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

The brain realizes the mental reflection of the objective world. The latter has the internal and external environment of his life. The first is reflected in human needs, i.e. in a general feeling, and the second - in sensual 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 leading character;
• provides an opportunity to correctly reflect reality;
• develops and improves;
• refracted through individuality.

Psychic Reflection Properties:

• mental reflection is able to receive information about the surrounding world;
• it is not a reflection of the world;
• it can't be traced.

Characteristics of mental reflection

Mental processes originate in vigorous activity, but on the other hand they are controlled by mental reflection. Before we take any action, we present 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 psychic is expressed not only as a process, but also as a result, that is, a certain fixed image. Images and concepts reflect the relationship of a person to them, as well as to his life and work. 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

The appearance of a living creature's own activity (including the response, i.e. reactive) opens up new opportunities for interaction with the surrounding objects, presented to the subject of activity by objects of the field of his action (useful or harmful). Now the living being may seek to make intentional physical contact with certain objects (such as food) or avoid physical contact with objects of danger to the living being. There is a possibility of a transition from an accidental meeting with an object to a deliberate search for an object or avoiding physical contact with it. This search activity is caused not by external, but by internal causes of a living being, its life tasks (needs).

In other words, the problem arises of determining the presence and location in space of the desired object and distinguishing it as different from other objects.

Help in solving this problem can be the ability of objects to directly enter into physical contact with living objects, independently emit some energy or reflect external radiation, i.e. the energy of any intermediary (for example, the radiation of the Sun and other luminous objects, sound and ultrasonic radiation, etc.). In this case, a living being often itself generates energy flows (ultrasound, electromagnetic field, etc.). These radiations, reflected from objects, begin to carry the signs of these objects and can come into contact with the sense organs of living beings before the real physical contact between objects and a living being, i.e. remotely. But a biological reflection, which can only create a signal of impact on a living being, provides information only about the presence of a source of physical (chemical) impact in the environment. It often cannot indicate either the direction or the location of the influencing object in the field of action of a living being, or the shape and size of the object. We need a new form of reflection. The possibility of its appearance is determined by the ability of the nervous tissue to transform biological signals (biocurrents) into subjective feelings (experiences or states). It must be assumed that nerve impulses, due to the characteristics of nerve cells, can be transformed into subjective states of the living being itself, i.e. into light, sound, heat and other feelings (experiences).

Now we have to understand the following.

• 1. How does this transformation of nerve impulses into subjective experiences take place, and what features do nerve cells differ in order to give subjective states (experiences)?
• 2. Does subjective experience remain only the state of a living being, or is it capable of separating the bearer of experience and the external world? If the subjective experience (state) is initially unable to separate the subject and the external world, then what is the mechanism of such separation and how is it formed?
• 3. What is the participation of subjective feelings (the result of the transformation of nerve impulses) in ensuring the localization of the desired object constructed by the subject in space? How is this subjective space created? How is the direction and location of an object in it determined? How is the image of an object constructed in general, i.e. object as a representative of the object, on the basis of subjective feeling?

Not all answers are visible to us today, but without them, the value of ideas about the transformation of biological signals into subjective states (feelings) turns out to be small. We know that the ability to subjective experiences (states) as feelings that arose in evolution is somehow involved in providing a living being with information about the shape, size and location of the desired object in space, its movements and other properties. To explain these processes, we are forced to enter the realm of assumptions that have only partial grounds for their confirmation or do not have them at all.

Today we know quite definitely how the primary traces of interaction are formed in the sense organs. It is known in more or less detail how the secondary transformation of primary traces into biological impulses (for example, into nerve impulses from the organs of hearing, vision, temperature and tactile receptors, etc.) occurs. But we do not know the mechanism of translation (transformation) of nerve impulses into a subjective state. We do not know what is the mechanism of separation in the generated images of the state of a living being and information about the outside world.

On the other hand, we understand that subjective feeling (sound, for example) and air vibration are not the same thing. The first remains a signal of an external event, although it is isomorphic to it. But we also understand that behind the ability of an object to consistently reflect the light of the green spectrum (or red, yellow, etc.) lies a constant objective quality of the object itself. Therefore, although the subjective experience of the color of an electromagnetic radiation wave affecting the body is only a signal, a sign of external influence, a sensation of the color of an object is a reflection of the objective property of the object. And when we get three different subjective experiences from one and the same object - shine when illuminated, slippery when touched, and cold when felt at temperature - we understand that these are three different descriptions of the same quality of the object - its smoothness. Here, feelings begin to function as a language for describing the reality that exists outside of us, they become a sensual language in which we (living beings) try to describe the external world for ourselves. And this means that subjective experiences and sensations are the result of two different processes: the first arise as a transformation of bio-impulses, and the second are built by the subject of perception as the simplest images of objects.

At the same time, we must remember one more function of subjective experiences - on their basis and with their help, a living being discovers objects located in space, i.e. subject field in which it operates. Today we can describe how this process is built only in the most general form or, on the contrary, in separate small details that do not give a general picture of the formation of what is called the image of an object, the image of a situation and the image of the world, i.e. what is called the mental image.

Let's take a general look at how the visual image of objects is formed in order to see those unresolved problems that still exist in the analysis of mental reflection. Recall our reflection scheme (Fig. 2.4).

Rice. 2.4.

The first stage is physical reflection. But now object A and object B do not interact directly, directly, but through an intermediary. An intermediary C appears - a source of light. Light interacts with object A (table) and, reflected from it already changed (C + a), falls on the human eye. The structures of the eye interact with light, and we get the primary traces of light (C + a) on the retina (1). Further, these primary traces are transformed into spikes of nerve impulses (2) that travel along the optic nerve through the subcortical nuclei to the occipital regions of the cerebral cortex. Reaching the primary visual fields of the brain, nerve impulses are transformed into light sensation (3). But normally, as you know, in this situation we see not light, but table A (4), which occupies a certain place in space. A natural question arises: “Where did the table come from, if the eye interacted only with light and the traces of light, and not the table, were transformed in the brain?

The first thing that inquisitive readers noticed was that the eye deals not just with light, but with traces of the interaction of light with the table. After such an interaction, the light reflected from the table changes: in its spectrum, in the direction and location of the rays in space, and in other indicators. So objectively - in the traces of the interaction of light and the table there is information about the table. But according to the laws of transformation of traces, the image of a table as a three-dimensional object located in space cannot arise. A picture of color spots with a certain contour can form, but not an image of a table, i.e. vision of an object occupying its place in space. What makes a transformed subjectively experienced picture a visible space with three-dimensional objects? In other words, we must ask ourselves the question: "How, through what mechanisms and methods is the visual subjective feeling (as a subjective state, as a visual picture) once again transformed into a visible object space, where desirable and undesirable objects are located?" There can be only one answer - in no way and in no way can this subjective picture turn into an image of an object. Today, the only answer that is close to the truth is the recognition by such a mechanism of a living being's own directed activity, which builds images of the objective conditions of its behavioral space, i.e. representing to the subject the visible external world; activity, "stretching" the visual sensory picture into the visible spatial field of adaptive activity and creating in it images of physical objects as objects of needs or guidelines. The task of generating images of objects arises before the subject of activity only when adaptive behavior creates the need for the subject of activity to discover the subject conditions of his behavioral space. In other words, the psyche as a discovery for the subject of his field of action was initially included in the activity of a living being as a necessary link, as an integral part of adaptive behavior, which I. M. Sechenov, S. L. Rubinshtein and A. N. Leontiev paid attention to.

Since, along with the response activity to interaction with the objects of the world, a living being has the ability to search initiative, i.e. activity coming from him, we can assume that this search activity and special additional activity ensure the creation of images of objects in the spatial field of action of a living being. Somehow, in constructing the image of the situation, the reciprocal activity of a living being also participates - its behavior, taking into account the presence of a real object and its properties. In other words, a special activity of a living being is required for the formation of a sample of an objective spatial field of action, i.e. special interaction with the environment. We still poorly know how this process of mental reflection occurs, but we have a lot of evidence that without the living being’s own activity aimed at building an image of the situation (i.e., the subject’s subject field of action), the opening of a behavioral space with objects is not formed. Psychic reflection, as we see, corresponds to its own type of interaction with the world.

This position remains true not only for a simple situation of constructing a spatial image of an object, but also for more complex cases of acquiring ready-made knowledge (training) and building a picture of the world (science). Without the student's own active work, there will be no success as a scientist. A natural question arises as to the nature of this special activity. So far, the answer to this question is only conjectural.

A living being is an active being. It maintains its existence without any external reasons, having a program of renewal of itself (ie, a program of self-construction), for the implementation of which appropriate external and internal conditions are needed. This primordially existing activity of a living being in evolution is transformed into external motor activity and into activity on the internal level, generated on the basis of subjective states as feelings and images of the objective conditions of the behavioral space. Activity is manifested, first of all, in response adaptive reactions, in exploratory initiative behavior and in adaptive behavior to meet the various needs (life tasks) of a living being.

Since, as we see, the image of objects and the situation as a whole is impossible without the independent activity of a living being, we must assume that primary activity also penetrates into the sphere of subjective experiences. It manifests itself not only in the movements of the whole body, limbs and sensory organs, "feeling" the object, but also in a special activity in terms of subjective phenomena. It was precisely such activity that the great H. Helmholtz could designate in the analysis of perceptions as "unconscious inference." Assessing the results of its directed interaction with the object, a living being builds on the basis of subjective states (feelings) of certain modalities the image of the object of its field of action.

With this understanding of mental reflection, a serious question arises about the content of the concept of "psyche". What is considered psyche? A subjective state (experience as a feeling), an image of an object, or all together?

The answer is not easy to give, and it cannot be unambiguous.

We have established that on the basis of mental reflection, it is no longer a response, but behavior - a complexly constructed, delayed in time from the primary interaction activity of a living being, solving its life problems, often initiated by the living being itself.

Biological reflection serves the reactions of a living being, and complex, lasting behavior, with the achievement of intermediate results, can be based only on mental reflection, which provides knowledge about the conditions of behavior and regulates behavior.

Understanding the psyche as one of the forms of reflection allows us to say that the psyche does not appear in the world unexpectedly, as something unclear in nature and origin, but is one of the forms of reflection and has its analogues in the living and inanimate world (physical and biological reflection). Mental reflection can be considered as the transformation of secondary traces into a subjective state (experience), and on its basis, the construction by the subject of activity of an objective spatial image of the field of action. We see that psychic reflection is based on primary interaction with the outside world, but for psychic reflection, a special additional activity of a living being is needed to build images of objects in the subject's behavior field.

We have already talked about how over the primary traces of the interaction of objects (energy flows and objects), which we can consider as a physical reflection, a biological reflection is built up in the form of primary traces of interaction with the outside world transformed into the own processes of a living being and in the form of adequate responses. organism.

Transformed into nerve impulses, the traces of the primary interaction are further transformed into subjective states (sensory experiences) of external influences. This subjective form of reflection becomes the basis for discovering the subject field of action of a living being, adequately acting in this subject space, taking into account the properties of objects, or, in other words, on the basis of subjective images of objects and the situation as a whole.

It is clear that the images of objects and situations can be attributed to mental reflection. But the question arises about subjective experience itself as feeling. Can it be attributed to mental reflection, or is it necessary to single out a special form - subjective reflection (experience), which is not the psyche? To answer this question, it is necessary to consider the concept of the psyche in more detail.

• Spinoza B. (1632-1677) - Dutch materialist philosopher.
• Spinoza B. Ethics // Selected Works. T. 1. M., 1957. S. 429.
• There.
• Spinoza B. Ethics // Selected Works. T. 1. M., 1957. S. 423.

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 passed half a century, 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 of 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, in the course of the progress of the sciences about nature, about man and society, it develops and enriches itself.

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

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 laid down in the "foundation of the very building of matter", which at a certain stage of development, namely at the level of highly organized living matter, takes the form of sensation, perception, and in man - also the form of theoretical thought, concept . Such, in the broadest sense of the word, historical understanding of reflection excludes the possibility of treating psychological phenomena as withdrawn from the general system of interaction of a single world in its materiality. The greatest significance of this for science lies in the fact that the psychic, the originality of which was postulated by idealism, turns into a problem of 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 extends to the concrete scientific study of the psyche, to psychology.

The path of investigating sensory phenomena, coming from the external world, from things, is the path of their objective investigation. As the experience of the development of psychology testifies, many theoretical difficulties arise along this path. They were already revealed in connection with the first concrete achievements in the study of the brain and sense organs in the natural sciences. Although the works of physiologists and psychophysicists have enriched scientific psychology with knowledge of important facts and regularities that determine the emergence of mental phenomena, they have not been able to 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 mental to the outside world was solved in the spirit of the physiological idealism of I. Müller, the hieroglyphism of H. Helmholtz, the dualistic idealism of W. Wundt, etc. The most widespread are parallelistic positions, which in modern psychology are only disguised new terminology.

A great contribution to the problem of reflection was made by the reflex theory, the teachings of IP Pavlov on higher nervous activity. The main emphasis in the study has shifted significantly: the reflective, mental function of the brain has acted as a product and condition of the real connections of the organism with the environment acting on it. This prompted a fundamentally new orientation of research, expressed in the 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 IP Pavlov, "the second part of physiology" in the future completely merges with scientific, explanatory psychology.

However, the main theoretical difficulty remained, 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 has acquired practical significance for solving many problems put forward by life, the proposition about the irreducibility of the mental to the physiological has received new evidence - in the very practice of psychological research. A fairly clear factual distinction has developed between mental processes, on the one hand, and the physiological mechanisms that implement these processes, on the other, a 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, in particular methods of borderline, psychological and physiological research, also took shape. Thanks to this, a concrete study of the nature and mechanisms of mental processes has gone far beyond the limits limited by natural-science ideas about the activity of the organ of the psyche - the brain. Of course, this does not mean at all that all theoretical questions relating to the problem of the psychological and physiological have found their solution. We can only say that serious progress has been made 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 the 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 the transmission, processing and storage of information. At the same time, there was a theoretical convergence of approaches to qualitatively different controlled and self-controlled objects - inanimate systems, animals and humans. The very concept of information (one of the fundamental for cybernetics), although it came from communication techniques, is, so to speak, in its origin human, physiological and even psychological: after all, everything began with the study of the transmission of semantic information through technical channels from person to person.

As is known, the cybernetic approach from the very beginning was implicitly extended to psychic activity as well. Very soon, its necessity appeared in psychology itself, especially in a clear way - 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 ​​that can describe management processes occurring in any systems, including technical ones.

If the introduction of neurophysiological concepts into psychology was based on the position 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, by studying the processes of intrasystem and intersystem interactions in terms of information and similarity, makes it possible to introduce quantitative methods into the study of reflection processes and thereby enriches the study 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 essential for psychological research.

The significance of cybernetics, taken from this side of it, for the study of the mechanisms of sensory reflection seems indisputable. However, we must not forget that general cybernetics, while describing the processes of regulation, abstracts from their concrete nature. Therefore, in relation to each special area, the question arises of its adequate application. It is known, for example, how difficult this question is when it comes to 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 just as fruitless as the attempt made in its time to replace psychological terms with physiological ones. It is all the less admissible to mechanically include individual propositions 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 has a particularly important specific scientific and methodological significance. Despite the fact that many works of philosophers, physiologists, psychologists and cybernetics 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 received the widest distribution and is used in very different meanings. However, for further consideration of our problem, we can accept the simplest and crudest, so to speak, definition of it. We will call a model such a system (set) whose elements are in relation of similarity (homomorphism, isomorphism) to the elements of some other (simulated) 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 the mental image can be approached as a model, but whether this approach captures its essential, specific features, its nature.

The Leninist theory of reflection considers sensory images in the human mind as imprints, snapshots of an independently existing reality. This is what brings mental reflection closer to forms of reflection “related” to it, which are also characteristic of matter that does not have a “clearly expressed ability to sense”. But this forms only one aspect of the characterization of psychic 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 dead, but active, that its definition includes human life, practice, and that it is characterized by a movement of constant transfusion of the objective into the subjective.

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

The proposition that the mental reflection of reality is its subjective image means that the image belongs to the real subject of life. But the concept of the subjectivity of the image in the sense of its belonging to the subject of life includes an indication of its activity. The connection of the image with the reflected is not the connection of two objects (systems, sets) that stand in a mutually identical relationship to each other - their relationship reproduces the polarization of any life process, on one pole of which there is an active ("biased") subject, on the other - object "indifferent" to the subject. This peculiarity of the relation of the subjective image to the reflected reality is not grasped by the “model-modeled” relation. The latter has the property of symmetry, and, accordingly, the terms “model” and “simulated” have a relative meaning, depending on which of the two objects the subject who cognizes them considers (theoretically or practically) as a model, and which one is modeled. As for the process of modeling (i.e., the construction by the subject of models of any type, or even the knowledge by the subject of the connections that determine such a change in the object, which gives it the features of a model of some object), this is a completely different question.

So, the concept of the subjectivity of the image includes the concept of the bias of the subject. Psychology has long described and studied the dependence of perception, representation, thinking on "what a person needs" - on his needs, motives, attitudes, emotions. At the same time, it is very important to emphasize that such partiality is itself objectively determined and is expressed not 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.

The mental image is a product of vital, practical connections and relations of the subject with the objective world, which are incomparably wider and richer than any model relationship. Therefore, its description as reproducing in the language of sensory modalities (in the sensory "code") the parameters of the object that affect the sense organs of the subject is the result of analysis at the essentially physical level. But just at this level, the sensory image reveals itself as poorer in comparison with a possible mathematical or physical model of the object. The situation is different when we consider the image at the psychological level - as a mental reflection. In this capacity, on the contrary, it appears in all its richness, as having absorbed that system of objective relations in which only the content reflected by it is real and exists. Moreover, what has been said refers to a conscious sensory image - to an image at the level of a conscious reflection of the world.

2. ACTIVITY OF MENTAL REFLECTION

In psychology, there are 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 one-sided impact 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 Dioptric with the perception of objects by the blind, who "as if they see with their hands", Descartes wrote: "... If you think that the difference seen by the blind 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, yet the dissimilarity between bodies is nothing more than how to move the stick in different ways 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 by Sechenov.

In modern psychology, the position that perception is an active process, necessarily including efferent links in its composition, has received general recognition. Although the identification and registration of efferent processes sometimes presents significant methodological difficulties, so that some phenomena seem to be evidence rather in favor of a passive, "screen" theory of perception, nevertheless, their mandatory participation can be considered established.

Particularly important data have been obtained in ontogenetic studies of perception. These studies have the advantage that they make it possible to study the active processes of perception in them, so to speak, in expanded, open, i.e., external motor, not yet internalized 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 tactile hand and the visual apparatus, is completely devoid of external activity. For speech hearing, the need for "articulatory imitation" was experimentally shown, for pitch hearing - the hidden activity of the vocal apparatus.

Now the position that for the emergence of an image is not enough one-sided impact of the thing on the sense organs of the subject and that for this it is also necessary that there be a “counter”, active process on the part of the subject, has become almost banal. Naturally, the main direction in the study of perception was the study of active perceptual processes, their genesis and structure. Despite the difference 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 “translating” external objects affecting the sense organs into a mental image is carried out. And this means that it is not the sense organs that perceive, but a person with the help of the sense organs. Every psychologist knows that the net image (net "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 be called images only conditionally, because they are devoid of 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 must 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 a perceptual activity takes, no matter what degree of reduction or automation it undergoes in the course of its formation and development, in principle it is built in the same way as the activity of a tactile hand, "removing" the outline of an object. Like the activity of a tactile 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, quite unfortunately, its objectification.

This feature of the sensory mental image in its simplest and most expansive form appears in relation to extraceptive objective 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 effect 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.

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

Therefore, one cannot agree with the assertion sometimes made that the objectivity of perception is the result of the “objectivization” of the mental image, i.e., that the action of a thing first generates its sensual 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 on the periphery of its retina of a bright point that suddenly appeared on the screen, 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 jump of the eye 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 by him 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 consists in the fact that for a surgeon probing a wound, the “feeling” is the end of the probe with which he gropes for a bullet - that is, his sensations turn out to be paradoxically displaced into the world of external things and are not localized on the “probe-hand” border, and on the border "probe-perceived object" (bullet). The same 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 lies in the fact that they "divorce" and partly exteriorize relations that are usually hidden from the researcher. One of them is the “hand-probe” relationship. The impact exerted by the probe on the receptive apparatuses 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 action of the surgeon brings the probe into contact with the object. But even in this first moment, the object, which still appears in its indeterminacy - as "something", as the first point on the line of the future "drawing" - the image - is related to the external world, localized in objective space. In other words, a sensual mental image reveals the property of objective relation already at the moment of its formation. But let's continue the analysis of the "probe-object" relationship a little further. The localization of an object in space expresses its remoteness from the subject; this is the charm of the boundaries "of his existence independent of 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 when the activity leads to its alteration or destruction. A remarkable feature of the relationship under consideration is that this the boundary passes as a boundary 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 boundary 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 tactile end of the probe - an artificial distant receptor, which forms a continuation of the hand of the acting subject.

If, under the described conditions of perception, the conductor of the subject's action is a material object that is set in motion, then with proper distant perception, the process of spatial localization of the object is rebuilt and becomes extremely complicated. In the case of perception by means of a probe, the hand does not move significantly in relation to the probe, while in visual perception, the eye is mobile, “sweeping” the light rays that reach the retina and are rejected 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 the visual object, namely, the presence of such displacements of the retina relative to the reflected light flux, which create, as it were, a continuous "change of probes" controlled by the subject, which is the equivalent of their movement along the surface of the object. Now the sensations of the subject are also shifted to the outer boundaries of the object, but not along the thing (the probe), but along the light rays; the subject sees not a retinal, continuously and rapidly changing projection of the object, but an external object in its relative invariance, stability.

Just ignoring the main sign of the sensory image - the relation of our sensations to the external world - created the biggest misunderstanding that paved the way for subjective - idealistic conclusions from the principle of specific energy of the sense organs. This misunderstanding lies in the fact that the subjectively experienced reactions of the sense organs, caused by the actions of stimuli, were identified by I. Müller with the sensations included in the image of the external world. In reality, of course, no one takes the glow resulting from electrical irritation of the eye for real light, and only Munchausen could have come up with the idea of ​​setting fire to the gunpowder on the shelf of the gun with sparks pouring from the eyes. Usually we quite rightly say: "darkness in the eyes", "ringing in the ears", - in the eyes, and ears, and not in the room, on the street, etc. In defense of the secondary attribution of the subjective image, one could refer to Zenden, Hebb and other authors who describe cases of restoration of vision in adults after the removal of congenital cataracts: at first they have only a chaos of subjective visual phenomena, which then correlate with objects of the external world, become their images. But after all, these are people with object perception already formed in a different modality, who now receive only a new contribution from the side of vision; therefore, strictly speaking, we have here not a secondary relation of the image to the external world, but the inclusion in the image of the external world of elements of a new modality.

Of course, distant perception (visual, auditory) is a process of extreme complexity, and its study comes up against 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 of the eye -> the image of this projection in the brain, emitting some kind of “metaphysical light”, is nothing more than a superficial, roughly one-sided (and therefore incorrect) image mental reflection. This scheme leads directly to the recognition that our sense organs, which have "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 process of perception in terms of the spread of nervous excitation, information, model building, etc., is able to change its essence.

The other side of the problem of a sensual 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 is the main point of the watershed between the Marxist understanding of knowledge and the understanding of knowledge in pre-Marxist 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 fundamental 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 has already been 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 primarily a practical process. Of course, it would be a serious mistake in psychology to consider any perceptual activity of an individual as proceeding directly in the form of practical activity or directly proceeding 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, in Marx's words, theoretical organs. The only sense of touch maintains 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 thinking, but also the perception of a person to a huge extent exceeds in its richness the relative poverty of his personal experience.

The correct formulation in psychology of the question of the role of practice as the basis and criterion of truth requires an investigation of exactly how practice enters into the perceptual activity of a person. It must be said that psychology has already accumulated a great deal of concrete scientific data that lead close to solving this problem.

As already mentioned, psychological research makes 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 "likening" not only in a narrower sense, but also in a broader sense. The latter also covers the function of including in the process of generating an image of the total experience of a person's objective activity. The fact is that such an inclusion cannot be carried out 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 emerging subjective images to the general properties of 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 likelihood.

To illustrate this principle, let us again turn to the well-known psychological facts for a long time - to the effects of "pseudo-peak" visual perception, the study of which we are now again engaged in. As you know, the pseudoscopic effect is that when viewing objects through binoculars made up 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 gypsum mask of a face is seen under certain lighting as a convex, relief image of it, and a relief image of a face, on the contrary, is seen as a mask. But the main interest of experiments with a pseudoscope is that a visible pseudoscopic image arises only if it is plausible (a plaster mask of a face is just as “plausible” from the point of view of reality, as is its plaster convex sculptural image), or if if in one way or another it is possible to block the inclusion of a visible pseudoscopic image in a person's picture of the real world.

It is known that if you replace the head of a person made of gypsum with the head of a real person, then the pseudoscopic effect does not occur at all. Particularly demonstrative are the experiments in which the subject, armed with a pseudoscope, is shown simultaneously in the same visual field two objects - both a real head and its convex plaster image; then the human head is seen as usual, and the plaster is perceived pseudoscopically, i.e., as a concave mask. Such phenomena are observed, however, only when the pseudoscopic image is plausible. Another feature of the pseudoscopic effect is that in order for it to arise, it is better to demonstrate the object against an abstract, non-objective background, that is, outside the system of concrete-objective relations. Finally, the same principle of likelihood is expressed in the absolutely amazing effect of the appearance of such "additions" to the visible pseudoscopic image, which make its existence objectively possible. So, placing a screen with holes in front of a certain surface through which parts of this surface can be seen, we should get the following picture with pseudoscopic perception: parts of the surface that is located behind the screen, visible through its holes, should be perceived by the subject as being closer to him than screen, i.e., how to hang freely in front of the screen. In reality, however, the situation is different. Under 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; however, they 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 side 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, but by no means automatically, 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 meaning of experiments with a pseudoscope, of course, is not at all that by creating a distortion of the projection of the objects being demonstrated on the retinas of the eyes with the help of special optics, one can, under certain conditions, obtain a false subjective visual image. Their real meaning consists (as well as classical “chronic” experiments of Stratton, I. Kohler and others similar to them) in the opportunity they open to explore the process of such a transformation of information coming to 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 initial 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 directly sensory level, but also at the highest cognitive levels - as a result of the individual's mastery of the experience of social practice, reflected in the linguistic form, in the system of meanings. In other words, the “operator” of perception is not simply the previously accumulated associations of sensations and not apperception in the Kantian sense, but social practice.

The former, metaphysically thinking psychology invariably moved in the analysis of perception on the plane of a twofold abstraction: the abstraction of man from society and the abstraction of the perceived object from its connections with objective reality. The subjective sensory image and its object appeared to her as two things opposed to each other. But the 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 the real and acting man, by means of his brain and its organs, perceives external objects; their appearance to him is their sensuous image. We emphasize once again: the phenomenon of objects, and not the physiological states caused by them.

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

Here again we must interrupt the presentation with a description of a psychological fact illustrating what has just been said. Everyone knows what it is to guess the mysterious pictures. It is necessary to find in the picture the image of the object indicated in the riddle disguised in it (for example, "where is the hunter", etc.). A trivial explanation of the process of perception (recognition) in the picture of the desired object is that it occurs as a result of successive comparisons of the visual image of the given object, which the subject has, with individual complexes of elements of the picture; the coincidence of this image with one of the image complexes 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 insufficient emphasis and completeness of the image of the desired object in the picture, which requires repeated “trying on” the image to it. The psychological implausibility of such an explanation suggested to the author the idea of ​​a simple experiment, consisting in the fact that no indication of the object disguised in the picture was given to the subject. 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 an object that arose in the test subject with its image contained in the elements of the picture. Nevertheless, the mysterious pictures were unraveled by the subjects. They "scooped out" the image of the object from the picture, and they actualized the image of this familiar object.

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 and representation. This is a generalization arising as a result of imposing on each other - in the manner of Galton's photography - sensual imprints, to which the word name is associatively attached. Although, within the limits of such an understanding, the possibility of transforming representations was admitted, they were nevertheless thought of as some kind of “ready-made” formations stored in the warehouses of our memory. It is easy to see that such an understanding of representations agrees well with the formal-logical doctrine of concrete concepts, but is in flagrant contradiction with the dialectical-materialist understanding of generalizations.

Our sensual generalized images, like concepts, contain movement and, therefore, contradictions; they reflect the object in its manifold 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 “ready-made”, after all, but only virtually – in the form of formed physiological brain constellations that are able to realize the subjective image of an object that opens up 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 its different, as it were, facets, including those that are not “superimposed” on each other, that are not in relations of structural or functional similarity.

It is not only concepts that are dialectical, but also our sensory representations; therefore, they are able to perform a function that is not reduced to the role of fixed reference models, correlating with the effects received by receptors from single objects. As a mental image, they exist inseparably from the activity of the subject, which they saturate with the wealth accumulated in them, make it lively and creative. *** *

* The problem of sensory images and representations arose before psychology from the very first steps of its development. The question of the nature of our sensations and perceptions could not be bypassed by any psychological trend, no matter what philosophical basis it came from. It is not surprising, therefore, that a huge number of works, both theoretical and experimental, have been devoted to this problem. Their number continues to grow rapidly even today. As a result, a number of individual questions turned out to be worked out in great detail and almost boundless 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 is especially true for the level of conscious perception.

New prospects in this regard are opened up 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 apart from its internal connection with other basic Marxist categories. Therefore, the introduction of the category of reflection into scientific psychology necessarily requires a restructuring of its entire categorical structure. The immediate problems that arise along this path are the essence of the problem of activity, the problem of the psychology of consciousness, the psychology of personality. Further presentation is devoted to their theoretical analysis.

Chapter 13. MENTAL STATE § 13.1. THE CONCEPT OF "STATE" IN THE NATURAL AND HUMANITIES SCIENCES The problem of the 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,