensory signals enter the primary sensory areas, such as the visual cortex, they then begin to circulate throughout the nervous system, spreading along different streams of the tarsal and ventral, from the visual cortex, for example, to the frontal cortex. And gradually, after some time, they extract subjective experience from memory. For this to happen, they must activate neurons in the temporal cortex of the hippocampus. This takes time, and after some time this information, which has already been enriched with content extracted from memory, enters again into the same structures that were the original receivers of this information. This process of cyclical activity, called reverberation, has specific frequencies, and these frequencies, typically in the gamma range, are considered one of the neural correlates of consciousness. When this reverberation occurs, it occurs with a delay of several hundred milliseconds, then we experience moments of awareness.
Conclusion: The modern human brain is a complex organ. The dependence of the level of consciousness on the degree of organization of the brain is confirmed by the fact that the consciousness of a child is formed, as is known, in connection with the development of his brain, and when the brain of a very old man becomes decrepit, the functions of consciousness also fade away. A normal psyche is impossible without a normally functioning brain. As soon as the refined structure of the organization of brain matter is disrupted, and even more so destroyed, the structures of consciousness are also destroyed. Consciousness is closely related to attention, i.e. we are aware only of what we pay attention to.
Various mechanisms of primary consciousness, that is, consciousness that does not include language and culture, arose in evolution in different taxa, are independent and have different neural bases.
Conclusions to section 2: Throughout life, a person acquires knowledge about the world around him and about himself. Thinking<#"center">CONCLUSIONS
The purpose of our course work was to highlight the stages of development of human consciousness.
In the course of writing the course work, we identified 4 stages of the development of consciousness:
) the psyche of animals and pre-humans (the emergence of social consciousness);
) herd consciousness (people separated from the animal kingdom; the emergence of a language of communication; it was easier for each individual to survive in a herd);
) consciousness of a reasonable person (knowledge and awareness of oneself and the surrounding world through discoveries);
) consciousness of a person in a tribal society and the emergence of self-awareness (the basis of collective work; social equality; the desire and ability to improve).
Having identified the stages of development of human consciousness, it can be argued that human consciousness was formed as brain functions improved in the process of evolution.
Also in research work, we have completed all the objectives of the course work:
We have examined and identified possible options for the emergence of human consciousness:
Ø the emergence of consciousness as a result of the efforts of some “superconscious”;
Ø the emergence of consciousness as a result of large single abrupt hereditary changes in the body of an animal close to man;
Ø the emergence of consciousness as a result of human labor activity;
Ø the emergence of consciousness at the moment the monkeys realize that a stick thrown into the fire burns;
Ø the emergence of consciousness as a result of the development of higher senses;
Ø the emergence of consciousness at the moment when a person begins to distinguish himself and other people from the world around him;
Ø the emergence of consciousness as a result of the emergence and development of speech.
We consider the last option to be the most probable because speech is included in all mental processes of a person, it contributed to the development of abstract thinking in a person, without it the joint labor activity of people could not be carried out, and accordingly, without it, a person’s social consciousness could not develop. And damage to the speech zone in the left hemisphere leads to a disorder not only of speech, but also of other intellectual functions, because speech is closely related to thinking.
2. We compared the periods of development of consciousness in ontogenesis with the historical stages of the development of human consciousness, and came to the conclusion that historical stages The development of human consciousness is identical to the periods of development of human consciousness in ontogenesis. We assume that in billions of years, human consciousness will develop at qualitatively new levels, because now we are at the fourth level of consciousness development, and there will still be quite a few of them ahead.
We also tried to determine the basic qualities, levels of knowledge and characteristics and functions of human consciousness. Having studied the judgments of other scientists, we can say that consciousness is a condition for the flow of mental processes, it is structureless and has such characteristics as: the feeling of being a cognizing subject, mental representation and imagination of reality, the ability to communicate and the presence of intellectual schemes in consciousness. The levels of knowledge of human consciousness represent stages of the development of consciousness - this is the relationship between the development of knowledge and the stages of development of human consciousness.
We established the relationship between the processes occurring in the human brain and consciousness and came to the conclusion that the psyche and consciousness are impossible without a normally functioning brain, because the structure of the brain, as an organ of consciousness, changed as a result of human labor activity, the emergence of speech and other changes.
Thus, we can conclude that individual human consciousness was formed thanks to social consciousness through speech and became more complex as brain structures developed. Human consciousness will continue to develop further thanks to the development of self-awareness.
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