The properties of mental reflection are: Features of human mental reflection

Our consciousness is a reflection of the external world. The modern personality is capable of very fully and accurately reflecting the world around him, unlike primitive people. With the development of human practice, it increases, which allows it to better reflect the surrounding reality.

The brain realizes the mental reflection of the objective world. The latter has an internal and external environment of his life. The first is reflected in human needs, i.e. in general feeling, and the second - in sensory concepts and images.

• mental images arise in the process of human activity;
• mental reflection allows you to behave logically and engage in activities;
• endowed with a proactive character;
• provides an opportunity to correctly reflect reality;
• develops and improves;
• refracted through individuality.

Properties mental reflection:

• mental reflection is capable of receiving information about the surrounding world;
• it is not a reflection of the world;
• it cannot be tracked.

Characteristics of mental reflection

Mental processes originate in active activity, but on the other hand they are controlled by mental reflection. Before we take any action, we imagine it. It turns out that the image of the action is ahead of the action itself.

Mental phenomena exist against the background of human interaction with the outside world, but the mental is expressed not only as a process, but also as a result, that is, a certain fixed image. Images and concepts reflect a person’s relationship to them, as well as to his life and activities. They encourage the individual to continuously interact with the real world.

You already know that mental reflection is always subjective, that is, it is the experience, motive, and knowledge of the subject. These internal conditions characterize the activity of the individual himself, and external causes act through internal conditions. This principle was formed by Rubinstein.

Stages of mental reflection

Psyche- this is the essence where the diversity of nature gathers into its unity, this is the virtual compression of nature, this is a reflection of the objective world in its connections and relationships.

Mental reflection is not a mirror, mechanically passive copying of the world (like a mirror or a camera), it is associated with a search, choice, in mental reflection incoming information is subjected to specific processing, i.e. mental reflection is an active reflection of the world in connection with some necessarily, with needs, this is a subjective selective reflection of the objective world, since it always belongs to the subject, does not exist outside the subject, depends on subjective characteristics. The psyche is a “subjective image of the objective world.”

Objective reality exists independently of a person and can be reflected through the psyche into subjective mental reality. This mental reflection, belonging to a specific subject, depends on his interests, emotions, characteristics of the senses and level of thinking (the same objective information from objective reality different people can perceive in their own way, from completely different angles, and each of them usually thinks that his perception is the most correct), thus a subjective mental reflection, subjective reality may differ partially or significantly from objective reality.

But it would be wrong to completely identify the psyche as a reflection of the external world: the psyche is capable of reflecting not only what is, but also what could be (prediction), and what seems possible, although this is not the case in reality. The psyche, on the one hand, is a reflection of reality, but, on the other hand, it is sometimes “inventing” something that does not exist in reality, sometimes these are illusions, mistakes, a reflection of one’s desires as real, wishful thinking. Therefore, we can say that the psyche is a reflection of not only the external, but also its internal psychological world.

Thus, the psyche is “ subjective image of the objective world“, this is a set of subjective experiences and elements of the subject’s internal experience.

The psyche cannot be reduced simply to the nervous system. Indeed, the nervous system is an organ (at least one of the organs) of the psyche. In case of disruption of activity nervous system suffers, the human psyche is disturbed.

But just as a machine cannot be understood through the study of its parts and organs, so the psyche cannot be understood through the study of the nervous system alone.

Mental properties are the result of the neurophysiological activity of the brain, but they contain the characteristics of external objects, and not the internal physiological processes through which the mental arises.

Signals transformed in the brain are perceived by a person as events taking place outside him, in external space and the world.

Mechanical identity theory asserts that mental processes are essentially physiological processes, that is, the brain secretes the psyche, thought, just as the liver secretes bile. The disadvantage of this theory is that the psyche is identified with nervous processes, do not see qualitative differences between them.

Unity theory states that mental and physiological processes arise simultaneously, but they are qualitatively different.

Mental phenomena are correlated not with a separate neurophysiological process, but with organized sets of such processes, i.e. the psyche is a systemic quality of the brain, realized through multi-level functional systems brain, which are formed in a person in the process of life and his mastery of historically established forms of activity and experience of mankind through his own active activity. Thus, specific human qualities(consciousness, speech, work, etc.), the human psyche is formed in a person only during his lifetime in the process of assimilating the culture created by previous generations. Thus, the human psyche includes at least 3 components: the external world (nature, its reflection); full brain activity; interaction with people, active transmission of human culture and human abilities to new generations.

Mental reflection is characterized by a number of features;

• it makes it possible to correctly reflect the surrounding reality, and the correctness of the reflection is confirmed by practice;
• the mental image itself is formed in the process more active activities person;
• mental reflection deepens and improves;
• ensures the appropriateness of behavior and activity;
• refracted through a person’s individuality;
• is anticipatory.

Functions of the psyche: reflection of the surrounding world and regulation of the behavior and activity of a living creature in order to ensure its survival.

This concept is philosophical, because this reflection is not in the literal sense. It represents a certain phenomenon that manifests itself with the help of images and states of the individual passed through consciousness.

In other words, mental reflection is a special form of a person’s dynamic connection with the world, during which new desires appear, worldviews and positions are formed, and specific solutions to certain problems are developed. Any individual is capable of managing his personal reality, presenting it in artistic or some other images.

Features and Properties

Mental reflection has a number of specific moments that are its individual manifestations. There are some features of mental reflection:

• Mental images appear during a person’s active pastime.
• Mental reflection makes it possible to carry out some kind of activity.
• It has a proactive character.
• Allows you to reliably represent the world around you.
• Progresses and improves.
• Changes through individuality.

Characteristics of this process

A person is able to perceive the real world, find his purpose, and develop his inner world only thanks to this process. Unfortunately, not every individual correctly reflects these phenomena - this problem arises in people with mental disorders.

As for healthy person, then he has the following criteria for mental reflection:

1. Dynamism. Throughout life, every person's thoughts, attitudes and feelings change. That is why the mental reflection can also change, because various circumstances influence it very significantly.

2. Activity. This process cannot coexist with passive behavior or regression. Thanks to this quality of the psyche, the individual, without even realizing it, is constantly looking for the best and most comfortable conditions.

3. Objectivity. The personality gradually develops, therefore the psyche also makes constant progress. Since we study the environment through activity, mental reflection is objective and natural.

4. Subjectivity. Despite the fact that this process is objective, it is also influenced by the individual’s past, his environment and his own character. That is why characterization includes subjectivity. Each of us looks at the same world and events in our own way.

5. Speed. Our ability to solve some problems with lightning speed exists thanks to the psyche. It has the right to be called superior to reality.

Stages and levels

Even if this process seems like something integral to us, it is still divided into several stages. The main stages and levels of mental reflection include:

1. Presentation. This level is characterized by the dynamic activity of the individual’s subconscious. Past memories that were partially forgotten reappear in the imagination. This situation is not always influenced by the senses.

The degree of importance and significance of incidents or phenomena has a great influence. Some of these incidents disappear, leaving only the most necessary episodes.

An individual, thanks to thinking, creates his ideals, makes plans, controls consciousness as best he can. This is how personal experience comes about.

2. Sensory criterion. This level is also called sensory. It is where mental images are built based on what we perceive through our senses. This influences the transformation of information in the required direction.

Due to the fact that taste, smell, sensation are excited, personality data is enriched and has a stronger influence on the subject. If something similar happens to an individual, the brain stimulates the repetition of some moments from the past, and they influence the future. This skill helps a person to create clear pictures in his own mind at any time.

3. Logical thinking. At this level, actual events have no meaning. A person uses only those skills and abilities that are present in his consciousness. The universal human experience that the individual knows about is also important.

All stages of psychic reflection naturally intersect and interact. This process occurs due to the complex work of the individual’s sensory and rational activities.

Forms

Reflection is not alien to all living organisms when they come into contact with other objects. Three forms of mental reflection can be distinguished:

1. Physical. This is a direct relationship. This process has a time limit. Such properties are insignificant for any of the objects (invariance of traces of connection), since destruction occurs.

2. Biological. This form is characteristic only of living beings, and this is its peculiarity. Thanks to it, such organisms can “mirror” both living and alternative nature.

The biological form of mental reflection is divided into several types:

• Irritability (the response of living beings to the realities and processes of this world).
• Sensitivity (the ability to reflect other objects in the form of sensations).
• Mental reflection (the ability to change one’s character depending on the situation).

3. Mental. The most difficult and progressive form reflections. She is not considered an inactive mirror duplicate of this world. It is clearly related to scanning,decisions.

First of all, it is the surrounding world that is actively reflected in connection with a specific problem, danger or need. This form is characterized by:

• Reflection as stages of an individual overcoming himself, his own life and habits.
• Reflection as self-control and development.
• Reflection as a stage of studying the personality of others.
• Reflection as a stage of an individual’s study of social life and relationships.

Understanding the psyche as a part certain type reflection allows us to assert that it does not arise suddenly or accidentally, like something incomprehensible in nature. Mental reflection can be studied as a transformation of derivative imprints into subjective experience and on this basis a spatial image can be built.

Thus, in the foundation of mental reflection there is a primary interaction with environment, but this process requires auxiliary activity to create images of objects in the field of the subject’s behavior. Author: Lena Melissa

MENTAL REFLECTION

1. LEVELS OF REFLECTION STUDY

The concept of reflection is a fundamental philosophical concept. It also has a fundamental meaning for psychological science. The introduction of the concept of reflection into psychology as a starting point marked the beginning of its development on a new, Marxist-Leninist theoretical basis. Since then, psychology has gone through a half-century journey, during which its concrete scientific ideas have developed and changed; however, the main thing - the approach to the psyche as a subjective image of objective reality - remained and remains unshakable in it.

Speaking about reflection, we should first of all emphasize the historical meaning of this concept. It consists, firstly, in the fact that its content is not frozen. On the contrary, with the progress of sciences about nature, man and society, it develops and becomes enriched.

The second, especially important point is that the concept of reflection contains the idea of ​​development, the idea of ​​existence different levels and forms of reflection. This is about different levels those changes in reflecting bodies that arise as a result of the influences they experience and are adequate to them. These levels are very different. But still these are levels of a single relationship, which is qualitatively different forms finds itself in inanimate nature, in the animal world, and, finally, in humans.

In this regard, a task arises that is of paramount importance for psychology: to study the features and function of various levels of reflection, to trace the transitions from its simpler levels and forms to more complex levels and forms.

It is known that Lenin considered reflection as a property already inherent in the “foundation of the building of matter itself,” which at a certain stage of development, namely at the level of highly organized living matter, takes on the form of sensation, perception, and in humans - also the form of theoretical thought, concept . Such, in the broadest sense of the word, historical understanding of reflection excludes the possibility of interpreting psychological phenomena as removed from common system interaction of a world united in its materiality. The greatest significance of this for science is that the mental, the originality of which was postulated by idealism, turns into a problem scientific research; the only postulate remains the recognition of the existence of objective reality independent of the cognizing subject. This is the meaning of Lenin’s demand to go not from sensation to the external world, but from the external world to sensation, from the external world as primary to subjective mental phenomena as secondary. It goes without saying that this requirement fully applies to the concrete scientific study of the psyche, to psychology.

The path of studying sensory phenomena, coming from the external world, from things, is the path of their objective study. As evidenced by the experience of the development of psychology, many theoretical difficulties arise along this path. They were discovered already in connection with the first concrete achievements in the natural science study of the brain and sense organs. The work of physiologists and psychophysicists, although they have enriched scientific psychology with knowledge important facts and patterns that determine the emergence of mental phenomena, but they could not directly reveal the essence of these phenomena themselves; the psyche continued to be considered in its isolation, and the problem of the relationship of the psyche to the external world was solved in the spirit of the physiological idealism of J. Müller, the hieroglyphism of G. Helmholtz, the dualistic idealism of W. Wundt, etc. Parallelistic positions, which in modern psychology are only disguised, became most widespread new terminology.

A great contribution to the problem of reflection was made by the reflex theory and the teaching of I. P. Pavlov on higher nervous activity. The main emphasis in the research has shifted significantly: the reflective, mental function of the brain acted as a product and condition of the real connections of the organism with the environment influencing it. This suggested a fundamentally new orientation of research, expressed in an approach to brain phenomena from the side of the interaction that generates them, which is realized in the behavior of organisms, its preparation, formation and consolidation. It even seemed that the study of the work of the brain at the level of this, in the words of I. P. Pavlov, “the second part of physiology” in the future will completely merge with scientific, explanatory psychology.

There remained, however, the main theoretical difficulty, which is expressed in the impossibility of reducing the level of psychological analysis to the level of physiological analysis, psychological laws to the laws of brain activity. Now that psychology as a special field of knowledge has become widespread and has acquired practical distribution and acquired practical significance for solving many problems put forward by life, the position about the irreducibility of the mental to the physiological has received new evidence - in the very practice of psychological research. There is a fairly clear factual distinction mental processes, on the one hand, and implementing these processes physiological mechanisms- on the other hand, distinction, without which, of course, it is impossible to solve the problems of correlation and connection between them; At the same time, a system of objective psychological methods emerged, in particular methods of borderline, psychological and physiological research. Thanks to this, the specific study of the nature and mechanisms of mental processes has gone far beyond the limits limited by natural scientific ideas about the activity of the mental organ - the brain. Of course, this does not mean at all that all theoretical questions related to the problem of psychological and physiological have found their solution. We can only say that there has been serious progress in this direction. At the same time, new complex theoretical problems arose. One of them was posed by the development of a cybernetic approach to the study of reflection processes. Under the influence of cybernetics, the focus was on the analysis of regulation of the states of living systems through the information that controls them. This was a new step along the already outlined path of studying the interaction of living organisms with the environment, which now appeared from a new side - from the side of transmission, processing and storage of information. At the same time, there has been a theoretical convergence of approaches to qualitatively different controlled and self-governing objects - inanimate systems, animals and humans. The very concept of information (one of the fundamental ones for cybernetics), although it came from communication technology, is, so to speak, of human, physiological and even psychological origin: after all, it all began with the study of the transmission of semantic information from person to person through technical channels.

As is known, the cybernetic approach from the very beginning implicitly extended to mental activity. Very soon, its necessity emerged in psychology itself, especially clearly in engineering psychology, which studies the “man-machine” system, which is considered as a special case of control systems. Now concepts such as “feedback”, “regulation”, “information”, “model”, etc. have become widely used in such branches of psychology that are not associated with the need to use formal languages ​​capable of describing control processes occurring in any systems, including technical ones.

If the introduction of neurophysiological concepts into psychology was based on the concept of the psyche as a function of the brain, then the spread of the cybernetic approach in it has a different scientific justification. After all, psychology is a specific science about the emergence and development of a person’s reflection of reality, which occurs in his activity and which, mediating it, plays a real role in it. For its part, cybernetics, studying the processes of intrasystem and intersystem interactions in the concepts of information and similarity, allows us to introduce quantitative methods into the study of reflection processes and thereby enriches the doctrine of reflection as a general property of matter. This has been repeatedly pointed out in our philosophical literature, as well as the fact that the results of cybernetics are of significant importance for psychological research.

The significance of cybernetics, taken from this side, for the study of the mechanisms of sensory reflection seems indisputable. We must not forget, however, that general cybernetics, while providing descriptions of regulatory processes, is abstracted from their specific nature. Therefore, in relation to each special area, the question arises about its adequate application. It is known, for example, how difficult this question is when we're talking about about social processes. It is also difficult for psychology. After all, the cybernetic approach in psychology, of course, does not consist in simply replacing psychological terms with cybernetic ones; such a replacement is as fruitless as the attempt made at one time to replace psychological terms with physiological ones. It is even less permissible to mechanically include individual provisions and theorems of cybernetics into psychology.

Among the problems that arise in psychology in connection with the development of the cybernetic approach, the problem of the sensory image and model is of particularly important specific scientific and methodological significance. Despite the fact that many works by philosophers, physiologists, psychologists and cyberneticists are devoted to this problem, it deserves further theoretical analysis - in the light of the doctrine of the sensory image as a subjective reflection of the world in the human mind.

As you know, the concept of a model has become very widespread and is used in very different meanings. However, for further consideration of our problem, we can accept the simplest and roughest, so to speak, definition of it. We will call a model a system (set) whose elements are in a relationship of similarity (homomorphism, isomorphism) to the elements of some other (modeled) system. It is quite obvious that such a broad definition of a model includes, in particular, a sensual image. The problem, however, is not whether it is possible to approach the mental image as a model, but whether this approach captures its essential, specific features, its nature.

Lenin's theory of reflection considers sensory images in human consciousness as imprints, photographs, independently existing reality. This is what brings mental reflection closer to its “related” forms of reflection, which are also characteristic of matter, which does not have a “clearly expressed ability of sensation.” But this forms only one side of the characteristic of mental reflection; the other side is that mental reflection, unlike mirror and other forms of passive reflection, is subjective, which means that it is not passive, not deathly, but active, which is included in its definition human life, practice and that it is characterized by a movement of constant transfusion of the objective into the subjective.

These provisions, which have primarily an epistemological meaning, are at the same time the starting point for concrete scientific psychological research. It is at the psychological level that the problem arises specific features those forms of reflection that are expressed in the presence of subjective – sensory and mental – images of reality in a person.

The position that the mental reflection of reality is its subjective image means that the image belongs to a real subject of life. But the concept of subjectivity of an image in the sense of its belonging to the subject of life includes an indication of its activity. The connection between an image and what is reflected is not a connection between two objects (systems, sets) standing in a mutually identical relationship to each other - their relationship reproduces the polarization of any life process, at one pole of which stands the active (“biased”) subject, at the other - an object “indifferent” to the subject. It is this feature of the relationship of the subjective image to the reflected reality that is not captured by the “model-modeled” relationship. The latter has the property of symmetry, and accordingly the terms “model” and “modeled” have a relative meaning, depending on which of the two objects the subject cognizing them considers (theoretically or practically) to be a model, and which one to be modeled. As for the modeling process (i.e., the subject’s construction of models of any type, or even the subject’s cognition of the connections that determine such a change in an object that imparts to it the characteristics of a model of a certain object), this is a completely different question.

So, the concept of the subjectivity of the image includes the concept of the subject’s partiality. Psychology has long described and studied the dependence of perception, representation, thinking on “what a person needs” - on his needs, motives, attitudes, emotions. It is very important to emphasize that such partiality is itself objectively determined and is not expressed in the inadequacy of the image (although it can be expressed in it), but in the fact that it allows one to actively penetrate into reality. In other words, subjectivity at the level of sensory reflection should be understood not as its subjectivism, but rather as its “subjectivity,” i.e., its belonging to an active subject.

A mental image is a product of the subject’s vital, practical connections and relationships with the objective world, which are incomparably broader and richer than any model relationship. Therefore, its description as reproducing in the language of sensory modalities (in a sensory “code”) the parameters of an object affecting the subject’s sensory organs is the result of analysis at an essentially physical level. But it is precisely at this level that the sensory image reveals itself to be poorer in comparison with a possible mathematical or physical model of the object. The situation is different when we consider the image on a psychological level - as a mental reflection. In this capacity, on the contrary, it appears in all its richness, as having absorbed into itself that system of objective relations in which only the content it reflects really exists. Moreover, what has been said applies to a conscious sensory image - to an image at the level of conscious reflection of the world.

2. MENTAL REFLECTION ACTIVITY

In psychology, there have been two approaches, two views on the process of generating a sensory image. One of them reproduces the old sensationalist concept of perception, according to which the image is the direct result of the unilateral influence of the object on the senses.

A fundamentally different understanding of the process of generating an image goes back to Descartes. Comparing vision in his famous “Dioptrics” with the perception of objects by the blind, who “see as if with their hands,” Descartes wrote: “...If you consider that the difference seen by a blind man between trees, stones, water and other similar objects with the help of his stick, does not seem to him less than that which exists between red, yellow, green and any other color, then nevertheless the dissimilarity between bodies is nothing more than different ways move the stick or resist its movements." Subsequently, the idea of ​​the fundamental commonality of the generation of tactile and visual images was developed, as is known, by Diderot and especially Sechenov.

In modern psychology, the position that perception is an active process that necessarily includes efferent links has received general recognition. Although identifying and recording efferent processes sometimes presents significant methodological difficulties, so that some phenomena seem to indicate rather in favor of the passive, “screen” theory of perception, their mandatory participation can still be considered established.

Particularly important data were obtained in ontogenetic studies of perception. These studies have the advantage that they make it possible to study the active processes of perception in their, so to speak, expanded, open, i.e., external motor, not yet interiorized and not reduced forms. The data obtained in them are well known, and I will not present them, I will only note that it was in these studies that the concept of perceptual action was introduced.

The role of efferent processes was also studied in the study of auditory perception, the receptor organ of which, in contrast to the touching hand and the visual apparatus, is completely devoid of external activity. For speech hearing, the need for “articulatory imitation” was experimentally demonstrated, and for pitch hearing, the need for hidden activity of the vocal apparatus.

Now the position that for the appearance of an image, the unilateral influence of a thing on the subject’s sense organs is not enough and that for this it is also necessary that there be a “counter” process active on the part of the subject, has become almost banal. Naturally, the main direction in the study of perception has become the study of active perceptual processes, their genesis and structure. Despite all the differences in the specific hypotheses with which researchers approach the study of perceptual activity, they are united by the recognition of its necessity, the conviction that it is in it that the process of “translation” of external objects affecting the sense organs into a mental image is carried out. This means that it is not the senses that perceive, but a person using the senses. Every psychologist knows that a grid image (grid “model”) of an object is not the same as its visible (mental) image, as well as, for example, that the so-called sequential images can only be called images conditionally, because they lack constancy, follow the movement of the gaze and are subject to Emmert's law.

No, of course, it is necessary to stipulate the fact that the processes of perception are included in the vital, practical connections of a person with the world, with material objects, and therefore necessarily obey - directly or indirectly - the properties of the objects themselves. This determines the adequacy of the subjective product of perception – the mental image. Whatever form the perceptual activity takes, no matter what degree of reduction or automation it undergoes during its formation and development, it is fundamentally structured in the same way as the activity of the touching hand, “removing” the outline of an object. Like the activity of the touching hand, all perceptual activity finds an object where it really exists - in the external world, in objective space and time. The latter constitutes that most important psychological feature of the subjective image, which is called its objectivity or, very unfortunately, its objectification.

This feature of the sensory mental image in its simplest and most explicit form appears in relation to extraceptive object images. The fundamental psychological fact is that in the image we are given not our subjective states, but the objects themselves. For example, the light impact of a thing on the eye is perceived precisely as a thing that is outside the eye. In the act of perception, the subject does not correlate his image of a thing with the thing itself. For the subject, the image is, as it were, superimposed on the thing. This psychologically expresses the immediacy of the connection between sensations, sensory consciousness and the external world, emphasized by Lenin.

When copying an object in a drawing, we must correlate the image (model) of the object with the depicted (modeled) object, perceiving them as two different things; but we do not establish such a relationship between our subjective image of an object and the object itself, between the perception of our drawing and the drawing itself. If the problem of such a relationship arises, it is only secondary – from the reflection of the experience of perception.

It is therefore impossible to agree with the statement sometimes expressed that the objectivity of perception is the result of the “objectification” of a mental image, that is, that the influence of a thing first gives rise to its sensory image, and then this image is related by the subject to the world “projected onto the original.” Psychologically, such a special act of “reverse projection” simply does not exist under normal conditions. The eye, under the influence of a light point unexpectedly appearing on the screen on the periphery of its retina, immediately moves to it, and the subject immediately sees this point localized in objective space; what he does not perceive at all is his displacement at the moment of the eye jump in relation to the retina and changes in the neurodynamic states of his receptive system. In other words, for the subject there is no structure that could be secondarily correlated with an external object, just as he can correlate, for example, his drawing with the original.

The fact that the objectivity (“objectivity”) of sensations and perceptions is not something secondary is evidenced by many remarkable facts long known in psychology. One of them is related to the so-called "probe problem". This fact is that for a surgeon probing a wound, the “sensing” end is the end of the probe with which he gropes for the bullet - that is, his sensations turn out to be paradoxically displaced into the world of external things and are not localized at the “probe-hand” boundary, and at the boundary “probe-perceived object” (bullet). The same thing happens in any other similar case, for example, when we perceive the roughness of paper with the tip of a sharp pen. we feel the road in the dark with a stick, etc.

The main interest of these facts is that they “divorce” and partly exteriorize relationships that are usually hidden from the researcher. One of them is the “hand-probe” relationship. The influence exerted by the probe on the receptive apparatus of the hand causes sensations that are integrated into its complex visual-tactile image and subsequently play a leading role in regulating the process of holding the probe in the hand. Another relationship is the probe-object relationship. It occurs as soon as the surgeon's action brings the probe into contact with the object. But even in this first moment, the object, still appearing in its uncertainty - as “something”, as the first point on the line of the future “drawing” - image - is related to the external world, localized in objective space. In other words, a sensory mental image exhibits the property of object-relatedness already at the moment of its formation. But let’s continue the analysis of the “probe-object” relationship a little further. Localization of an object in space expresses its distance from the subject; this is the charm of the boundaries of its independent existence from the subject. These boundaries are revealed as soon as the activity of the subject is forced to submit to the object, and this happens even in the case when the activity leads to its remodeling or destruction. A remarkable feature of the relationship under consideration is that this the border passes as the border between two physical bodies: one of them - the tip of the probe - implements the cognitive, perceptual activity of the subject, the other constitutes the object of this activity. On the border of these two material things the sensations that form the “fabric” of the subjective image of the object are localized: they act as. shifted to the touching end of the probe - an artificial distance receptor, which forms an extension of the arm of the acting subject.

If in the described conditions of perception the conductor of the subject’s action is a material object that is set in motion, then with distant perception itself the process of spatial localization of the object is rearranged and becomes extremely complicated. In the case of perception through a probe, the hand does not move significantly in relation to the probe, but in visual perception, the eye is mobile, “sorting through” the light rays that reach its retina and are cast by the object. But even in this case, in order for a subjective image to arise, it is necessary to comply with the conditions that move the “subject-object” boundary to the surface of the object itself. These are the very conditions that create the so-called invariance of a visual object, namely, the presence of such displacements of the retina relative to the reflected light flux that create, as it were, a continuous “change of feelers” controlled by the subject, which is the equivalent of their movement along the surface of the object. Now the subject’s sensations also shift to the external boundaries of the object, but not along the thing (probe), but along the light rays; the subject sees not a retinal, continuously and rapidly changing projection of an object, but an external object in its relative invariance and stability.

It was precisely the ignorance of the main feature of the sensory image - the relation of our sensations to the external world - that created the largest misunderstanding that prepared the ground for subjectively idealistic conclusions from the principle of the specific energy of the sense organs. This misunderstanding lies in the fact that the subjectively experienced reactions of the sensory organs, caused by the actions of stimuli, were identified by I. Muller with sensations included in the image of the external world. In reality, of course, no one mistakes the glow resulting from electrical irritation of the eye for real light, and only Munchausen could have come up with the idea of ​​​​igniting gunpowder on the shelf of a gun with sparks falling from the eyes. Usually we quite correctly say: “it’s dark in the eyes”, “it’s ringing in the ears” - in the eyes and ears, and not in the room, on the street, etc. In defense of the secondary nature of the attribution of the subjective image, one could refer to Zenden, Hebb and other authors describing cases of restoration of vision in adults after removal of congenital cataracts: at first they experience only a chaos of subjective visual phenomena, which then correlate with objects of the external world and become their images. But these are people with already formed objective perception in another modality, who now receive only a new contribution from vision; Therefore, strictly speaking, what we have here is not a secondary reference of the image to the external world, but the inclusion of elements of a new modality in the image of the external world.

Of course, distant perception (visual, auditory) is a process of extreme complexity, and its study encounters many facts that seem contradictory and sometimes inexplicable. But psychology, like any science, cannot be built only as a sum of empirical facts; it cannot avoid theory, and the whole question is what theory it is guided by.

In the light of the theory of reflection, the school “classical” scheme: a candle -> its projection on the retina -> the image of this projection in the brain, emitting some kind of “metaphysical light” - is nothing more than a superficial, grossly one-sided (and therefore incorrect) image mental reflection. This scheme directly leads to the recognition that our senses, possessing “specific energies” (which is a fact), fence off the subjective image from external objective reality. It is clear that no description of this scheme of the perception process in terms of the spread of nervous excitation, information, construction of models, etc. is able to change it in essence.

The other side of the problem of a sensory subjective image is the question of the role of practice in its formation. It is well known that the introduction of the category of practice into the theory of knowledge constitutes the main point of the divide between the Marxist understanding of knowledge and the understanding of knowledge in pre-Marxian materialism, on the one hand, and in idealist philosophy, on the other. “The point of view of life, of practice, must be the first and main point of view of the theory of knowledge,” says Lenin. As the first and main point of view, this point of view is also preserved in the psychology of sensory cognitive processes.

It was already said above that perception is active, that the subjective image of the external world is a product of the subject’s activity in this world. But this activity cannot be understood otherwise than as realizing the life of a bodily subject, which is, first of all, a practical process. Of course, it would be a serious mistake to consider in psychology any perceptual activity of an individual as occurring directly in the form of practical activity or directly arising from it. The processes of active visual or auditory perception are separated from direct practice, so that both the human eye and the human ear become, as Marx put it, theoretical organs. The only sense of touch supports direct practical contacts of the individual with the external material-objective world. This is an extremely important circumstance from the point of view of the problem under consideration, but it does not exhaust it completely. The fact is that the basis of cognitive processes is not the individual practice of the subject, but the “totality of human practice.” Therefore, not only the thinking, but also the perception of a person greatly exceeds in its richness the relative poverty of his personal experience.

Correctly posing in psychology the question of the role of practice as the basis and criterion of truth requires investigating exactly how practice enters into human perceptual activity. It must be said that psychology has already accumulated a lot of concrete scientific data that closely leads to the solution of this issue.

As already mentioned, psychological research is making it more and more obvious to us that the decisive role in the processes of perception belongs to their efferent links. In some cases, namely, when these links have their expression in motor skills or micromotor skills, they appear quite clearly; in other cases they are “hidden”, expressed in the dynamics of the current internal states of the receiving system. But they always exist. Their function is “assimilative” not only in a narrower sense, but also in a broader sense. The latter also covers the function of including the total experience of objective human activity in the process of generating an image. The fact is that such inclusion cannot be achieved as a result of a simple repetition of combinations of sensory elements and the actualization of temporary connections between them. After all, we are not talking about the associative reproduction of the missing elements of sensory complexes, but about the adequacy of the emerging subjective images general properties the real world in which a person lives and acts. In other words, we are talking about the subordination of the process of generating an image to the principle of verisimilitude.

To illustrate this principle, let us again turn to well-known psychological facts - to the effects of “pseudo-spock” visual perception, which we have now begun to study again. As is known, the pseudoscopic effect is that when viewing objects through binoculars composed of two Dove prisms, a natural distortion of perception occurs: closer points of objects seem more distant and vice versa. As a result, for example, a concave plaster mask of a face is seen under certain lighting as a convex, relief image of it, and a relief image of a face is seen, on the contrary, as a mask. But the main interest of experiments with a pseudoscope is that a visible pseudoscopic image appears only if it is believable (a plaster mask of a face is as “plausible” from the point of view of reality as its plaster convex sculptured image), or in the case if in one way or another it is possible to block the inclusion of a visible pseudoscopic image in a person’s existing picture of the real world.

It is known that if you replace a human head made of plaster with the head of a real person, then the pseudoscopic effect does not arise at all. Particularly demonstrative are the experiments in which the subject, armed with a pseudoscope, is shown simultaneously two objects in the same visual field - both a real head and its convex plaster image; then the person’s head is seen as usual, and the plaster is perceived pseudoscopically, that is, like a concave mask. Such phenomena are observed, however, only if the pseudoscopic image is plausible. Another feature of the pseudoscopic effect is that in order for it to occur, it is better to demonstrate the object against an abstract, non-objective background, i.e., outside the system of concrete-objective connections. Finally, the same principle of verisimilitude is expressed in the absolutely amazing effect of the appearance of such “additions” to a visible pseudoscopic image that make its existence objectively possible. Thus, placing a screen with holes in front of a certain surface through which parts of this surface can be seen, we should obtain the following picture with pseudoscopic perception: parts of the surface that are located behind the screen, visible through its holes, should be perceived by the subject as being closer to him than screen, i.e., hanging freely in front of the screen. In reality, the situation is different. At favorable conditions the subject sees - as it should be with pseudoscopic perception - parts of the surface located behind the screen, in front of the screen; they, however, do not “hang” in the air (which is implausible), but are perceived as some volumetric physical bodies protruding through the opening of the screen. In the visible image, an increase appears in the form of lateral surfaces that form the boundaries of these physical bodies. And finally, the last thing: as systematic experiments have shown, the processes of the emergence of a pseudoscopic image, as well as the elimination of its pseudoscopicity, although they occur simultaneously, are by no means automatic, not by themselves. They are the result of perceptual operations carried out by the subject. The latter is proven by the fact that subjects can learn to control both of these processes.

The point of experiments with a pseudoscope, of course, is not at all that by creating a distortion of the projection of demonstrated objects on the retina of the eyes using special optics, it is possible, under certain conditions, to obtain a false subjective visual image. Their real meaning consists (as well as the similar classical “chronic” experiments of Stratton, I. Kohler and others) in the opportunity they open to explore the process of such a transformation of information arriving at the sensory “input”, which is subject to the general properties, connections, patterns of real reality. This is another, more complete expression of the objectivity of the subjective image, which now appears not only in its original relation to the reflected object, but also in its relation to the objective world as a whole.

It goes without saying that a person should already have a picture of this world. It develops, however, not only at the immediate sensory level, but also at higher cognitive levels - as a result of an individual’s mastery of the experience of social practice, reflected in linguistic form, in a system of meanings. In other words, the “operator” of perception is not simply previously accumulated associations of sensations and not apperception in the Kantian sense, but social practice.

The former, metaphysically thinking psychology invariably moved when analyzing perception on the plane of double abstraction: the abstraction of a person from society and the abstraction of the perceived object from its connections with objective reality. The subjective sensory image and its object appeared for her as two things opposing each other. But a mental image is not a thing. Contrary to physicalist ideas, it does not exist in the substance of the brain in the form of a thing, just as there is no “observer” of this thing, which can only be the soul, only the spiritual “I”. The truth is that valid and active person with the help of his brain and its organs perceives external objects; their appearance to him is their sensory image. Let us emphasize once again: the phenomenon of objects, and not the physiological states caused by them.

In perception, there is constantly an active process of “extracting” from reality its properties, relationships, etc., their fixation in short-term or long-term states of receiving systems and the reproduction of these properties in acts of formation of new images, in acts of formation of new images, in acts of recognition and object recall.

Here again we must interrupt the presentation with a description psychological fact, illustrating what was just said. Everyone knows what guessing mysterious pictures is. You need to find in the picture a hidden image of the object indicated in the riddle (for example, “where is the hunter,” etc.). A trivial explanation of the process of perception (recognition) in a picture of the desired object is that it occurs as a result of successive comparisons of the visual image of this subject, available to the subject, with separate complexes of picture elements; the coincidence of this image with one of the complexes of the picture leads to its “guessing”. In other words, this explanation comes from the idea of ​​two things being compared: the image in the subject’s head and his image in the picture. As for the difficulties that arise in this case, they are due to the lack of emphasis and completeness of the image of the desired object in the picture, which requires repeated “trying on” of the image to it. The psychological implausibility of such an explanation suggested to the author the idea of ​​a simple experiment, which consisted in the fact that the subject was not given any indication of the object disguised in the picture. The subject was told: “before you are the usual mysterious pictures for children: try to find the object that is hidden in each of them.” Under these conditions, the process could not proceed at all according to the scheme of comparing the image of the object that arose in the subject with its image contained in the elements of the picture. Nevertheless, the subjects solved the mysterious pictures. They “scooped” the image of the object from the picture, and their image of this familiar object was updated.

We have now come to a new aspect of the problem of the sensory image - the problem of representation. In psychology, a representation is usually called a generalized image that is “recorded” in memory. The old, substantial understanding of the image as a certain thing led to the same substantial understanding of representation. This is a generalization that arises as a result of superimposing on each other - in the manner of Galton's photography - sensory imprints, to which a word-name is associatively attached. Although within the limits of such an understanding the possibility of transformation of ideas was allowed, they were still thought of as certain “ready-made” formations stored in the warehouses of our memory. It is easy to see that such an understanding of representations is in good agreement with the formal-logical doctrine of concrete concepts, but is in blatant contradiction with the dialectical-materialist understanding of generalizations.

Our sensory generalized images, like concepts, contain movement and, therefore, contradictions; they reflect the object in its diverse connections and mediations. This means that no sensory knowledge is a frozen imprint. Although it is stored in a person’s head, it is not as “ready-made”, but only virtually – in the form of formed physiological brain constellations that are capable of realizing the subjective image of an object that is revealed to a person in one or another system of objective connections. The idea of ​​an object includes not only what is similar in objects, but also different, as it were, facets of it, including those that do not “overlap” each other, and are not in a relationship of structural or functional similarity.

Not only concepts are dialectical, but also our sensory representations; therefore, they are capable of performing a function that cannot be reduced to the role of fixed reference models, correlating with the influences received by the receptors from individual objects. As a mental image, they exist inseparably from the activity of the subject, which they saturate with the wealth accumulated in them, making it alive and creative. *** *

*The problem of sensory images and ideas arose before psychology from the very first steps of its development. The question of the nature of our sensations and perceptions could not be ignored by any psychological direction, no matter what philosophical basis it came from. It is not surprising, therefore, that a huge number of works – theoretical and experimental – have been devoted to this problem. Their numbers continue to grow rapidly today. As a result, a number of individual questions turned out to be developed in extremely detail and almost unlimited factual material was collected. Despite this, modern psychology is still far from being able to create a holistic, non-eclectic concept of perception, covering its various levels and mechanisms. This especially applies to the level of conscious perception.

New prospects in this regard are opened by the introduction into psychology of the category of mental reflection, the scientific productivity of which now no longer requires proof. This category, however, cannot be taken outside of its internal connection with other basic Marxist categories. Therefore, introducing the category of reflection into scientific psychology necessarily requires a restructuring of its entire categorical structure. The immediate problems that arise on this path are problems of activity, the problem of the psychology of consciousness, the psychology of personality. The following presentation is devoted to their theoretical analysis.

Chapter 13. MENTAL STATE § 13.1. THE CONCEPT OF “STATE” IN THE NATURAL AND HUMANITIES The problem of state and the term “state” itself have long occupied the minds of representatives of philosophy and the natural sciences. For the first time, the question of the concept of “state” was raised by Aristotle,