Dualism is a philosophical doctrine that considers the basis of the world. Dualism in the philosophy of mind. Dualism in religion

Philosophy seeped into the consciousness of the broad masses at the end of the last century. Then the first reports about the plurality of worlds, the reality of the existence of the microworld and its branching began to be mentioned. The duality in the cognition of the question has given rise, oddly enough, to quantum physics. Throughout their existence, philosophers have tried to get rid of duality. In philosophy, monism ruled, denying the existence of two opposite substances. Therefore, supporters of Descartes and he himself were criticized for their adherence to the duality of the world. Attempts were constantly made to combine monism with dialectics, which led to many paradoxes in philosophy.

Recently, modern philosophers have made attempts to combine dialectics and duality. For the first time in the 90s of the 20th century, the concept appeared dialectical dualism. What is dualism and what is it?

What is dualism

Dualism is philosophical trend, according to which two classes of things mutually influence each other without changing their structure. That is, the material and spiritual principles equally coexist in this current. The term dualism comes from the Latin "duality". It is the duality of this trend in philosophy that led to such a name. If we take, for example, monism, then in philosophy it will be a clear opposite.

The first philosopher to use the term dualism was H. Wolf. He believed that all those who recognize the existence of the material and non-material world are dualists. Among leading representatives This trend is considered the French philosopher Descartes and the German Kant. The first of them singled out the spiritual and bodily substances, which found their confirmation in the person himself: soul and body. The second divided the two essences of dualism into human consciousness and the objective basis of phenomena. The basis of phenomena, in his opinion, is unknown.

This philosophical trend appeared long before the founders themselves. It has existed since ancient times. In the Middle Ages, before the definition of the concept itself, it was customary to consider the eternal struggle of two principles: Good and Evil. In Marxist-Leninist philosophy, the very idea of ​​the existence of dualism is usually completely rejected, since, in its opinion, the material is the basis for the emergence and existence of the spiritual (mental) and nothing else.

Thus, this philosophical meaning is directly related to the eternal law of philosophy about the unity and struggle of opposites. philosophical law says directly that there is no unity without opposition, and opposition cannot exist without unity. Any of the selected objects has its direct opposite. Such an existence leads to an inevitable contradiction, as a result of which one of the known objects disappears completely and another appears in a new state. And so on ad infinitum.

Types of dualism

Historically, dualism has two varieties - it is Cartesianism and occasionalism.

Considering the philosophical trend in the context of historical materialism and dialectical materialism, one must take into account another equally important question of philosophy: "What comes first: matter or consciousness?".

Dualism in theology (religious) implies the presence of two opposite forces (gods). In theology, this trend is referred to as ditheism (biteism). The opposite of the doctrine presents ditheism (biteism) as a moral dualism, which at the same time does not imply any "theisms". That is, ditheism (biteism) suggests that religion can be both dual and monotheistic, but there must be a supreme god. As an example for this species serves an ancient Christian heresy - Marcionism. Marcionism claimed:

It is aimed at recognizing the equality of the material and the ideal, but it denies their relativity to each other. In Western philosophy, following the example of Descartes, mind and self-consciousness were equated on the basis of the human soul and body. In Eastern philosophy, matter and consciousness were connected, so that matter began to include the body and consciousness.

Dualism and Philosophy of Consciousness

• In the philosophy of consciousness, this is the mutual complement of consciousness and matter. Consciousness and matter are equal in importance here. This kind of philosophy is called Cartesianism. The material and the spiritual are different in their properties: the material has a shape, position in space, has a body mass; the spiritual is subjective and purposeful.
• The second form, besides Cartesianism, is dualism of qualities or properties. There is no spiritual substance, but there is something material (the brain) that has properties that give rise to mental phenomena.
• epiphenomenalism considers motives and desires as side processes occurring in the brain of causal events. The role of influence is denied psychic entities to physical processes.
• Predicativity This is another form of dualism. Means a description of the subject of judgment. For the perception of the world according to this doctrine of philosophy, many descriptions - predicates - are required.
• Symbolic physicalism(propetive dualism) presents consciousness as a group of properties independent of each other. Consciousness is not a separate substance, since the brain highlights these independent properties. When matter is like human body, then the properties appear.

Dualism in physics acts as a basis for oscillatory processes. If we consider it in quantum mechanics, then dualism here will be the duality of corpuscles and waves, or rather, the dual nature of these particles. As a compromise, this duality in quantum mechanics began to be described by the wave function of the particle.

Basic postulates of the dualistic law in life

The structure of everything in the Universe depends on the Law of dualism, which affirms the presence of a plurality of worlds. The development of all things occurs due to the transition of matter from one state to another. Even in our world we can always encounter duality, at least in a magnet. Plus and minus are two opposite components of a substance and at the same time making the substance a single whole.

The postulates of the law on the duality of the world highlight some points, without which existence is impossible:

1. Any phenomenon has its positive and negative direction.
2. Each of the opposites has a part of the antipode in it. A good explanation is given by the Chinese to the energies of Yin and Yang. Each of them has something from the other.
3. Remembering the unity and struggle of opposites, we can say that only in the struggle will harmony and unity be created.
4. Only constant conflict can be the driving force in development. Thanks to the conflict, the process of the development of the Universe does not stop for a minute.

Using the dualistic law in practice, each of us can change his worldview in relation to the ongoing processes. Even in a negative situation, you can find a piece of positive. A philosophical attitude to everything that happens will make it easier to endure the blows of fate and life will become much easier.

1.1 The mind-body problem

The mind-body problem is the following problem: what is the relationship between mind and body? Or, in an alternative formulation, what is the relationship between mental and physical properties?

Human beings are (or appear to be) endowed with both physical and mental properties. They have (or appear to have) the kind of properties that the physical sciences talk about. Among these physical properties are size, weight, shape, color, movement in time and space, etc. But they also have (or seem to have) mental properties that we do not attribute to ordinary physical objects. Among these properties are consciousness (including perceptual experience, emotional experiences, and much more) and intentionality (including beliefs, desires, and much more); these properties can also be said to be inherent in the subject or self.

Physical properties are public, in the sense that they are, in principle, equally observable by everyone. Some physical properties - for example, the properties of an electron - are not directly observable at all, but they are equally accessible to everyone with the help of scientific equipment and technologies. This is not the case with mental properties. I can tell that you are in pain based on your behavior, but only you can directly feel the pain. Likewise, you know what something looks like to you, and I can only guess about it. Conscious mental events are private to the subject, who has a privileged access to them that no one else has with respect to the physical.

The mind-body problem deals with the relationship between these two sets of properties. The mind-body problem is broken down into many components.

1. Ontological question: what are mental states and what are physical states? Is one class a subclass of another, so that all mental states are physical, or vice versa? Or are mental states and physical states completely separated from each other?

2. Causal question: Do physical states affect mental states? Do mental states affect physical states? And if so, how?

In connection with various aspects of the mental, such as consciousness, intentionality, selfhood, various aspects of the mind-body problem are revealed.

3. The problem of consciousness: what is consciousness? How does it relate to the brain and body?

4. The problem of intentionality: what is intentionality? How does it relate to the brain and body?

5. The problem of the self: what is the self? How does it relate to the brain and body?

Other aspects of the mind-body problem arise in connection with various aspects of the physical. Eg:

6. The problem of incarnation: what conditions must be met for the presence of consciousness in the body? Under what conditions does the body belong to the individual subject?

The seeming insolubility of these problems has given rise to many philosophical views.

According to materialistic views, mental states, despite appearances to the contrary, are just physical states. Behaviorism, functionalism, mind-brain identity theory, and computational theory of mind are examples of how materialists try to explain the possibility of this state of affairs. The most notable unifying factor of such theories is the attempt to unravel the nature of the mind and consciousness in terms of their ability to directly or indirectly modify behavior, but there are varieties of materialism that attempt to link the mental and the physical without resorting to a detailed explanation of the mental in terms of its role in behavior modification. . These varieties are often grouped under the rubric of "non-reductive physicalism", although this designation itself is devoid of clear contours due to a lack of agreement on the meaning of the term "reduction".

According to idealistic views, physical states are actually mental states. The point is that the physical world is empirical world, and as such it is the intersubjective product of our collective experience.

According to the dualistic view (which is discussed in this article), both the mental and the physical are real, and neither can be assimilated by the other. Below we look at the various forms of dualism and the problems associated with them.

In general, we can say that the mind-body problem exists because both consciousness and thinking (in their broadest interpretation) seem to be very different from everything physical, and there is no unanimity on how to describe such beings that are endowed with consciousness. , and the body, so that it satisfies us in terms of unity.

Among the many other articles that touch on aspects of the mind-body problem, the following can be mentioned: behaviorism (English), neutral monism (English) and.

1.2 History of dualism

Dualism contrasts the "mental" with the "corporeal," but at different times, different aspects of the mental have come into focus. In the classical and medieval periods, it was believed that materialistic explanations were most obviously inapplicable to the intellect: since Cartesian times, it was assumed that the main obstacle to materialistic monism was “consciousness”, of which phenomenal consciousness or sensation began to be recognized as an exemplary case.

The classical arrangement of accents goes back to Plato's Phaedo. Plato believed that true substances are not ephemeral physical bodies, but eternal Ideas, imperfect copies of which are bodies. These Ideas provide not only the possibility of the world, but also its intellectual comprehensibility, playing the role of universals, or what Frege called "concepts". For the philosophy of mind, it is this connection with intellectual comprehensibility that matters. Since Ideas form the foundation of intelligibility, it is they that must be grasped by the intellect in the process of cognition. In the Phaedo, Plato puts forward various arguments in favor of the immortality of the soul, but the important argument for us is that the intellect is immaterial due to the immateriality of Ideas and that the intellect must be related to the Ideas it comprehends (78b4-84b8). This kinship is so great that the soul strives to leave the body in which it is enclosed and dwell in the world of Ideas. Achieving this goal may be preceded by many reincarnations. Plato's dualism is thus not just a conception of the philosophy of mind, but an integral part of his entire metaphysics.

One of the problems with Platonic dualism was that although it speaks of the soul in the body, it does not clearly explain the connection between a particular soul and a particular body. The difference in their nature makes this connection something mysterious.

Aristotle did not believe in Platonic ideas that exist regardless of the cases of their implementation. Aristotelian ideas or forms (the capital disappears with their self-sufficiency) are the natures and properties of things, and they exist in these things. This allowed Aristotle to explain the unity of body and soul with the thesis that the soul is the form of the body. This means that the soul of a particular person is only his human nature. This seems to make the soul a property of the body, and this circumstance has contributed to the materialistic interpretation of his theory by many of its exponents, both ancient and modern. The interpretation of Aristotle's philosophy of mind - as well as his whole doctrine of forms - causes no less controversy today than it caused immediately after his death. Nevertheless, the texts leave no doubt about Aristotle's conviction that the intellect, although a part of the soul, differs from its other abilities in the absence of a bodily organ. His argument in favor of this position looks more weighty than that of Plato, an argument in favor of the immateriality of thinking and, accordingly, some kind of dualism. He argued that the intellect must be non-material because, if it were material, it could not take on all forms. Like the eye, whose physical nature is such that, in contrast to the ear, it is sensitive to light, but not to sound, the intellect, being in a physical organ, could be sensitive only to a limited range of physical things; but this is not so - we can think of any material object ( De Anima III, 4; 429a10–b9). Since it has no material organ, its activity must be essentially immaterial.

Modern followers of Aristotle, otherwise highly appreciative of his significance for modern philosophy, usually say that this argument is only historically interesting and irrelevant to the Aristotelian system as a whole. They emphasize that Aristotle was not a "Cartesian" dualist because the intellect is one aspect of the soul, and the soul is a form of the body, not a separate substance. Kenny argues that Aristotle, in his theory of the spirit as form, interprets it in the same way as Ryle did, since the soul in this theory is equated with the dispositions inherent in the living body. This "anti-Cartesian" approach to Aristotle seems to ignore the fact that, according to Aristotle, the form There is substance.

It may seem that these problems are of purely historical interest. Below, in Section 4.5, however, we will see that this is not the case.

This feature of the Aristotelian system, i.e., the identification of form and substance, is productively used in this context by Aquinas, who identifies soul, intellect and form and considers them as substance. (See, for example, Part I, questions 75 and 76). But although the form (and hence the intelligence identical to it) constitute the substance of the human personality, they are not the personality itself. Aquinas says that when we turn to the saints for prayer - with the exception of the Blessed Virgin Mary, who is believed to have kept her body in Heaven and therefore has always been a whole person - we should say, for example, not "Saint Peter, pray for us ", but "soul of St. Peter, pray for us." The soul, although an intangible substance, is a person only in unity with her body. Without a body, those aspects of her personal memory that depend on images (considered bodily) disappear. (See, Ch. I, question 89).

More modern versions of dualism can be traced back to Descartes' Meditations and the controversy that his theory provoked. Descartes was a substantial dualist. He believed that there are two types of substance: matter, the essential property of which is spatial extension, and spirit, the essential property of which is thinking. Descartes' conception of the relationship between mind and body was very different from that of the Aristotelian tradition. Aristotle considered impossible the exact science of matter. The behavior of matter essentially depends on its form. You cannot combine any matter with any form - you cannot make a knife out of butter or a man out of paper, so the nature of matter is a necessary condition for the nature of substance. But the nature of a substance cannot be deduced only from the nature of matter: it is impossible to explain the substance "from the bottom up". Matter is the determinate that has become determinate through form. This is how, Aristotle believed, the connection between the soul and the body can be explained: a specific soul exists in a specific part of matter as an organizing principle.

This belief in the relative indeterminacy of matter is one of the foundations of Aristotle's rejection of atomism. If matter is atomic, then it in itself turns out to be a collection of certain objects, and it will be natural to consider the properties of macroscopic substances as simple combinations of the natures of atoms.

Although, unlike most of his famous contemporaries and closest followers, Descartes was not an atomist, he, like others, took a mechanistic position on the question of the properties of matter. Bodies are machines that work according to their own laws. Except for the intervention of spirits, matter itself follows a deterministic course. Wherever influence on the bodies of spirits is required, they must "pull the levers" in one of the parts of this machinery, with their own laws. This raises the question of exactly where in the body such "levers" are located. Descartes chose the pineal gland - mainly because it is not duplicated on both sides of the brain and therefore may be a candidate for a unique unifying function.

The main ambiguity faced by Descartes and his contemporaries, however, was not Where interaction takes place, and How in general, two such different things as thought and extension could interact. This seems especially mysterious if one considers that causal interaction occurs through push, - as anyone who has been influenced by atomism would believe, in which the model of causality is something like a picture of billiard balls flying off from each other.

Descartes' disciples such as Arnold Geilincks and Nicolaus Malebranche concluded that all interactions between spirit and body required the direct intervention of God. The corresponding states of mind are just occasions for such interventions, not their real reasons. It would be convenient to think that the occasionalists considered all causality to be natural. with the exception of that which takes place between the spirit and the body. In fact, they generalized their conclusion and believed that all causality directly depends on God. Here we have no opportunity to discuss why they held this opinion.

Cartesian concept of dualism substances was criticized by more radical empiricists, who considered it a difficult task to give meaning to the concept of substance at all. Locke, a moderate empiricist, recognized the existence of both material and immaterial substances. Berkeley became famous for his denial of material substance - he generally denied existence beyond the spirit. In his early Notebooks, he contemplated the negation of immaterial substance because we lack the idea of ​​the latter, and the reduction of our self to a collection of "ideas" that give it content. In the end, he decided that the self, conceived as something above the ideas it is aware of, is an essential component of an adequate understanding of the human personality. Although the self and its actions are not given in consciousness as its objects, indirectly we know about them simply by virtue of the fact that we are active subjects. Hume rejected such claims and proclaimed the self as a mere concatenation of its ephemeral contents.

In fact, Hume criticized the concept of substance as a whole for lack of empirical content: when you look for the owner of the properties that make up a substance, you find only successive properties. Consequently, the spirit, he argued, is only a "bundle" or "heap" of impressions and ideas, that is, specific mental states or events, without any owner. This position became known as ligamentous dualism', and it is a special case theories of substance as a bundle, according to which objects as a whole are only ordered sets of properties. The problem for Humean is to explain what exactly binds together the elements of the bundle. This difficulty arises for any substance, but in the case of material bodies it seems that it can be resolved without special equivocations: the unity of the physical bundle is created by some causal interaction between the elements of this bundle. But if we are talking about the spirit, then the causal connection alone will not be enough; an additional relation of joint consciousness is needed. In Section 5.2.1 we will see the problematic of treating such a relation as more elementary than the notion of belonging to a subject.

Regarding Hume's theory, the following should be noted. His bundle theory is a theory whose subject matter is the nature of the unity of consciousness. As a theory of such unity, it need not be dualistic at all. The physicalists Parfit and Shoemaker, for example, support it. In general, physicalists will accept it unless they are willing to attribute unity to the brain and the organism as a whole. A bundle theory can be dualistic, provided dualism is recognized properties, which we will discuss in more detail in the next section.

The crisis in the history of dualism was associated, however, with the growing popularity mechanism in nineteenth century science. According to the Mechanist, the world is, as one would now say, "physically enclosed." This means that everything that happens is a consequence of the laws of physics and occurs in accordance with them. There is therefore no possibility for such an intervention of the spirit in the physical world as interactionism seems to require. The Mechanicist believes that the conscious spirit is epiphenomenon(a term whose widespread use is associated with the name Huxley), that is, a by-product of a physical system that does not have a reverse effect on it. Similarly, the recognition of the facts of consciousness does not violate the integrity of physical science. Many philosophers, however, have found it implausible to say, for example, the pain I have when you hit me, the visual sensations I have when I see a ferocious lion lunge at me, or the sense of conscious awareness I have. me when I listen to your argument - all this is not directly related to my reactions to all this. The interest of twentieth-century philosophy in finding a plausible form of materialistic monism owes very much to the need to avoid this counterintuitiveness. But while dualism has gone out of fashion in psychology since the advent of behaviorism, and in philosophy since Ryle, the debate is far from over. A number of eminent neuroscientists, such as Sherrington and Eccles, have continued to defend dualism as the only theory that can leave consciousness data intact. Dissatisfaction with physicalism among leading philosophers led in the last decade of the 20th century to a moderate revival of property dualism. At least some of the reasons for this will have to be clarified below.

Original: Robinson, Howard, "Dualism", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2012 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = .

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lat. dualis - dual) - 1) a philosophical interpretive paradigm, founded on the idea of ​​the presence of two principles that are irreducible to each other: spiritual and material substances (ontological D.: Descartes, Malb-ranche, etc.; it was in this context that Wolf introduced the term "D ."), object and subject (epistemological D.: Hume, Kant, etc.), consciousness and bodily organization of a person (psychophysiological D.: Spinoza, Leibniz, occasionalism, Wundt, Fechner, Paulsen, representatives of psychophysiological parallelism), as well as good and evil (ethical D.), the natural world and freedom, fact and value (neo-Kantianism), the dark and light principles of being (pre-conceptual mythological and early conceptual cosmological models: Orphism, Zoroastrianism, Manichaeism, Gnosticism, etc.). Semantic alternatives within the historical and philosophical tradition - monism and pluralism; 2) a cultural phenomenon that expresses the fundamental intention of the European - and Western in general - interpretation tradition, genetically ascending to the philosophy of Plato, in whose concept the elements of mythological and cosmological D. present in any early culture take the form of a conceptual doctrine and receive axiological content: the world of ideas as a sphere perfection of the Absolute, on the one hand, and the world of created similarities in their imperfection, on the other. The “ladder of love and beauty” (Plato) connecting both worlds is radically destroyed in Christianity, which sets the ultimate sharpness of the D. of the bottom and mountain worlds, applying it to almost all spheres of human existence through the D. of sin and virtue and the paradigm of duality of meaning (D. of sacred and earthly) of any phenomenon, which caused the intense semioticism of European culture (starting with the mediaeval). D. is understood in the Western tradition as parallelism, the fundamental and fundamental incommensurability of alternative principles (see Spinoza, for example: "neither the body can determine the soul to thinking, nor the soul can determine the body neither to movement, nor to rest, to anything - or to another"), - while in relation to Eastern views the term "D." means a fundamentally different form of the event, implying interaction and interpenetration (cf. "D." yang and yin in ancient Chinese culture and D. male and female principles in the culture of Europe - see Sex). A typical analytical situation of bifurcation of the single (revealing an internal contradiction in a cognizable object) proceeds in Western culture with an obvious vector for the ontologization of inconsistency (see the status of dialectics in European culture, the logical-rhetorical priority of dialogue in comparison with a monologue in European philosophy, theatrical art and literature) , - in contrast to Eastern cultures, which think of opposites within the framework of universal syncretism. As a cultural phenomenon, D. manifests itself in the orientation of the European mentality to the discretion of the basic inconsistency of both individual phenomena and being as a whole. - The specificity of the European cultural tradition is the ability to fix in its context a dual alternative for almost any cultural phenomenon (the very design of conceptual monism in European culture constitutes a new dual opposition Monism - D. within the framework of the historical and philosophical tradition), which creates a powerful incentive for the development of criticism and variability of thinking, alien to dogmatism (see bilateral dispute as a form of development of philosophical thinking, characteristic - in various modifications - for many areas of European culture and realized in its pure form in scholasticism). At the same time, the aforementioned trend finds its manifestation in the European-specific phenomenon of “torn consciousness”, the axiological status of which in the context of the Western tradition turns out to be very far from pathology (compare with the traditional cultures and cultures of Southeast Asia and India, where the integrity of consciousness acts not so much as a desired state as a norm) and approaches value (see Hegelian "darned stockings are better than torn stockings - not so with consciousness"). The monistic nature of the individual's spiritual world is constituted in the Western tradition as an ideal, the ascent to which is conceived as an asymptotic process. In this context, the rigid D. Descartes, who, in Heisenberg's way, sharply set the principle of uncertainty to describe the relationship between the spiritual (thinking) and corporeal (material) principles, can be interpreted as one of the attempts to model the way of being, unsurpassed in terms of logical and moral consistency and intellectual courage in the conditions of the fragmentation of the consciousness of European culture as a whole. European culture is based on dual oppositions, fundamentally unknown to other cultural traditions (D. love on earth and heaven as D. carnal sin and spiritual rebirth, for example, see Love). Hence the intense search European culture harmony paradigms and comprehension of the latter as a result of a special harmonization procedure, i.e. secondary in relation to the initial state: harmony as a bracket that connects two heterogeneous construction details in the natural ancient Greek language; cosmization as a consistent design and removal of dual pairs of opposites in ancient philosophy; articulation of pre-established harmony as a goal (see Teleology); rethinking the idea of ​​the Apocalypse as a promising completion of the creation process (deification of nature in the models of cosmism); the moral paradigm of perfectionism in Protestant ethics; foundation of the possibility and ways of being in the conditions of a disharmonious world and a torn consciousness in modernism, etc. The fundamental D. of the Western tradition is associated with the genetic ascent of the culture of Christian Europe to two equally significant spiritual sources: the rational intellectualism of the ancient and the sacral-mystical irrationalism of the Middle Eastern traditions (see Jesus Christ), which allows us to speak about the ambivalence of its deep philosophical foundations (cf. with " a woman with two navels" by N. Joaquin).

Great Definition

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philosophical sciences

• Dubrovsky David Izrailevich, Doctor of Sciences, Professor, Chief Researcher
• the Russian Academy of Sciences

• CONSCIOUSNESS
• CONSCIOUSNESS
• INFORMATION
• SUBJECTIVE REALITY
• PHYSIOLOGICAL
• MENTAL
• UNCONSCIOUS
• PHYSICAL
• FUNCTIONAL
• PHILOSOPHY OF CONSCIOUSNESS
• PROBLEM
• PSYCHO-PHYSIOLOGICAL PROBLEM
• METHODOLOGY
• INSOLVENCY
• DECRYPTION
• BRAIN CODES
• NEUROSCIENCE
• INFORMATIONAL EXPLANATION
• MENTAL PHENOMENA
• HISTORICAL ASPECTS
• IDEALISTIC APPROACH
• DUALISTIC APPROACH

• General questions of neurophysiological interpretation of mental phenomena
• On the neurophysiological interpretation of the sensory image. The question of isomorphism between subjective phenomena and their neurodynamic carriers
• Some Considerations Regarding the Neurodynamic and Cybernetic Interpretation of the Phenomenon of Consciousness

Among the naturalists of the capitalist countries, idealistic and dualistic views are still widespread; they sometimes acquire a refined scientific form, but this does not cease to fetter scientific thought. Idealistic and dualistic tendencies are especially strong in biological disciplines and psychology. Due to long and strong traditions, they often find support from prominent naturalists. All this, of course, has certain social and epistemological reasons.

Since the awakening of human thought, three great qualitative gradations have appeared before it: an inanimate body - an organism - and it itself in the form of a person's spiritual activity. The desire to understand the world in its unity led to the search for genetic links between these different qualities and then it was discovered that the natural scientist was not in a position to unite such sharp differences and pass from one sphere to another solely by his own means. In order to do this, he needs general ideas of an ideological nature, allowing him to give an abstract explanation. This is one of the many reasons for the organic inclusion in the fabric of specific sciences of philosophical, worldview ideas. The latter had been driven out of the front door of natural history many times by militant empiricists, but this meant that they were immediately let in by the back door.

The whole question is what is the nature of these philosophical ideas. Creating a picture of a single world, materialism goes from the simple to the complex, deriving the living from the inanimate and from the living - a conscious thought. It must be admitted that considerable theoretical difficulties stood in the way of the development of the materialistic worldview, which were sometimes not overcome in the best possible way. This is natural, because the materialistic worldview is not a finished canvas, exhibited for viewing in a museum; it is constantly deepening and improving in the course of scientific knowledge, constituting its unshakable foundation.

The idealistic picture of the world requires, at first glance, less logical and theoretical efforts to create it. Idealism goes to the explanation of the complex from itself and comes to it. The illusion of "economicality" of the idealistic worldview is achieved by the fact that the cognizing thought puts itself at the basis of all its objects and in this way gets rid of them as such once and for all, turning from now on only to itself and into itself. What should appear at the end is already at the very beginning. The spirituality of everything is postulated and in this way all qualitative differences are easily removed, and at the same time a convenient motor stimulus is introduced, which, however, turns out to be already unnecessary, because there is no need to explain how the living comes from the inanimate and how the thinking mind arises. Human thought is inexhaustibly inventive; however, the product of her ingenuity is not only a solution, but also a quasi-solution of problems.

And yet, the attractive force of the idealistic worldview, which, when carefully considered, is a skillful tautology, is still significant in Western countries, since, among other things, it has talented restorers there.

Philosophical idealism is refracted and embodied in biological disciplines and psychology in various forms. One of them is the creation of specialized general concepts such as neovitalism, holism, dualistic parallelism, etc., which have a significant impact on the theoretical thinking of natural scientists.

These general concepts are not, as a rule, original theoretical constructions, but are nothing more than an application of idealistic principles to the fundamental problems of biology and psychophysiology; and if they are confined to the same problems, they differ not so much in content as in name.

As an example, one can point to the concepts of G. Driesch's neovitalism and J. Smuts' holism, which have their successors and admirers among modern biologists and psychologists. The focus of both concepts is the problem of organic integrity. According to G. Driesch (1915), biological integrity cannot be understood on the basis of material factors and natural causes (note that here Driesch speculates on the weaknesses of natural science); it is, so to speak, an embodied "entelechy", which is defined as a timeless and extra-spatial "factor of the formation of the whole": the activity of a living system is an expression of its spiritualization by this form-forming and goal-setting force. The core of holism is a similar thesis. Exactly spirituality, according to Smuts, is the essence and basis of any biological integrity. True, Smuts more resolutely extends this principle beyond the limits of strictly biological integrity. In his opinion, the spiritual principle is already manifested in the reactive ability of the atom, and therefore the subject and object are nothing but "fields in the field of the spirit" (J. Ch. Smuts, 1936, p. 235).

In minor variations, similar views are developed in Western countries by many philosophizing biologists. Thus, R. S. Lilly speaks of the “psychic principle”, which is fundamentally different from physical and chemical phenomena and acts as the same entelechy, “is the main source of the selective, renewing and integrating properties of the organism” (R.S. Lillie, 1946, p. 196). L. Bunur believes that “at all its levels, even the most primitive, the organic has a soul” (L. Bounoure, 1957, p. 77) and that it is this soul that plays the role of the driving force of evolution. Similar views are developed by F. Walsh (F.M.R. Walshe, 1951), I. Schreiber (I. Schreiber, 1953), E. Sinnot (E.W. Sinnot, 1957) and others in relation to the explanation of mental activity proper, and thus vitalism in biology merges with vitalism in psychology.

It should be noted that modern vitalism in all its variations definitely gravitates towards the philosophy of the neo-Thomist circle. In turn, neo-Thomists actively speculate on the fundamental problems of biology, psychology and physiology, substantiating the principle of finalism and providing vitalists with extensive arguments (by the way, it is precisely at these points, i.e. in philosophical questions of biology, that neo-Thomists often make critical attacks on dialectical materialism). To get an idea of ​​this, it is enough to cite the following statement of one of the prominent neo-Thomists H. Vetter: causal relationships (“causally”), while the processes occurring in the body, in addition, are also determined by the future and, therefore, not yet existing (“finally”). And this conditionality of the future, this ideal anticipation of the goal that lies ahead, and the direction of the physico-chemical processes taking place in the present, but subordinate to the achievement of precisely this goal - all this is precisely what purely physico-chemical processes are not capable of carrying out on their own. by itself and that is accessible only to a spiritual principle standing above time” (G. Wetter, 1958, S. 56). Along with G. Vetter, a number of other representatives of neo-Thomism are engaged in a special substantiation of vitalism (O. Spulbeck, 1957; I. Haas, 1961)

However, among philosophers of the neo-Thomistic circle there are also those who, concentrating their interests mainly on the problem of human mental activity, contrary to their initial principles, make a certain contribution to its development. This is a very curious phenomenon, testifying to how an objective theoretical consideration of the conclusions of natural science undermines the original idealistic principles and makes them completely superfluous, although they continue to be defended at the same time. Such contradictions convincingly demonstrate the inconsistency of the neo-Thomistic doctrine and, at the same time, the strength of tradition, and expose the social roots of idealism.

P. Chauchard (1960) and P. Teilhard de Chardin are among such philosophers of the neo-Thomist circle, whose views are in many respects distinctly materialistic and whose investigations into the nature of the psyche contain positive results. I would like to dwell on the views of the latter in a little more detail.

Being a prominent specialist in paleontology and having outstanding erudition in the field of biological sciences, Chardin builds his concept in connection with the main achievements of natural science, at the same time revealing a deep interest in the progressive development of mankind, speaking from the standpoint of humanism.

In his book The Phenomenon of Man, Chardin gives an interesting dialectical outline of biological evolution, focuses on the self-development of matter, emphasizing that geogenesis turns into biogenesis, which is psychogenesis. However, at the same time, he admits a number of inconsistencies, often resorting to clearly idealistic principles, and ultimately comes “to the divine hearth of the spirit” (P. Teilhard de Chardin, 1965, p. 266), which supposedly contains the highest and final development goal. Attention is drawn to the fact that in order to understand the picture of the development of nature drawn by Chardin, the idealistic postulates and finalist excursions he introduces are often redundant.

Philosophically, Chardin borrows a number of ideas from Hegel and Leibniz, trying with their help to overcome the difficulties that, in his words, human thinking faces, “trying to combine spirit and matter in the same rational perspective” (P. Teilhard de Chardin, 1965, p. 62). However, Chardin is not able to achieve a logically coherent “connection” of them, since, coming to materialistic conclusions, he immediately refutes them, oscillating between them, on the one hand, Leibniz’s monadology and the neo-Thomist absolute spirit, on the other, concluding that “ spiritual perfection (or conscious “center”) and material synthesis (or complexity) are only two interrelated sides or parts of the same self of the same phenomenon” (ibid., p. 61), at the same time he postulates the following: “We allow, that essentially all energy has a psychic nature. But let's make a reservation that in each element-particle this fundamental energy is divided into two components: tangential energy, which connects this element with all other elements of the same order (i.e., the same degree of complexity and the same "internal concentration") and radial an energy that pulls him towards an increasingly complex and inwardly focused state” (ibid., p. 65). In the course of further presentation, it turns out that it is precisely radial energy that constitutes the actual psychic, spiritual factor, which acts as a creative stimulus, which, it turns out (as we learn about this at the end of the book), was secretly stimulated during the entire period of evolution by “the action of the prime mover in front” (ibid., p. 266). Thus, instead of the self-development of matter, we imperceptibly receive the self-development of the spirit, which, describing the classically Hegelian trajectory, goes from itself to itself in order to reveal itself in some final instance - “Omega”, where “the separation of consciousness, which eventually reached perfection, from its material matrix, so that from now on it will be possible to rest with all its strength in the omega-god” (ibid., p. 282).

As we can see, the stated logical construction of Chardin is not at all original, as it repeats the well-known versions of the idealistic mystification of mental phenomena. However, it does not withstand the onslaught of the natural science material that Chardin operates, and in many respects remains a bare logical skeleton, something brought in from outside. All this shows once again how alien idealistic principles are to natural science, how artificial their application to the understanding of the development of nature and the psyche is.

The dualistic traditions are especially strong among the neurophysiologists and psychologists of the capitalist countries. Dualistic views for researchers of the brain and psyche turn out to be more “convenient”, as they create a field for maneuvering from materialistic conclusions to idealistic ones. The true naturalist is always in his deepest essence a spontaneous materialist. And therefore, dualistic views often take the form of that bashful materialism, when the natural scientist, in the course of concrete research, remains all the time on materialistic soil and leaves it only when he tries to connect his results with the symbols of his faith, with those "metaphysical" principles, which, as it seems to him forever remain outside scientific knowledge. A somewhat peculiar situation for a neurophysiologist who studies the brain. He certainly acts like a spontaneous materialist, studying the movements of nerve impulses, synaptic formations, building and testing hypotheses about the functional relationships between various brain structures; but at the same time, he is forced to somehow connect these processes with mental phenomena, and here he inevitably encounters “metaphysical” questions, to which he has long prepared answers that are not subject to control from the experimental data he obtains.

Let's listen to what the outstanding Canadian neurophysiologist and neurosurgeon W. Penfield says about this: “The dualist believes that in every individual there is something additional to the body and to its living energy. He may call it the spirit of consciousness, which is an active companion of the brain activity and which is present from birth to death, except perhaps in the state of sleep or coma. He may also believe that this spirit continues to exist after the death of the body and that it is something one with God.” And further: "These attitudes about the spirit and God are what the scientist can believe" (W. Penfield, L. Roberts, 1959, p. 9); for they, according to Penfield, do not in the least prevent the scientist from remaining in his field on the strict basis of factual data and their deterministic explanation, i.e. essentially on the basis of natural-scientific materialism. It is one thing, they say, positive research, another thing - the "metaphysical" beliefs of the scientist. Unfortunately, such illusions are shared by many eminent neurophysiologists, although it would seem that these illusions should be dispelled already at the first steps of their theoretical activity.

The whole experience of scientific knowledge persistently testifies that "metaphysical", i.e. ideological, beliefs of the scientist have not only indirect, but also the most direct influence on the process of his creative activity. And, perhaps, this is most clearly manifested in the way of thinking of neurophysiologists, who come face to face with mental phenomena and the urgent need for their explanation in connection with the material activity of the brain they observe.

Let us briefly consider in this respect the views of one of the greatest neurophysiologists of our century, Charles Sherrington, who played a significant role in strengthening the dualistic tradition in Western psychophysiology.

Rightly emphasizing the adaptive role of the psyche, the close connection of mental phenomena with neurophysiological and somatic processes, Ch. Sherrington already in his book “Integrative Activity nervous system”, published in 1906, leans towards a dualistic interpretation of the old problem of mind and body. The main question on which he focuses his interest is how spiritual phenomena are connected with the material activity of the brain. Careful reading reveals the whole tragedy of the struggle of Sherrington the naturalist against his own ideological attitudes. On the one hand, he resolutely insists on the inextricable connection between the mental and the physiological, calls for the unification of these heterogeneous phenomena into scientific research. But, on the other hand, he is not able to overcome the preconceived notion of the absolute difference between psychic and material phenomena and is not able to step over the abyss dug by him. The real difficulties of investigating psychic phenomena by physiological methods further deepen this contradiction.

In the future, Sherrington more and more definitely looks for a way out on the paths of dualistic parallelism of spiritual and bodily phenomena (we are referring to his well-known book "Man on His Nature", which is a collection of lectures he delivered in 1937-1938 at the University of Edinburgh). The psychic, the spiritual, according to Sherrington, does not arise from the material, it is primordially, it only “wakes up”, acquiring a developed form (Ch. Sherrington, 1942, p. 271). And although “the cortex is the area where the brain and the spirit meet” (ibid., p. 264), they meet, so to speak, on an equal footing. Thought is actually no longer a function of the brain, a subjective manifestation of its material activity, it has its own special source, which lies beyond matter, but for some reason lives all the same in the brain. And Sherrington takes another step, which is quite logical in his position: he is generally inclined to take the psychic, the spiritual, beyond the limits of natural science, into the sphere of "natural theology." This operation is carried out on the grounds that the mental is not physical, and to that extent is inaccessible to natural scientific research. "Physiology, natural science is silent about everything that lies beyond the physical" (Ch. Sherrington, 1952, p.1). In the above statement of Sherrington, it is clearly seen what consequences the dualistic opposition of spiritual and bodily phenomena leads to; the absolutization of differences makes the mental inaccessible to scientific knowledge.

In addition, Sherrington's argument is essentially unconvincing, for the psychic is a property of highly organized material processes; indeed, it cannot be classified as a physical phenomenon, just as information (not a signal of information, but information as such) cannot be classified as one. But it does not yet follow from this that information cannot be an object of natural science research. Equally, the mental, being an extremely original phenomenon, becomes in the face of natural science an ordinary object of study, like any property.

Sherrington is overly pessimistic about the achievements of natural science in the study of the nature of mental phenomena. In 1952, he repeats his idea, expressed for the first time in 1906 (in the book "The Integrative Activity of the Nervous System" (Ch. Sherrington, 1948, p. XIII), that in the field of knowledge of the relation of the spirit to the body, we have not advanced in comparison with with Aristotle (see Ch. Sherrington, 1952, p. 4).

“In this matter, it seems to us, we are still standing at a dead point,” says Samuel (W. Samuel, 1952, p. 69), repeating Sherrington's statement and seeking to purely philosophically reinforce his concept. According to Samuel, the material world is not the product of the spirit. But the spiritual is not a product of matter either. Efforts to reduce matter to spirit or spirit to matter remained, in his opinion, unsuccessful, although there is no doubt that “in fact, the body, including the brain, conditions the spirit and influences it, and the spirit causes bodily changes and influences them” (ibid.). , page 68). Samuel does not go beyond these vague assertions without being able to offer any positive research program, which is very typical of the representatives of dualism, whether they are neurophysiologists or philosophers; we see the same thing in psychologists (for example, in W.R. Hess (W.R. Hess, 1962) and others).

An attempt to further develop and concretize Sherrington's concept was undertaken by his student, the largest modern specialist in the field of neuron physiology and synaptic formations, J. Eccles. Unlike other neurophysiologists who gravitate towards dualistic views, but are not aware of how much these views predetermine the way of their scientific thinking, Eccles quite consciously relies on the dualistic principle as the source of his hypotheses. Moreover, he believes that the dualistic position is so far the only acceptable one for the neurophysiologist, gives him "the starting postulate for a scientific approach to the problem of consciousness and the brain" (J. C. Eccles, 1953, p. 265).

Eccles rightly notes that Sherrington only raised the question of how the spiritual and the corporeal, consciousness and brain are connected, how these opposite principles are connected in a person, but left him without any definite answer. Eccles seeks to fill this gap, following the principles of Sherrington and relying on the concept of the spatio-temporal nervous model introduced by the latter, with which consciousness is somehow connected (note that this concept in itself has a deep content and reflects the real forms of brain activity). It is precisely this kind of brain formations, according to Eccles, that act as a kind of receiver of the spiritual substance poured into the universe. His hypothesis is that “the brain, with the help of a special ability, enters into communication with the spirit, having the property of a “detector”, the exceptional sensitivity of which is incomparable with the detector of any physical instrument” (ibid., pp. 267-268). Such a "connection" of the spirit to the brain takes place most likely at the level of synaptic formations, and then everything happens according to the laws of neurophysiological relationships. And although Eccles criticizes the Cartesian concept of the relationship between spirit and body, calling it mechanistic, he himself does not introduce anything fundamentally new in comparison with Descartes, replacing only mechanistic descriptions with electrophysiological ones and expelling the spirit from its favorite habitat in the pineal gland. In Descartes, the spirit directly affects the pineal gland, while in Eccles it affects the synapses; that's the difference.

Eccles' hypothesis only ostensibly suggests a research agenda. In fact, it is completely unpromising, artificial, and already from the first steps gives rise to additional misunderstandings. Indeed, what is this "special ability" to capture the spirit? And how can you catch the elusive? After all, the spirit, according to the dualistic principle, is something absolutely opposite to the physical, bodily, something completely devoid of energy properties, something absolutely “transparent” to matter. How, then, can the spirit influence the physical, bodily, even if it possesses "exceptional sensitivity"? Or, perhaps, the spirit is a particularly “subtle energy” hovering in the universe? But then the Dualistic principle collapses. And, most importantly, why does an incorporeal spirit, entering into a mysterious way in contact with the brain, create a variety of personalities so familiar to us? Apparently, the body and the brain do not play any role here and everything depends on the whim of the spirit. It is no coincidence that Eccles admits that he is unable to "answer the question of how it comes about that a given 'I' is in connection exclusively with a given brain" (J. C. Eccles, 1953, p. 285). This is indeed a fatal question for Eccles' concept. Guided by it, we fall into the sphere of glaring logical uncertainty. And if Eccles believes that his hypothesis contributes to the expansion of the boundaries of the natural sciences beyond the "natural system - matter, energy" (ibid., p. 265), then we are forced to admit that in reality such an expansion only means going beyond the limits of science in general, into the realm of theology or spiritualism.

It should be emphasized that many neurophysiologists, psychologists and representatives of related specialties in Western countries are fully aware of the harm that idealistic and dualistic views cause to science and subject them to sharp criticism from materialistic positions. So the famous American scientist K. Pribram, speaking about the prospects for the development of neuropsychology, to which he made the largest contribution, specifically notes: “The main obstacle to the development of our field of knowledge was the philosophical dualism that marked all areas of behavioral research over the past fifty years” (K. Pribram, 1964, p. 16). The Portuguese psychiatrist I. Sebra-Dinis rightly emphasizes that "traditional dualistic concepts favored by the social climate of Western countries" significantly hinder the use of neurophysiology in the field of psychology and pedagogy (I. Seabra-Dinis, 1962, p. 52).

In contrast to dualistic concepts, the English physiologist J. O "Leary (1965), summarizing the achievements of neurophysiology and neuromorphology over the past thirty years (the doctrine of chemical mediators and the conduction of excitation in synapses, postsynaptic potentials, spontaneous rhythms and cortical potentials; data from electron microscopy, etc.), comes to the conclusion that the expansion and deepening of our knowledge of the structure and functions of the brain brings us closer to the neurophysiological interpretation of the problem of consciousness. One can also note the distinctly materialistic speeches of many prominent neurophysiologists at the well-known symposium "Brain Mechanisms and Consciousness", which played a significant role in the development of this problem. These include reports and speeches in discussions by A. E. Fessard (A. E. Fessard, 1953), R. Young (R. Jang, 1953), K. Lashley (K. S. Lashley, 1953), G. Gasteau (N. Gastaut, 1953) and others.

Among Western neurophysiologists, especially great merit in the criticism of dualism undoubtedly belongs to Lashley, who actively opposed the view that the brain is just an agent of the spirit, and its latest modifications. Paying much attention to the analysis of the relationship between consciousness and nervous activity, he subjected to a detailed critical examination the views of Sherrington, Eccles, Walsh, convincingly showed the inconsistency of their dualistic attitudes and the pernicious influence of the latter on natural science. Objecting to Walsh, who tries with the help of the divine soul to explain the fact that with insignificant morphological differences between the brains of animals and humans and the neurodynamic processes taking place in them, striking differences between the human spirit and the psyche of animals are observed, Lashley says: “I am not ready to accept these doctrines of scientific despair and Christian hope. They are based on a complete distortion of the facts of consciousness” (K.S. Lashley, 1958, p. 2). Lashley relates this statement to Eccles' concept of the influence of the spirit on synaptic formations, shows the groundlessness of Eccles' references to the uncertainty principle and telepathic phenomena in order to substantiate his hypothesis; he puts forward precise arguments showing the groundlessness of Sherrington's assertions that a purely spiritual synthesis takes place in binocular vision, and so on.

Analyzing the concept of dualistic parallelism, Lashley emphasizes its complete hopelessness for the neurophysiologist and psychologist: “This doctrine, in his opinion, does not give any key to the nature of brain operations” (ibid., p. 11).

The prominent American neurophysiologist K. Herrick (S. Herrick, 1956, 1957), who speaks from materialistic positions and put forward a number of fruitful general ideas in his field, shows great interest in the philosophical problems of psychophysiology.

The struggle against all kinds of idealistic stratifications in natural science forces us to pay special attention to their epistemological roots, which, as a rule, escape from the field of vision of materialistically minded natural scientists in Western countries.

The most important epistemological source of idealistic and dualistic tendencies among neurophysiologists and psychologists is the explicit or implicit absolutization of differences between mental and physiological; at first, the concepts of physiological and mental are absolutely opposed to each other, and then incredible and fruitless efforts are expended to combine them. This epistemological source of idealistic and dualistic views feeds on the current weaknesses of natural science and its internal theoretical contradictions, the difficulties of studying mental phenomena in connection with neurophysiological changes in the brain and a number of other objective circumstances. First of all, they should include the fact that the thinking of a natural scientist who is interested in the highest forms of brain activity, from the very beginning of his path, takes place in line with two different historically established systems of concepts that are rather loosely interconnected, namely: a system of physiological concepts that describe activity brain from the side of the material processes occurring in it, and the system psychological concepts describing the activity of the brain in a completely different plane, from the side of meaningfully designed internal states personality and goal-directed actions.

For obvious reasons, the psychological description has an incommensurably greater variety compared to the physiological description of the activity of the brain. Psychic phenomena are given to the personality as if directly and from this “outer side”, i.e. at the phenomenological level, relatively easily accessible for approximate generalizations and classifications; in addition, the rather clear equivalence of external, behavioral acts to the basic subjective states of the individual allowed him to compare his own subjective states with the same kind of states of other personalities, and the very nature of life in a social environment strongly required this. On the basis of this kind of primary psychological empiricism, over the centuries, a vast terminology has grown up, which only in its insignificant part, processed in an appropriate way, enters psychology as a science. On the contrary, the physiological phenomena taking place in the brain are not given directly to the subject; they are deeply hidden from him, and the study of the neurodynamic relations of the brain began quite recently, is going through its childhood or, at best, adolescence; the personality, on the other hand, does not directly have any empirical material about what is going on in its brain. Being the privilege of a relatively narrow circle of professionals, neurophysiological empiricism and the terminology built on its basis benefit from greater certainty of the meanings associated with it, greater internal order, but at the same time incomparably poorer in the number of phenomena it displays in comparison with psychological terminology.

From this, in fact, comes the impression that mental activity is immeasurably “richer” than those neurodynamic relations that are played out in the brain. And along with this growing impression, there is an unfounded belief in the fundamental impossibility of "reducing" mental phenomena to brain neurodynamic phenomena. From here it is already one step to dualism, because there is no place left for psychic phenomena in the brain; but then they are generally taken out of it, as we saw with Eccles, in whom the spiritual, the psychic, only for a time condescends to dwell in the human brain.

Thus, the gap between the two systems of concepts, which is quite natural for the current level of scientific knowledge (which is nevertheless noticeably shrinking), as a result of a rough ontological interpretation, turns into a split of the world into two opposite and independent entities. It is here that very important epistemological reasons for dualistic views lie hidden. They produce a conviction, which acquires the strength of a prejudice, that the psyche is not "contained" in the neurodynamic relations of the brain and that therefore physiological research is fundamentally incapable of revealing the nature of the psyche and explaining its basic properties; and this prejudice is reinforced by the argument that we cannot extract the content of psychic phenomena directly and immediately from the neurodynamic relations of the brain.

In essence, the following incident occurs: the goal of scientific knowledge is declared fundamentally unattainable on the grounds that it has not yet been achieved. The dualistic view is a subtle form of surrender to the difficulties that stand in the way of the neurophysiological interpretation of psychic phenomena.

Unfortunately, the criticism of dualistic views in the field of the psychophysiological problem is hampered by the position of some Marxist philosophers who, under the most plausible pretexts, are trying to expel mental phenomena from the brain. We have already noted similar tendencies in F.T. Mikhailova and E.V. Ilyenkov (§ 3). But since this issue seems to us very important and is directly related to the criticism of dualism and clearing the way for solving the fundamental problems of science related to the activity of the brain, it is advisable to return to it again and consider A. Arseniev's point of view, which he passes off as one hundred percent dialectical materialism.

“In recent years,” writes A. Arseniev, “the development of radio, electronics, chemistry, the method of labeled atoms, etc. gave new powerful means of studying the processes occurring in the human brain. In this regard, various laboratories around the world have made many attempts to establish some kind of relationship between the processes taking place in the brain and the content of thinking. A lot of time and effort has been spent. All results were negative. No correlation could be found between the logical content of thinking and the internal processes of the brain. Meanwhile, knowledge of dialectical materialism by scientists would make it possible to predict such a result in advance and thereby save a huge amount of effort and money. (A. Arseniev, 1963, pp. 40-41. My course. - D. D.).

As we can see, A. Arseniev "officially", on behalf of dialectical materialism, proclaims the futility of research into the relationship between the "content of thinking" and "the internal processes of the brain", suggests that this fruitless exercise be abandoned. What are his arguments?

They boil down to the following: “From the point of view of dialectical materialism, thinking is a side of the objective activity of the social subject. Consequently, a being thinks, acting in an objective-practical manner and having the appropriate organs for this - hands. In short, it is not the brain that thinks on its own, but a person with the help of the brain, and the content of his thinking is his objective activity in certain social conditions. Therefore, it is impossible to find the content of thinking in the physiological processes or structures of the brain - this content is simply not there” (ibid., p. 41).

It is true that the content of thinking is determined by the objective activity of the social subject, but does A. Arseniev's categorical conclusion follow from this? His logic is as follows: since the content of thinking is determined by objective activity, and the latter is not brain activity, then the content of thinking is in no way inherent in the physiological processes and structures of the brain. The thesis: “the content of thinking is determined by objective activity” is roughly cut out of the living context of knowledge and presented as a kind of fetish. An abstract definition closes in on itself, it is no longer possible to proceed from it to other definitions: the content of thinking is connected only with objective activity and is no longer connected with anything.

But, perhaps, the very objective activity of a person is nevertheless connected with the neurophysiological activity of his brain? If a person thinks “with the help of the brain” and carries out objective activity not only with the help of hands and feet, but also “with the help of the brain”, then the content of his thinking, as well as the content of his objective activity, must be directly related to the content of material processes in his the brain, if only because the latter programs the actions of the arms, legs, tongue and all other organs. It is currently unacceptable to ignore these links. Science strives and must find out how the content of thinking is encoded in the material processes and structures of the brain.

To assert, like A. Arseniev, that there is not and cannot be “no correlation between the logical content of thinking and the internal processes of the brain” (ibid., p. 40), means absolutely cutting off thinking from the brain. Such attitudes, coming from a Marxist philosopher, can only disorient natural scientists, not to mention the fact that they objectively, regardless of the good intentions of their author, pour water on the mill of dualistic views.

In order to show how far-reaching are the prohibitions imposed on neurophysiological studies of psychic phenomena and, at the same time, on the fundamental possibility of their neurodynamic interpretation, we allow ourselves to cite the following curious fact.

In 1890, the rector of the Kyiv Theological Seminary, Archimandrite Boris, published an instructive work in many respects, On the Impossibility of a Purely Physiological Explanation of the Soul Life of Man. Speaking against I. M. Sechenov and N. O. Kovalevsky, this undoubtedly intelligent and well-informed theologian in the science of his time sets as his task to prove that "the desire for such an explanation contains a direct logical inconsistency" (Archimandrite Boris, 1890, p. . 18). At the same time, he directly says that he is defending “the most important postulate of religion, which requires the recognition of the existence of the soul as an independent beginning of a person’s mental life” (ibid., p. 22), and is also fully aware that “the physiological explanation of mental phenomena, since its first appearance in science, has always been closely associated with materialism, as it is postulated or as a necessary conclusion from its principles ”(ibid., p. 18),

Archimandrite Boris does not deny that spiritual life, mental processes are carried out with the help of the brain; he only tries to prove that psychic phenomena have their source and their true existence outside the brain. “If mental functions are formed differently with a change in the state of the brain, then this only proves, which no one denies, that the soul is determined by the brain and that the intensity and clarity of the mental process may depend on the states of the brain” (ibid., p. 22). But “all physiological traits and phenomena have only a modifying (modifying) effect on the soul. They themselves never represent the real, sufficient, immediate causes of psychic phenomena. “Materialism, at the same time, is unable to explain the spiritual and the material in their interaction” (ibid.). And, finally, the main conclusion, which is supported by references to Dubois Reymond, C. Ludwig and other prominent physiologists: “no similarity, no analogy can be accepted between physiological phenomena and mental phenomena” (Archimandrite Boris, 1890, p. 25).

Of course, the venerable archimandrite proves only what is already contained in his premises (we have in mind the proposition about the "independent beginning of mental phenomena"). But something else is indicative: a faithful minister of the church argues in exactly the same way as dualistic neurophysiologists and psychologists, uses the same arguments against materialism as they do, concluding from the inability to physiologically explain mental phenomena to the fundamental impossibility of such an explanation; but the most interesting thing is that it is precisely on this point that he is entirely unanimous with certain philosophers who speak in the name of dialectical materialism. In any case, we can agree with him on one thing: the proof of the impossibility of a physiological explanation of mental phenomena, if only it could be consistently and consistently carried out, would definitely testify against materialism, in favor of idealistic and dualistic views and religion. Having accepted the thesis about the fundamental impossibility of a physiological (neurodynamic) explanation of mental phenomena, the theorist must either deny the position that the mental is a function of the brain, or, sharing this position, declare this function unknowable, which is also incompatible with dialectical materialism and natural science.

The actual elaboration of the psychophysiological problem has nothing in common with dualistic and idealistic presuppositions; it requires the consistent implementation of the principles of dialectical materialism. The methodological principles of dialectical materialism provide the widest scope for the search for new ways and methods of natural-science research into the functions of the brain; moreover, they stimulate such searches, performing a heuristic role not only in finding new analytical approaches to the object, but also in finding new forms of integration of results obtained in different planes of research, and in this sense they do not tolerate extremely rigid dividing lines. The methodological principles of dialectical materialism help to assess the relevance of a particular plane of research of an object and, most importantly, its place in the context of the entire system of knowledge about a given object; they protect against one-sidedness, against dogmatism, and constantly serve as a creative stimulus for the researcher.

Any of a number of philosophical propositions that allow for two separate states of nature or two sets of fundamental principles of the universe. As Plato declared, there is a difference between spirit and matter. In modern debates, the problem usually boils down to the distinction between consciousness and matter. A strong dualistic position may manifest itself in an understanding of the operation of one sphere that contributes nothing at all to the understanding of the other; or a milder form of dualism is manifested in the fact that some differences between, say, mental and physical phenomena are accepted, but without recognizing that they are fundamental

are fundamentally different metaphysically. The classical forms of dualism are interactive, when it is recognized that consciousness and matter are separate, but interacting phenomena, and parallel, when consciousness and matter are considered as different manifestations of a complex organism and it is accepted that they "develop along separate, but parallel paths." Descartes is commonly cited as the strongest proponent of interactive dualism; early structuralists such as Titchner were vehement advocates of a parallel position, which they often referred to as psychophysical dualism. See the matter-spirit problem and monism.

DUALISM

from lat. dualis - dual) - a philosophical doctrine that proceeds in the explanation of existence from the presence of 2 against, principles - material and spiritual. In the most developed form in the philosophy of modern times, D. is represented in the teachings of R. Descartes. According to Descartes, there are 2 substances - matter and spirit. The main property, or attribute, of matter is extension, and of the spirit - thinking (understood more widely than is currently accepted). The properties of matter are not derivable from thinking, and vice versa; Substances do not and cannot have any points of contact. For psychology, Descartes' formulation of the problem of man, in which the spiritual and material principles really coexist, is of the greatest interest. Descartes tried to solve this problem based on the interaction hypothesis (see Interactionism), in which the role of mediator between the body and the soul was assigned to the pineal gland of the brain (pineal gland). In posing this problem, a contradiction (inconsistency) of dualistic philosophy was revealed, namely, a contradiction between the principle of natural causality and the presence of 2 substances, which, in essence, cannot be causally dependent on each other. The further development of dialectics, primarily in the philosophy of occasionalism (N. Malebranche, A. Geylinks, G. Leibniz, and others), showed that the solution of the psychophysical problem is possible only with a complete rejection of the principle of causality. current, real reason turned out to be taken out beyond the limits of available substances, into the highest divine substance. Thus, it was shown that the justification of the principles of D. requires the introduction of a single foundation, a certain beginning of being, which in occasionalism is the substance of God.

In psychology, the influence of the dualistic tradition was very significant and manifested itself in the long history of the existence of the psychophysical problem, the problem of psychophysical interaction, the psychophysiological problem, etc. In the most developed form, dualistic principles are presented in the teaching of psychophysical parallelism (W. Wundt, F. Paulsen). A doctrine based on the opposition of independently existing soul and body, consciousness and brain, leads either to the need to reject the recognition of causal dependence, or to the reduction of the phenomena of consciousness to a reflex, to brain processes. The logic of the need to introduce a single basis, revealed by the philosophy of occasionalism, turns out to be the result of any form of D.

Already in the philosophy of B. Spinoza, the Cartesian formulation of the problem of man as "composed" of the body and soul was removed in the affirmation of the existence of man as a thinking body. The universal nature of man is revealed, according to Spinoza, in the ability of the thinking body to build its own movement according to the logic of any other body.

Dualism

A philosophical position that is commonly found in discussions about body and mind. Dualism distinguishes between body and mind in two ways. Parallel dualism views the body and mind as fundamentally different parts of the same organism: they coexist, but in a separate and parallel way. On the other hand, interactive dualism recognizes the separate nature of the body and mind, but considers them in a process of constant interaction.

Dualism

Word formation. Comes from lat. dualis - dual.

Specificity. Philosophical doctrine, which postulates the effective principle of both the material and the spiritual. According to Descartes, there are two substances - matter, the main property of which is extension, and spirit, based on thinking. When solving the anthropological problem, he put forward a hypothesis of the interaction of these substances, in which the pineal gland of the brain was considered as an intermediary between the body and the soul.

In psychology, dualistic principles were realized primarily in the teaching of psychophysical parallelism (W. Wundt, F. Paulsen).

Dualism

from lat. dualis - dual), a philosophical doctrine in which the effective principle of both the material and the spiritual is postulated. In particular, according to Descartes, there are two substances - matter, the main property of which is extension, and spirit, based on thinking. When solving the anthropological problem, Descartes put forward a hypothesis of the interaction of these substances, in which the pineal gland of the brain was considered as an intermediary between the body and the soul. A philosophical doctrine that postulates the active principle of both the material and the spiritual. In psychology, dualistic principles were realized primarily in the teaching of psychophysical parallelism (W. Wundt, F. Paulsen). The opposite is Monism.