Home / Archives / No. 2 (2022) / Philosophy and Science Evolutionary Approach to Consciousness in Modern Philosophy and Interdisciplinary Studies
Voprosy filosofii January 1, 2022 Peer reviewed DOI: 10.21146/0042-8744-2022-2-106-116 via Semantic Scholar
Summary
Consciousness is a familiar yet poorly defined concept in modern science. This philosophical review examines major approaches to defining consciousness, drawing on the Russian activity-based tradition that emphasizes interaction with the world and culture. By incorporating recent anthropology and neuroscience, the authors propose that human consciousness is the learned ability to control actions at the level of intentions. This distinguishes it from other forms of subjective reality in other species and suggests an evolutionary logic for subjective experience, providing a foundation for linking subjective states to neural activity.
Study at a glance
| Design | theoretical or philosophical paper |
|---|---|
| Key finding | Human consciousness is defined as the characteristic ability to control actions at the level of intentions, learned during life, which distinguishes it from other forms of subjective reality. |
Abstract
Experiencing, awareness, and being conscious of the subjective experience are familiar to everyone and invariably bear the stamp of subjectivity. This makes the concept of consciousness one of the most problematic in modern science; insofar as there is no satisfactory definition of human consciousness that has been developed yet. This article reviews the most popular approaches to the definition of consciousness in modern philosophy and cognitive sciences. Our study continues the tradition of the Russian activity-based approach in studying consciousness, thus the greatest attention is paid to studies that consider consciousness in the context of interaction with the world and the culture. The authors consider the latest data of anthropology and neuroscience in order to find the features that distinguish human consciousness from the other forms of subjective reality, which are present in the other species. Based on the provided analysis, the authors propose to define human consciousness as a characteristic ability of a human to control their actions at the level of intentions, which should be mastered during the life. Therefore, it becomes possible to distinguish particular features of the human consciousness from other forms of subjective reality and to show the logic of the evolutionary development of subjective reality. This result can become a foundation for further research on how to identify most common subjective states of human with the corresponding activity of the neural system.