Mental reflection is the most developed reflection. What is psychic reflection

MENTAL REFLECTION

1. LEVELS OF REFLECTION STUDY

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 an initial one 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 concepts have developed and changed; however, the main thing - the approach to the psyche as a subjective image of objective reality - remained and remains unshakable in it.

Speaking about reflection, one 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 becomes enriched.

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

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

It is known that Lenin considered reflection as a property already 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 ... This, in the broadest sense of the word, historical understanding of reflection excludes the possibility of interpreting psychological phenomena as being removed from the general system of interaction of the world, one 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 is the recognition of the existence of objective reality, independent of the cognizing subject. This is the meaning of Lenin's requirement to go not from sensation to the external world, but from outside 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 investigation of sensory phenomena, coming from the external world, from things, is their path objective research... As the experience of the development of psychology shows, many theoretical difficulties arise along this path. They were discovered already in connection with the first concrete achievements of the natural science study of the brain and sense organs. Although the works of physiologists and psychophysicists have enriched scientific psychology with knowledge of important facts and laws that determine the emergence of mental phenomena, they could not directly reveal the essence of these phenomena themselves; the psyche continued to be considered in its isolation, and the problem of the relationship of the psychic to the external world was solved in the spirit of I. Müller's physiological idealism, H. Helmholtz's hieroglyphism, W. Wundt's dualistic idealism, 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 teaching of I.P. Pavlov on higher nervous activity. The main emphasis in the study has shifted significantly: the reflective, mental function of the brain acted as a product and condition for real connections between the organism and the environment acting on it. This prompted a fundamentally new orientation of research, expressed in the approach to cerebral 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.

There remained, however, the main theoretical difficulty, which is expressed in the impossibility of reducing the level of psychological analysis to the level of physiological analysis, psychological laws to the laws of brain activity. Now, when psychology as a special area of ​​knowledge has become widespread and gained practical distribution and acquired practical significance for solving many problems put forward by life, the proposition that the mental cannot be reduced to the physiological has received new evidence - in the very practice of psychological research. A fairly clear actual distinction has developed between mental processes, on the one hand, and the physiological mechanisms realizing 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 was formed, in particular, methods of borderline, psychological and physiological research. Thanks to this, the concrete study of the nature and mechanisms of mental processes went far beyond the limits limited by natural-scientific ideas about the activity of the organ of the psyche - the brain. Of course, this does not mean at all that all theoretical questions related to the problem of the psychological and physiological have found their solution. We can only say that there has been serious progress in this direction. At the same time, new complex theoretical problems arose. One of them was posed by the development of the 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 made a new step along the already outlined way of studying the interaction of living organisms with the environment, which now came out from a new side - from the side of transmission, processing and storage of information. At the same time, there has been a theoretical convergence of approaches to qualitatively different controllable and self-governing objects - inanimate systems, animals and humans. The very concept of information (one of the fundamental for cybernetics), although it came from their communication technology, is in its, so to speak, human, physiological and even psychological origin: after all, it all began with the study of the transmission of semantic information through technical channels from person to person.

As you know, the cybernetic approach from the very beginning implicitly extended to mental activity. Very soon, its necessity appeared in psychology itself, in a particularly graphic way - in engineering psychology, which studies the "man-machine" system, which is considered as a special case of control systems. Now concepts like “ Feedback"," Regulation "," information "," model ", etc. began to be widely used in such branches of psychology that are not associated with the need to use formal languages ​​capable of describing control processes occurring in any systems, including technical ...

If the introduction of neurophysiological concepts into psychology was based on the proposition 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 concrete science about the origin and development of a person's reflection of reality, which occurs in his activity and which, mediating it, plays a real role in it. For its part, cybernetics, studying the processes of intrasystem and intersystem interactions in terms of information and similarity, allows one 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 importance of cybernetics, taken from this side, for the study of the mechanisms of sensory reflection seems indisputable. However, one must not forget that general cybernetics, when describing regulation processes, is abstracted from their specific nature. Therefore, in relation to each special area, the question arises about its adequate application. It is known, for example, how complex this issue is when it comes to social processes. It is also difficult for psychology. For the cybernetic approach in psychology, of course, is not simply to replace psychological terms with cybernetic ones; such a substitution is as fruitless as the attempt made at one time to replace psychological terms with physiological ones. Nevertheless, it is permissible to mechanically incorporate certain provisions and theorems of cybernetics into psychology.

Among the problems that arise in psychology in connection with the development of the cybernetic approach, the problem of the sensory image and model has a particularly important concrete 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 human consciousness.

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

Lenin's theory of reflection considers sensory images in human consciousness as imprints, snapshots of an independently existing reality. This is what brings psychic reflection closer to its "related" forms of reflection, which are also inherent in matter, which does not have a "clearly expressed ability of sensation." But this forms only one side of the characteristic of psychic reflection; the other side is that mental reflection, in contrast to mirror and other forms of passive reflection, is subjective, which means that it is not passive, not deathly, 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 provisions, which have, first of all, an epistemological meaning, are at the same time the starting point for concrete scientific psychological research. It is on psychological level there is a problem specific features those forms of reflection that are expressed in the presence of subjective - sensory and mental - images of reality in a person.

The proposition that the psychic 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 an image in the sense of its belonging to the subject of life includes an indication of its activity. The connection between the image and the reflected is not a connection between two objects (systems, sets) standing in a mutually identical relation to each other - their relation reproduces the polarization of any life process, at one pole of which there is an active ("biased") subject, on the other - An object "indifferent" to the subject. It is this peculiarity of the relationship of the subjective image to the reflected reality that is not captured by the "model-modeled" relationship. The latter has the property of symmetry, and, accordingly, the terms “model” and “modeled” have a relational meaning, depending on which of the two objects the subject cognizing them considers (theoretically or practically) a model, and which one is modeled. As for the modeling process (i.e., the subject's building models of any type, or even the subject's cognition of connections that determine such a change in the object, which gives him the features of the model of some object), this is a completely different question.

So, the concept of the subjectivity of the image includes the concept of the partiality 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 subjectivity, but rather as its "subjectivity", that is, its belonging to an active subject.

The mental image is a product of the subject's life, practical connections and relationships 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 an object that affect the subject's sense organs is the result of analysis at a physical, essentially level. But it is precisely at this level that the sensory image reveals itself as poorer than 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, he acts, on the contrary, in all his wealth, as having absorbed that system of objective relations in which only the content reflected by it exists in reality. 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 influence of the object on the sense organs.

A fundamentally different understanding of the process of generating an image goes back to Descartes. Comparing in his famous "Diopter" vision with the perception of objects by the blind, who "seem to see with their hands," Descartes wrote: "... If you think that the difference seen by a blind person between trees, stones, water and other similar objects with his stick does not seem to him less than the one that exists between red, yellow, green and any other color, nevertheless, the dissimilarity between the bodies is nothing more than 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 proposition that perception is an active process, necessarily including efferent links, has received general acceptance. Although the identification and registration of efferent processes sometimes presents significant methodological difficulties, so that some phenomena seem to be more likely evidence in favor of a passive, "screen" theory of perception, nevertheless, their obligatory participation can be considered established.

Particularly important data have been obtained in ontogenetic studies of perception. These studies have the advantage that they allow the study of active processes of perception in them, so to speak, expanded, open, that is, 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 auditory perception, the organ-receptor of which, in contrast to the touching hand and the visual apparatus, is completely devoid of external activity. For speech hearing, the need for "articulatory imitation" was experimentally shown, for sound-pitch hearing - the hidden activity of the vocal apparatus.

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

No, of course, it is necessary to stipulate the fact that the processes of perception are included in the life, 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 the perceptual activity takes, whatever degree of reduction or automation it may undergo in the course of its formation and development, in principle it is built in the same way as the activity of the touching hand, "removing" the contour of the object. Like the activity of the touching hand, any 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, rather unsuccessfully, its objectivity.

This feature of the sensory mental image in its simplest and most expquisite form appears in relation to extraceptive object images. The fundamental psychological fact is that in the image we are given not our subjective states, but the objects themselves. For example, the light 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, which Lenin emphasized.

Copying an object in a drawing, we must correlate the image (model) of the object with the depicted (modeled) object, perceiving them as two different things; but we do not establish such a relationship between our subjective image of the object and the object itself, between the perception of our drawing and the drawing itself. If the problem of such a relationship arises, then 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 "objectification" of the mental image, that is, that the effect of a thing first gives rise to its sensory image, and then this image is related by the subject to the world "projected onto the original." Psychologically, such a special act of “reverse projection” simply does not exist under ordinary conditions. The eye, under the influence of a light point that suddenly appeared on the screen, immediately moves to the periphery of its retina, and the subject immediately sees this point localized in objective space; what he does not perceive at all is his displacement at the moment of the eye leap 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 known in psychology for a long time. 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 the bullet - that is, his sensations are paradoxically displaced into the world of external things and are not localized at the “probe-hand” border. and on the "probe-perceived object" boundary (bullet). The same happens in any other similar case, for example, when we perceive the roughness of the paper with the tip of a sharp pen. we feel the road in the dark with a stick, etc.

The main interest of these facts is that they are "divorced" and partly exteriorized relations, usually hidden from the researcher. One of them is the "hand-probe" relationship. The influence exerted by the probe on the receptive apparatus of the hand causes sensations that are integrated into its complex visual-tactile image and subsequently play a leading role in regulating the process of holding the probe in the hand. Another relationship is the probe-object relationship. It occurs as soon as the action of the surgeon brings the probe into contact with the object. But even at this first moment, the object, which still appears in its uncertainty - as “something”, as the first point on the line of the future “drawing” - the image - is referred to the external world, localized in objective space. In other words, a sensory mental image reveals the property of object-relatedness already at the moment of its formation. But let us continue our analysis of the probe-object relationship a little further. 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 in question is that this the border passes as a border between two physical bodies: one of them - the tip of the probe - realizes the cognitive, perceptual activity of the subject, the other constitutes the object of this activity. displaced to the tactile end of the probe - an artificial distantreceptor, which forms an extension 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 rearranged and extremely complicated. In the case of perception by means of a probe, the hand does not significantly move in relation to the probe, while in visual perception, the eye is movable, "picking up" the light rays reaching its retina, which are thrown 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 a kind of continuous, subject-controlled "change of probes", which is the equivalent of their movement along the surface of the object. Now the subject's sensations are also shifted to the outer boundaries of the object, but not along the thing (probe), but along the light rays; the subject sees not a retinal, continuously and rapidly changing projection of an object, but an external object in its relative invariance and stability.

It is the ignorance of the main feature of the sensory image - the attribution of our sensations to the external world - that created the biggest misunderstanding that paved the way for subjective - idealistic conclusions from the principle of the specific energy of the senses. 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 sensations included in the image of the external world. In reality, of course, no one takes the glow that occurs as a result of electrical irritation of the eye for real light, and only Munchausen could have come up with the idea to set fire to gunpowder on the shelf of a gun with sparks streaming from his eyes. Usually we say quite correctly: "it has darkened in the eyes", "rings 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, describing cases of restoration of vision in adults after 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 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 reference of the image to the external world, but the inclusion in the image of the external world of elements of a new mode - distance.

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

In the light of the theory of reflection, the school's "classical" scheme: a candle -> its projection on the retina -> the image of this projection in the brain, which emits a certain "metaphysical light" - is nothing more than a superficial, grossly one-sided (and, therefore, incorrect) image mental reflection. This scheme leads directly to the recognition that our sense organs, possessing "specific energies" (which is a fact), fence off the subjective image from external objective reality. It is clear that no description of this scheme of the process of perception in terms of the propagation of nervous excitement, information, building models, etc., can change it in essence.

Another side of the problem of the sensory subjective image is the question of the role of practice in its formation. It is well known that the introduction of the category of practice into the theory of knowledge constitutes the main point of the dividing line between the Marxist understanding of knowledge and the understanding of knowledge in pre-Marxian materialism, on the one hand, and in idealistic philosophy, on the other. "The point of view of life, practice should be the first and main point of view of the theory of knowledge," says Lenin. As the first and main, this point of view is 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 to consider in psychology any perceptual activity of the individual as proceeding directly in the form of practical activity or directly arising from it. The processes of active visual or auditory perception are separated from direct practice, so that both the human eye and human ear become, in the words of Marx, 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 great extent surpasses in their wealth 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 investigating exactly how practice enters into a person's perceptual activity. It must be said that psychology has already accumulated a lot of specific scientific data, which closely lead to the solution of this issue.

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 or micromotor, they appear quite clearly; in other cases, they are "hidden", expressed in the dynamics of the current internal states of the recipient system. But they always exist. Their function is "similar" 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 aggregate experience of a person's objective activity. The fact is that such an inclusion cannot be realized as a result of a simple repetition of combinations of sensory elements and the actualization of temporary connections between them. After all, we are not talking about the associative reproduction of the missing elements of sensory complexes, but about the adequacy of the arising subjective images general properties of the real world in which a person lives. 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 turn again to the well-known and well-known psychological facts - to the effects of “pseudo-spokic” visual perception, the study of which we have now resumed. As you know, the pseudoscopic effect is that when viewing objects through binoculars composed of two Dove prisms, there is a natural distortion of perception: closer points of objects seem more distant and vice versa. As a result, for example, a concave plaster mask of a face is seen under certain lighting conditions as a convex, embossed image of it, while the embossed image of a face is seen, on the contrary, as a mask. But the main interest of experiments with a pseudoscope is that a visible pseudoscopic image appears only if it is plausible (a plaster mask of a face is as “plausible” from the point of view of reality as its plaster convex sculptural image), or in the case, if in one way or another it is possible to block the inclusion of a visible pseudoscopic image in a person's picture of the real world.

It is known that if you replace the head of a person made of plaster with the head of a real person, then the pseudoscopic effect does not occur at all. Particularly demonstrative are experiments in which a 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 person's head is seen as usual, and the plaster of paris is perceived pseudoscopically, that is, as a concave mask. Such phenomena are observed, however, only if the pseudoscopic image is plausible. Another feature of the pseudoscopic effect is that in order for it to arise, it is better to demonstrate the object against an abstract, non-objective background, that is, outside the system of concrete-objective connections. 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 it than screen, that is, as if to hang freely in front of the screen. In reality, however, the situation is different. At favorable conditions the subject sees - as it should be with pseudoscopic perception - parts of the surface located behind the screen, in front of the screen; they, however, do not "hang" in the air (which is implausible), but are perceived as some volumetric physical bodies protruding through the opening of the screen. In the visible image, an increase occurs in the form of lateral surfaces that form the boundaries of these physical bodies... And finally, the last: as systematic experiments have shown, the processes of the emergence of a pseudoscopic image, as well as the elimination of its pseudoscopicity, although 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 proved by the fact that the subjects can learn to control both of these processes.

The meaning of experiments with a pseudoscope is, of course, not at all that by creating a distortion of the projection of the displayed objects on the retinas with the help of special optics, it is possible, under certain conditions, to obtain a false subjective visual image. Their real meaning is (as well as similar to them, the classical "chronic" experiments of Stratton, I. Kohler and others) in the opportunity they open to explore the process of such transformation of information coming to the sensory "input", which obeys general properties, connections, laws of real reality. This is another, more complete expression of the objectivity of the subjective image, which now appears not only in its initial reference to the reflected object, but also in its reference to the objective world as a whole.

It goes without saying that a person should already have a picture of this world. It develops, however, not only at the immediate sensory level, but also at the higher 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 in the plane of a double abstraction: the abstraction of a person from society and the abstraction of a perceived object from its connections with objective reality. The subjective sensory image and its object appeared for her as two opposing things. But the psychic 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 a soul, only a spiritual "I". The truth is that the real and acting man, with the help of his brain and its organs, perceives external objects; their appearance to him is their sensory image. Let us emphasize again: the phenomenon of objects, and not of the physiological states they cause.

In perception, an active process of "scooping" out of the reality of its properties, relationships, etc., constantly takes place, their fixation in short-term or long-term states of recipient systems and the reproduction of these properties in acts of formation of new images, in acts of formation of new images, in acts of recognition and remembering objects.

Here again we must interrupt the exposition with a description of a psychological fact that illustrates what has just been said. Everyone knows what the guessing of mysterious pictures is. 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 picture elements; the coincidence of this image with one of the complexes of the picture leads to its “guessing”. In other words, this explanation comes from the idea of ​​two things being compared with each other: the image in the head of the subject and his image in the picture. As for the difficulties that arise in this case, they are attributed to the lack of emphasis and completeness of the image of the desired object in the picture, which requires multiple "fitting" of the image to it. The psychological implausibility of such an explanation suggested to the author the idea of ​​the simplest experiment, in which the subject was not given any indication of the object disguised in the picture. The subject was told: "before you are the usual mysterious pictures for children: try to find the object that is hidden in each of them." Under these conditions, the process could not proceed at all according to the scheme of comparing the image of an object that arose in the subject with its image contained in the elements of the picture. Nevertheless, the subjects solved the mysterious pictures. They “scooped up” the image of an object from the picture, and the image of this familiar object was actualized in them.

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 kind of thing led to a substantial understanding and representation. This is a generalization resulting from the superposition of sensory imprints on each other, in the manner of Galton's photography, to which the word-name is associated associatively. Although within the limits of such an understanding the possibility of transformation of representations was admitted, they were nevertheless thought of as some "ready-made" formations stored in the warehouses of our memory. It is easy to see that such an understanding of representations is in good agreement with the formal-logical doctrine of concrete concepts, but is in blatant contradiction with the dialectical-materialist understanding of generalizations.

Our sensible generalized images, like concepts, contain movement and, therefore, contradictions; they reflect the object in its various connections and mediations. This means that no sense 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 cerebral constellations that are capable of realizing a subjective image of an object that opens up to a person in one or another system of objective connections. The concept of an object includes not only similarities in objects, but also different, as it were, its facets, including those that do not "overlap" each other, that are not in a relationship of structural or functional similarity.

Not only concepts are dialectical, but also our sensory representations; therefore, they are capable of performing a function that 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 alive and creative. *** *

* The problem of sensory images and ideas arose before psychology from the very first steps of its development. The question of the nature of our sensations and perceptions could not be bypassed by any psychological trend, no matter what philosophical basis it may proceed from. It is not surprising, therefore, that a huge number of works, theoretical and experimental, have been devoted to this problem. Their number continues to grow rapidly 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 perspectives in this respect are opened by the introduction of the category of mental reflection into psychology, the scientific productivity of which now no longer requires proof. This category, however, cannot be taken outside of its internal connection with other main Marxist categories. Therefore, the introduction of the category of reflection in scientific psychology requires a restructuring of its entire categorical structure. The immediate problems that arise on 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 HUMAN SCIENCES The problem of state and the term "state" itself have long occupied the minds of representatives of philosophy and natural sciences. For the first time the question of the concept of "state" was posed by Aristotle,