Chapter IV. Man: force and progress
The philosophical aspects of consciousness and thought
Life starts with man precisely because man is the sole phenomenon in the Universe that started to think, i.e. distinguish itself from the environment. It is precisely thinking that is man’s definiteness which distinguishes him from the rest of the world, including the animal world. Man is thinking in himself, i.e. in his body, since thinking is different from his being as a physical body and his natural sensuality, which are his ties to the surrounding world. But there is thinking in him, too, since man himself is thinking. It is an attribute of man, in the same way as motion and force are attributes of matter. Where there is no thinking, there is no man. In other words, thinking is present in his available being, while his available being is present in thinking. This is the essence of the definition of man. I repeat Hegel’s words: "The determination of man is thinking reason."[1]
The views of the different scientists who analyze consciousness within the framework of the dichotomy “mind-body”, broadly presented in the preceding pages, lead them inevitably into a dead end: they will never be able to solve the “enigma” of consciousness outside of its carrier – man, or, more exactly, thinking man (though non-thinking man does not exist; the creature resembling him is only just a biological species of the Australopithecus race). Thought is precisely that line that separates the world of man from the rest of the world. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was correct to a certain degree when he wrote: "that the access to thought represents a threshold–a threshold that must be crossed with one step. …we find ourselves transported to an entirely new biological level."[2]
I wrote “to a certain degree”, meaning that the emergence of thought did not occur “in one step”. The size of this step is about 14 billion years within the framework of the Universe, 4.4 billion years within the framework of Earth, 3.4 billion years after the emergence of the organic world, about 800 million years after the emergence of the animal world; finally, the transition from apelike creatures to man took about 2-3 million years. No one described the latter stage better than Darwin within the framework of his evolution theory and Engels in his work The Role of Labor in the Process of the Ape’s Transformation into Man. They explained how this process took place and why man “became thoughtful” (“fell to thinking”).[3]
One of the reasons why contemporary Western scientists keep circling the topic “mind-body” is this, in my opinion: they never “learned in school” the theory of reflection – a most important component of dialectical materialism. This ignorance manifests itself, for example, in their opinion that “materialists” ignore or even deny altogether thought and consciousness as objective reality. In actual fact this is not so. It suffices to refer to Lenin, who wrote: “It is indeed correct that thought and matter are ‘real’, i.e. they exist. But to call thought material would mean making an erroneous step toward confusing materialism with idealism.”[4]
Dialectic materialism does not deny the existence of thought, consciousness and other ideal notions as reality, but it is reality that exists subjectively, not objectively, i.e. it is reflected in man’s thinking. Thinking itself is the process of reflecting objective reality in conclusions, concepts, theories, etc. This reflection is not identification of, say, matter with the spirit or of the body with the mind, which leads to “thing-becoming” of the ideal and its substantiation. The latter amounts to vulgar materialism that is represented so broadly today in physicalism; the classics of Marxism in fact waged a battle against this.
The phenomena of consciousness, thought are subjective realities that reflect in themselves objective realities. In the tongue of philosophy, the definition of consciousness would look like this: consciousness is the capacity for subjective reflection of the objective world, inherent only to man. Thinking is the capacity for cognizing and transforming the surrounding world in accordance with one’s objectives and purposes, inherent only to man.
The problem usually lies in identifying how (in what fashion?) this reflection of objective reality takes place. The mechanism of reflection in the process of human cognition was described by many philosophers, but none went as deep as Hegel did. I was about to retell Hegel’s views here in brief, but fortunately I had a book at hand in which the authors of one of the chapters needed less than one page to say what it took me over five pages to tell. In order to save “time and space”, I will make use of those authors’ explanation, especially since they use examples from information theory which we will have need of subsequently anyway. The authors of the chapter in question are D. I. Dubrovsky and A D. Ursul.
They specify clearly the differences between the concepts of “information” and “signal”: the latter includes material-energetic characteristics; the former is free of them. It is obvious that information does not exist separately from the signal; it is embodied in its material structure. At the same time it does not depend on the concrete physical properties of the carrier, therefore it is to a certain degree invariant with respect to the form of the signal. This is extremely important for understanding the nature of the ideal. And now let the authors speak.
Let us examine some comparatively simple case of psychic reflection. Suppose that the individual perceives visually over a relatively short stretch of time some object A; this means that the individual experiences the image of object A (let us designate that subjective image as a). In that same stretch of time there emerges in the individual’s brain a certain aerodynamic process (a certain neurodynamic structure), born from the influence of object A and responsible for the image of A experienced by the individual (let us designate this neurodynamic equivalent of the image as x). It is natural to think that the subjective image and its nerodynamic carrier (a and x) are simultaneous and same-causal phenomena. Nonetheless these phenomena should be distinguished: a is an ideal phenomenon, i.e. subjective reality (it cannot be called material, since it doesn’t exist in the form of objective reality accessible to an external observer); x is a material process that takes place in the brain. x is not a psychic, ideal image of the object A; a is a code reflection of object A. This neurodynamic code, existing in the individual’s brain, is experienced by him precisely as an image: it is subjected to psychic decoding, so to say.
The relationship between a and x can be considered a particular case of the relationship between information as content and the signal as its form; a is the information received by the person about object A; x is the material, neurodynamic carrier of this information, the signal. However, the person as an integral self-organizing system has only the information ‘given’ directly in its interior world, while its neurodynamic carrier (the signal) is deeply hidden from it (I do not know what takes place in my brain when I see the object A, experience the image of object A). [5]
This passage explains accessibly, in my opinion, the mechanism of reflection of the objective (signal) in the subjective (information). The question may arise: why is it that a certain signal is reflected informationally in the form of, say, an image of a man or a table, or in the form of some quality: red, warm, round - that is, through neurodynamic codes with different contents.
This question is related to the evolution of man, to his past that is 2 to 3 million years long. When one says that man is the thinking mind, one has to remember, naturally, that man became what he is due to the development of social relations with the indispensable attribute of speech. Without speech, there is no thought, without thought there is no man, and all three are not possible without society. Everything is united, but this unity is achieved over a lengthy evolutionary-revolutionary period. It was during that period that various signals formed gradually in the form of certain physico-chemical structures in the bowels of the brain, fixing themselves in the brain’s memory. I cannot exclude the possibility that each word could take several thousand years to develop. And thus it went: word by word, sentence by sentence, concept by concept.
And now it is time to proceed from general philosophical reasoning to the analysis of the forming of the functioning structure of man as a thinking creature.
[1] Hegel's Science of Logic, p. 123.
[2] Chardin, 116 .
[3] On the same topic, see: Mithen Steven, The Prehistory of the Mind .
[4] Lenin. Materialism and Empirio-criticism, 231.
[5] Quoted from: Management, Information, Intellect (Russ.), 234-5.
(Philosophical-sociological Essay)