p One of the fundamental achievements of materialism in explaining the rise and development of consciousness was discovery of the decisive role of labour in the evolution of man from the apes. That discovery largely determined the special attention that experimental and theoretical psychology has paid for many decades to the anthropoid apes. As man’s closest relatives, morphologically and genetically, they also take first place in level of development of mental capacities among all the other members of the animal kingdom.
p The anthropoid apes are capable of resorting, in certain situations, to use of a kind of rudimentary tool, an object of the environment that is available ready-made or is even partly ’worked up’ by the apes themselves. Evidence of that is the well-known fact that apes display a capacity, in artificially created situations, to manipulate objects that are within their sensory field, for example, sticks, and even to ‘make’ such rods by biting off surplus bits of objects that outwardly resemble sticks. A stick in the paws of an ape and the savage’s spear, in any case, have this in common that they extend the natural dimensions, as it were, of their bodily organs, without being living attachments of them, and serve as a mediator between the living organism and the environment.
p On the background of established views of the close genetic kinship of apes and man, reports about the discovery of species in the animal kingdom with a highly developed psyche proved unexpected. That applies in particular to dolphins, whose surprising responsiveness to training, and ingenuity, 45 have been confirmed by scientific observations and experiments. Leaving aside sensation-mongering statements about their being rational creatures, one can slill not help wondering how it became possible for psychic properties to develop among dolphins that are in no way inferior in complexity, in the view of some workers, to those of anthropoid apes. Neither their habitat nor their bodily organisation give grounds for supposing that they may have used the naturally given objects employed by anthropoid apes as a kind of forerunner of tools. But isn’t it precisely the transition to employing external objects as tools that led to the complicating of the psychic activity of man’s ape-like ancestors on the road to the rise of consciousness?
p The new data of the natural sciences have heightened interest in such traditional philosophical problems as the origin and essence of consciousness, and have made the role of labour in its genesis again a topical question. This interest has been roused, in particular, by the advances of cybernetics, and efforts to model thought process on computers, and the transfer of propositions about the existence of extraterrestrial civilisations from the field of science fiction to that of scientific search, and so on. It has been suggested, moreover, that a high degree of psychic activity may have been ‘evolved’ on the basis of other factors than labour, and that ’man’s mental development is beginning to be considered a partial case of genetically different paths of evolution of the psyche’.^^1^^
p The suggestion that labour is one, but not the only possible way of the origin of thinking beings merits our further attention. It must not be forgotten that assertions about consciousness having a source outside labour are widely employed, and still used, to construct anti-scientific conceptions that treat the problems of the origin and essence of consciousness from both a frankly religious and a sophisticated idealist position. But that is not grounds for consistent adherents of dialectical materialism to reject as unscientific the thesis that there may have been various paths for the origin of reason. On the contrary, our task is to show that, if there really could have been several paths by which consciousness was formed, there is nothing mystical aboiit it, and that the scientific significance of such an assumption can be substantiated precisely from the methodological positions of dialectical materialism.
p First of all, let us assume that man owes his origin as 46 a thinking fragment of the material world precisely to labour. Hypotheses about other ways of the forming of rational beings cannot ignore this point, if they are built on a materialist basis, or in any case cannot help treating it as a realistic version of the genesis of consciousness.
p On the other hand, an important methodological proposition follows from the doctrine of the material unity of the world, from Lenin’s theory of reflection, and from the dialectical unity of the general and the particular, namely that the origin of consciousness through labour is only a particular phenomenon, and that the general pattern of its genesis must seemingly be manifested in it. The particular does not exist out of context with the general. In this case our task, consequently, is to try and explain whether or not there is something about labour that should be considered a common invariant factor for other possible situations of the rise of highly developed forms of ideal reflection of reality similar to human consciousness.
p The radical difference between the psyche of even highly organised animals and human reason is usually seen as being that while the sensory level of reflection of reality is available to animals,j entry to the field of logical operations and conceptual thinking is closed to them. It is thus the faculty of forming and operating with concepts in accordance with certain rules (on the basis of sense perception or together with it) that is the criterion that makes it possible to class a subject among rational beings (whose sole representative on Earth is Homo sapiens).
p But where does this faculty come from? Can conceptual thinking be derived from the evolution of sensory reflection? The answer to that is associated with important epistemological conclusions. At the same time disclosure of the mechanism of the transition from sensory reflection to the rational is directly related to explanation of the historical process of the transition from the psyche of prehominids to consciousness, to determination of the boundary between the psyche of animals and the mental activity of man, to the heuristic problematic, etc.
p The eternal and natural condition (as Marx put it) of the life of any organism, including man, is the exchange of matter (metabolism) between the organism and its natural environment. In that respect man cannot be viewed outside the living world, being only one species among its numerous representatives. At the same time, however, men make 47 their exchange of matter with nature in a way qualitatively different from animals. The animal’s relationship with the external world is characterised by a direct, unmediated link along the lines of ‘organism—nature’. Man interacts with nature in an indirect mediated way, putting natural objects that he has altered between himself and nature as an intermediary. This intermediary is a part of nature that has come to be called second, or ‘humanised’, nature.
p Marxism demonstrated, for the first time, with strict scientific precision, that man, unlike animals, interacts with external nature to a determining extent along the pattern ’man—humanised nature—nature’.^^2^^ The dyad ’subject— object’ does not take that important fact fully into account. The epistemological relation ‘subject—object’ reflects features of man’s actually existing relation, as a living organism, to his environment. Unlike the concept of the direct relationship between the organism and the environment, which we have expressed in the form of a two- member relation ’ organism—nature’, the concept ‘subject’ already includes the idea that the living organism (man) interacts with nature by means of tools, and is a rational being.
p But tools, as an objective given quantity that is not a natural organ of the human body, are not numbered among the ‘subjects’ and in that sense do not form part of the objective reality that is reflected in the concept ‘subject’. The concept of the tool differs, too, from that of ‘object’, when we understand by the latter nature (the environment) in its virgin form, because a tool is a part of nature created by man himself by transforming its objects and forces in the labour process into objects and forces that he puts into his use as an intermediary between himself and nature. A tool is therefore an object that represents ’humanised nature’ or a ’ subjectivised object’.
p Since we apply the term ‘subject’ in the accepted sense to a thinking, rational being, and do not use it in relation to animals, we shall, in order to avoid terminological confusion and for sake of brevity, depict the direct relationship between the living organism and the environment symbolically by
p where S is the living organism and TV the environment. This relationship, characteristic of species of non-rational living organisms, contains the premises of the rise of rational 48 beings, because man was moulded as a result of the natural historical process of his differentiation from the animal kingdom.
p Theses on the activity of the living organism as an integral, self-governing system, on the functional mechanism of anticipating reflection, and on the role of orientation in behaviour have been put forward and developed in the work of Soviet scholars (N.A. Bernstein, D.N. Uznadze, P.K. Anokhin, and others). In basing ourselves on these, we would like to touch simply on those aspects of the complex relationship of the living organism and the environment that relate to the problem of the transition from sense reflection of reality to rational, abstract reflection.
p The living organism, being the objective result of the self-development of inanimate nature, is at the same time an organised part of nature that has its own qualitative features. It is an integral system with an inherent drive to preserve its integrity, and to self-reproduction, or (to use the broader term proposed by Bernstein in relation to the living organism) a drive to maximum negative entropy. This drive is realised in the course of the organism’s activity, which has two aspects—internal and external.
p The internal aspect of activity is the functioning of all the elements of the animate system’s structure in their interconnection as a single whole. There is a limit to breach of the inner functional links beyond which the elements of the integral system must break down and the system die, and the organism lose its internally inherent drive to negative entropy. This striving requires energy and material resources whose assimilation by the organism enables it to counter the action of the objective law of entropy. Their source is the environment. The external aspect of the organism’s activity is primarily the process of assimilating energy and material resources available in the environment and needed to sustain life and maintain constant reproduction of the organism as an integral system. In the absence of these resources, or with the rise of conditions in which they cannot be assimilated by the organism, the inexorable operation of the law of entropy clearly leads to death of the organism.
p These two aspects of activity form a unity. During activity the animate system transforms elements of the environment, and includes them into its inner, integral organisation. The process of its activity thus functions as integral activity, and the system itself as an active entity.
49p For the drive to survive (maximum negative entropy, reproduction of its integrity) that is built into the animate system to be realised successfully in the course of its activity, it must obviously possess a form of reflection specific to it and differing from the forms of reflection existing in inanimate nature (according to dialectical materialism reflection is a universal property of matter). We call this form of reflection, innate in animals that interact with the environment directly by the scheme S+±N, as well as in humans, feeling or sensory reflection.
p We stipulated earlier that we would use the term ’animate organism’ in the narrow sense. In the broad sense it of course includes bacteria, plants, protozoa, and other organisms. But for the purposes of our exposition it is sufficient to limit it to those branches of the tree of life that are almost exclusively represented by the Ghordata, and predominantly by higher animals. By direct sensory reflection as a property of living organisms we shall therefore mean the sensitivity inherent in a number of species limited by this reservation.^^3^^
p With more detailed consideration it is clear that an animate system could not survive if it did not (1) possess a faculty of somehow reflecting and ‘feeling’ itself precisely as a living entity. This faculty, which is expressed in the systems’s drive for self-preservation, can be called an instinctive feeling (instinct) of self-preservation. This instinct, so understood, is a kind of integral background (field) of experience that makes it possible to ‘evaluate’ external and internal events by a single criterion, namely whether or not they are conducive to the organism’s drive to survive. Stimuli fixed by the organism as signals of certain events are projected onto the integral background of the instinctive feeling of self-preservation, taking the form of positive or negative emotions. If the change in the situation is favourable for survival, the emotions are positive; if it is dangerous, or harmful for life, the emotions are negative. Any situation is accordingly experienced as satisfactory or unsatisfactory.
p An animate system could not survive (2) if it did not have a faculty of reflecting in some way changes taking place in its inner functional organisation. Its normal functioning thus requires (as we have already said) replenishment of its material and energy resources. The fixing of a shortage of these resources is projected onto the background of the instinct for self-preservation, taking the form of an 50 emotionally experienced feeling of an unsatisfied need (e.g. of hunger). On the contrary, bringing of these resources to the vitally necessary level is experienced as a feeling of satisfaction of a need. This sensory reflection of changes in the inner state of the organism we call a sense of need.
p (3) A necessary condition of the organism’s survival is the existence of a faculty in it to reflect situations in the environment as a source of vitally, necessary resources and as the external field of its life activity, into which it is plunged, and changes in the parameters of which (within limits unacceptable to the organism) lead to its death. The initial facts of sensory reflection of the environment are sensations. Sensations of one sort or another are also ‘evaluated’ in the form of positive or negative emotions. Combinations of sensations with an incomplete or isolated character, passing through the ‘filter’ of the integral background of the instinct for self-preservation, are given a certain order and integrity, and become perceptions. This aspect of sensory reflection we call perception, in accordance with the accepted terminology.
p External irritation not connected with events of vital importance to the organism is not fixed after repeated reactions at the emotional level in its characteristic form of experience of opposing (favourable—dangerous) situations. Because of the undifferentiated nature of such irritation as regards the drive to preserve life, it is also not reflected at the level of perception. In that way the animate organism fences itself off from excess information.
p The process of active interaction with the environment could not, furthermore, ensure the organism’s survival if it did not reflect the direction of its activity toward passage from the unsatisfactory situations it experiences to satisfactory ones, and toward search for conditions favourable for life in the environment. This direction is realised in movement of the organism (for many species of animal it also includes spatial motion). This aspect of sensory reflection can be called kinaesthesia.
p Sensation and sensory reflection thus display a complicated structure already at the level of a relatively primitive animate system, still far from its transformation into a rational being. It follows from recognition of a striving to maintain life internally inherent in an animate system that sensory reflection is manifested in various, albeit interconnected aspects. The role of the link connecting the various data of sensory reflection into a whole is thus performed by the 51 instinctive feeling of self-preservation as self-reflection of the system itself in its drive for maximum negative entropy and for reproduction of its integrity precisely as an animate system. The kind of orientation that has a special place in determining the general direction of the animal’s actions thus rests on the instinct of self-preservation.
p Allowing for that, let us turn to consideration of the organism’s direct interconnection with the environment along the lines of S +* N. This relation is characterised, on the one hand, by the organism’s active effect on the environment and, on the other hand, by the latter’s influence on it, in the space-time continuum that it enters from the moment of its origin. In the one case, and the other, the interaction S =«=* N is realised through the living organism’s activity, during which it obtains means of existence and responds to vitally important influences of the environment that do not depend on it and therefore require adaptation to them.
p The process of activity consists of a chain of individual actions, each of which has its result, so that the total result, which consists in survival of the organism, is realised through a multiple series of separate results rlt r2, r3, . . . rn.
p However each separate result differs from the others, a certain recurrence of elements is characteristic of the series. This stems from the objective patterns of the motion of matter in general, and in particular from the evolution of the animate, system itself as part of the material world. The system encounters recurrence of processes in the environment (caused, for example, by the Earth’s revolution around the Sun and its rotation around its own axis), from its very inception. It is logical, furthermore, to suppose that not only is the animate system included in the external, objective recurrence of processes, but that this repetition also occurs within it, since life itself is engendered by that very nature that later opposes it as the external environment.
p There are now many experimental findings that confirm that most animals and plants are capable of measuring intervals of time, even in conditions of constant illumination. They preserve the rhythm of physiological processes and behaviour, i.e. possess inner biological clocks to orientate them in time. Interest in this has grown so in recent decades that modern biology has given rise to a special field of biorhythmology, whose subject-matter is this phenomenon. Most of those working in that field have come to the conclusion that the rhythmic activity of living organisms depends to 52 a large extent on endogenous (internal) causes rather than on exogenous (external) ones.^^4^^
p We would like to draw attention, in that connection, to an aspect of the ‘organism-environment’ problem that has long been the subject of keen discussions in biology and philosophy. Which of these two aspects is the leading, determinant one in the evolution of life as a special biological form of the motion of matter, the organism or the environment? Idealists, of course, isolate inanimate and animate matter from one another explaining the latter, moreover, as underivable in principle from the former. In one way or another they assume that it is impossible to give a determinist explanation of the evolution of life, regarding the activity of living organisms as not governed by any objective laws, and considering that the unpredictable will of the living organism’s own choice underlies its behaviour. The reaction of materialists to that position is quite definite; the formation of species and behaviour of the forms of animate matter are determined, and the source of that determination must be sought in the environment.
p Darwin’s theory of natural selection, which followed from the proposition that living organism’ adaptation to the environment in the course of the struggle for existence had a leading role as the cause of the origin of species and their mode of behaviour in fact laid the basis for a scientific explanation from the standpoint of dialectical materialism of the mechanism of the operation of biological laws. Idealist conceptions suffered a major setback as regards its scientific and ideological consequences. But it is sometimes forgotten, in that connection, that the assumption of the external conditioning of species formation and animal behaviour does not exclude the existence of inner patterns of the development of living organisms, and that vital activity is determined from within to some extent as well as from outside. This oversight has frequently been employed to refute Darwinism. More and more evidence has been gathered in biology that mutations (changes suddenly arising in the structure of inheritance responsible for storing and transmitting genetic information) underlie the inherited variability of living organisms. Mutations do not, in fact, have an adaptive character, and may arise spontaneously, without visible links with changes in the environment. Mutation theory was actually in seeming contradiction with the Darwinian theory of natural selection until their initial 53 assumptions were synthesised, and natural selection began to be considered as the natural selection of mutations.^^5^^
p Efforts to employ the critique of Darwin’s scientific conceptions to attack philosophical materialism are clearly unsound, as well as regards problems of the interconnection of internal and external factors in species formation and the behaviour of living organisms. Anyone acquainted with the principles of Marxist-Leninist philosophy will confirm that the determinant source of change, evolution, and motion lies, according to dialectical materialism, within a material system and not outside it, and is not a push from outside but is conditioned rather by inner contradictions existing in unity and ‘struggle’ within the concrete material system, and within the material world as a whole. That position makes it possible to regard any change as seZ/-change, i.e. an intrinsic, internally necessary, self-produced change of the system that is determined by its contradictions, which mediate the effect of external factors and conditions.^^6^^ That also applies to animate systems. The dialectical materialist approach to explaining the origin of life as a special more highly organised form of the motion of matter than inanimate nature must obviously be linked with recognition of the cardinal thesis that animate nature is the natural product of inanimate nature in the course of the latter’s gradual evolution. But if that is so, the ’building material’ of the first living cell could only have been ‘materials’ of inanimate nature, and nothing more (quantum mechanical elements, fields, bodies, etc.). The determined links of the inanimate elements could not help being included, therefore, though in altered form, in the internal connections of the elements of the first living cell. Whatever this transformation was, the living cell must have been determined internally from the outset, because, as regards its inner aspect, it was part, because of its initial state, of that same determined nature, which began to oppose the cell from its inception as the environment (medium) as a special part different from the cell. The materialist thesis about the conditioning of the evolution of life by external factors therefore not only does not refute, but on the contrary presupposes the existence of internal, relatively independent laws of the functioning and evolution of living organisms. Thus, if living organisms did not have an impulse to maintain and continue life built into their structural organisation, there could be no possibility of their 54 changing in the course of adaptation to changes in the conditions of the environment.
p As regards the objective necessity of a cyclic recurrence of the processes taking place within an organism, this is manifested in particular, in a constant replenishment of vital resources being necessary for the organism’s reaction to the law of entropy; satisfied needs become in time unsatisfied, which in turn leads to a need to repeat the cycle of actions to satisfy the unsatisfied needs. Since this cyclicity is vitally important, it must obviously become fixed by the organism at the level of sensory reflection as a recurrence of results in the general series of its actions.
p A very important circumstance is brought out here (which has not received due attention in the philosophical literature), viz., in spite of the fact that recurrence of the results of the organism’s activity is ultimately based in an objective interconnection of the phenomena of nature, the direct source uniting these results in animal’s psyche into some sort of interconnected whole is all the same not the objective laws of the natural environment but the laws of the active integrity of the animate system itself. Given its direct interaction with the environment, the results (which consist in the chain rl7 r2, . . . rn) cannot be linked together outside their direct link with the system’s activity.
p Direct sensory reflection of the temporal links of any phenomena is unable to bring out their essence as causal connections operating with objective necessity. Experiments in producing conditioned reflexes in animals quite convincingly confirm that. In certain experiments with dogs that were regularly fed after the flashing of a lamp, they secreted saliva, anticipating the appearance of food, in response to the next flash. The switching on of the lamp and the delivery of food had no causal relationship, and were deliberately done by the experimenter. But in the dog’s brain a connection was established between these successively repeated events (the flashing of the lamp and the receiving of food).
p The direct basis for the establishment of this link is obviously not an objective causal connection of the phenomena in the environment, but the internal active unity and autonomy of the animal’s organism requiring satisfaction of a need for food. With disappearance at the end of the chain of the successively repeated reinforcing event (the receiving of food) the conditioned reflex also fades with time, and the animal ceases to react to the conditioned signal. If 55 we began to treat the reflection of the recurrence of phenomena of the environment characteristic of the organism’s direct relation with it as reflection of a cause-and-effect relationship, the hooting of a train would have to be considered the cause of its movement.
p The results of an organism’s activity are embodied externally in the environment as changes introduced into it by the organism. With the origin of life and rapid rise of living forms, a biosphere came into being and began to evolve that altered the face of Earth substantially. Biological equilibrium, reproduced in ever more complex form in the course of the natural evolution of terrestrial life, is manifested in a host of connections and relations between living organisms and both inanimate nature and themselves. As Frederick Engels remarked:
p Animals ... change the environment by their activities in the same way, even if not to the same extent, as man does, ... on the island of St. Helena, goats and pigs brought by the first arrivals have succeeded in exterminating its old vegetation almost completely, and so have prepared the ground for the spreading of plants brought by later sailors and colonists. But animals exert a lasting effect on their environment unintentionally and, as far as the animals themselves are concerned, accidentally....
p In short, the animal merely uses its environment, and brings about changes in it simply by its presence.^^7^^
p Since the results of animals’ activity expressed in changes in the natural environment produced by them are made ’as far as the animals themselves are concerned, accidentally’, one must obviously distinguish that aspect in the chain of animals’ effective actions which has a necessary character. All these actions and results are such as are necessary for the maintenance and reproduction of life, because life would simply become impossible without them. Consequently, we have to investigate any chain of recurrent events from the aspect of inner activity directed to maintaining life and to self-reproduction of the organism as a living, integral system.
p If we employ the ‘stimulus—reaction’ formula for this, it turns out that the leading stimulus of behaviour during the organism’s direct relation with the environment, in this sense too, is the instinct of self-preservation, with the animal’s drive stemming from it to transform a situation dangerous for life, by its activity, into one satisfying the conditions for maintenance of life (e.g. satisfaction of a 56 physiological need for food, defence, or safety through flight from an attacking enemy, etc.). The moment of satisfaction of the need for food is thus the end result of a chain of certain actions in which the connection of its links is ‘closed’, so as to be repeated again when the need arises. Without an unconditioned-reflex reinforcing link of the satisfied need, this whole periodically repeated chain of actions could not be formed.
p But because the environment is the sole source of replenishment of the animal’s vital resources, changes in it (irrespective of whether they are brought about without the animal’s involvement or are caused by its actions) assume the character of intermediate results in the chain of events leading to unconditioned reflex reinforcement. The fixing of the chain of these intermediate results in the animal’s psyche becomes an external stimulus directing its behaviour to achievement of a given ‘end’ result.
p Intermediate results may therefore be regarded as elements perceived by the organism as signals, i.e. stimuli, and the organism’s responses in its interaction with the environment as actions.^^8^^
p Conditionally designating the satisfactory and unsatisfactory situations reflected in the animal’s psyche respectively by the symbols rh and r^, the signals by the letters
p n
p rx, r2, . . . rn, and the actions by arrows -»-, ->-, . . . ->-, we can write the cyclic recurrence in the chain of actions leading, for example, to satisfaction of the need for food, as follows:
where rfe is the feeling of a satisfied need for food; r-^ is a feeling of hunger; -v is the search for food; rt is the sensation of the odour of an external object that has previously
2served as food; -*- is movement in the direction of the arri-
3ving odour; r2 is visual perception of the object; ->- is movement toward the object to contact with it and test it by taste; r3 is the palatable sensation of the object as the expected
4p food; ->- is the eating of the food; rh is the feeling of the newly satisfied need for food, and so on.
57p When we interpret our shorthand note of the sequence of events in the form of a linear chain rlf r2, . . . rn we must bear in mind each time the detailed record deduced above of cyclic recurrence in the chain of the animal’s actions, because this sequence in reality includes cycles of closedopen effective processes. ‘Closing’ thus occurs in this chain at points where situations unsatisfactory from the aspect of the drive to prolong life are transformed into satisfactory ones. Account must be taken, of course, of the fact that this cycle of actions and results has not only an external aspect, but also an internal one, i.e. that they are not reducible to recording the outer behaviour and its directly observable results, but also include inner (e.g. biochemical and bioelectrical) effective processes of self-regulation of the animal’s vital activity.
p Let us isolate the mechanism of the forming of that aspect of sensory reflection called sensation and perception from the general characteristics of the organism’s interaction with the environment, and consider it in more detail.
p From what we have already said about perception, it can be concluded that an animate system originally perceives objects and phenomena of the external world (e.g. form, colour, temperature) not simply as a set of separate sensations (e.g. round, yellow, warm), but through the correlation of perception of the object with the evaluation criterion of an instinctive sense of self-preservation, and experiencing perception thereby in the form of a positive or negative emotion.^^9^^ Thus, if a given round, warm, yellow object is useful for maintaining life, it is perceived as something that causes a positive emotion, in contrast, for example, to a black, cold, square object that is dangerous for life, which in turn evokes a negative emotion. But each of these* objects is perceived separately at this stage as something coherent and connected. In the perception of the first object, for instance, there is still no difference between round, yellow, and warm; all these properties of the object are perceived coherently and undifferentiated.
p Let us suppose, furthermore, that there is a third round, black, warm object in the organism’s environment, contact with which is dangerous, although the first and third properties coincide with the similar properties of the first, wholesome object. The difference consists solely in the colour. The faculty of distinguishing the third object from the first becomes vitally important. There consequently arises a 58 necessity to single out yellow colour from the coherent perception of the first object and black from the perception of the third, and to make a difference between them. This difference is also fixed by the organism through projection of the perceived objects onto the field of the instinct of self- preservation.
p We could give more examples, but it will be clear from what we have said that at the organism’s most elementary level of perception of its environment, the latter is perceived in the form of an opposition of two aspects, differentiated by a single criterion, which consists in the organism’s striving to survive. At that stage perception and sensation still coincide with one another, or rather perception and sensation are still one and the same thing. But from the elementary cellule of perception, which contains these oppositions, ever richer perceptions by living creatures of the world in which they live arise in the course of evolution. While each of the two differentiated, opposed aspects is still perceived initially as something coherent and undifferentiated, further evolution leads to the singling out and differentiation in perception of various properties, objects, and relations of the environment.
p This process is, at the same time, one of complication and differentiation of the living cell itself as an integral system. While it did not initially possess specialised sense organs to fix various events and objects of the environment, such organs (of touch, vision, hearing, etc.) developed of vital necessity in the course of evolution. A multiple series of perceptions arose from the elementary cellule of perception through differentiation of opposites, each perception having on the one side a certain integrity or wholeness, and being differentiated on the other into a multiple series of singled-out sensations (round, yellow, warm, hard, etc.).
p From the standpoint of the natural historical process of the evolution of sensory reflection, it must thus be said that the coherence of perception is not built up from an aggregate of sensations, but is differentiated on the contrary from such an aggregate. In other words a perception is a differentiated entity, not an integrated one. But if the organism of an animal is regarded, in abstraction from the whole preceding process of the evolution of life, as already given, and as the final result of that process, then its perception of the environment is represented in the form of an integrated entity of various sensations. Therefore, when defining 59 perception through an aggregate of sensations, we must not forget that it is possible to integrate sensations into a certain unity because perception itself took shape historically as a differentiated entity.
p The absence of an evolutionary approach is largely responsible for the erroneousness of a number of psychological conceptions when the relationship of sensations and perceptions is being explained, an erroneousness that gets its extreme expression in the opposition between associationist and gestalt psychology. The associationists’ attempts to obtain an integral perception through a summation of sensations were doomed to failure because the source of the integral character of sensations remained outside consideration, since the wholeness of the aggregate of separate sensations does not consist in them themselves but arises in a genetic unity of perceptionsensation, and ultimately lies in the inner integrity of the sensing organism itself as a material animate system.
p The adherents of gestalt psychology correctly noted the error of associationists’ views, and experimentally confirmed the fact of the integrity (wholeness) of perception, which is not reducible to an aggregate of separate sensations. But they, in turn, not having discovered the source of this integrity, absolutised it, idealistically ‘objectified’ it, and isolated it from the subjectivity of sensations. The integral formations of perception began to be interpreted as some sort of independent substances like Leibniz’s monad.
p Allowing for what we have said, let us consider certain aspects of the mechanism of perceptions from the example of an already formed, ‘ready-made’, animate system possessing a certain set of specialised sensa organs. Because of the sequential recurrence intrinsic both in the processes of the organism’s vital activity itself and in the phenomena of the environment, the organism repeatedly comes up against similar situations in its interaction with the environment. At the next encounter with a situation that has already occurred in the past it takes the results of the previous meeting into account, as it were, in order to determine the direction of its future actions. If an external object that satisfied some need of its in the past, for instance, is yellow, it will display heightened interest in yellow colour.
p Experiments have established that many species not only of mammals but also of other animal organisms with a less developed nervous system (i.e. insects and fish), have the capacity to differentiate shape, size, colour, etc. to some 60 degree or another. It has been shown, for instance, by changes in the colour, shape, and size of the feeding rack of acquarium fish that after several repeated experiments the fish display a clearly expressed faculty to distinguish a circle from a triangle, a big triangle from a smaller cirlce, a yellow triangle from a black one, etc. They select precisely those trays from others, with a high degree of certainty according to shape, colour, and size, on which food was previously found. A conditioned reflex had been established in them.
p Let us now touch on an aspect of complex conditionedreflex activity. When an animal is capable of choosing precisely a yellow triangle of a certain size from several objects of different shape, size, and colour, does that mean that it performs an operation of differentiating and identifying objects of the environment such as’a triangle is not a circle’, ’yellow is not black’, ’this object, like that one, is triangular’, ’yellow is yellow’, ’this triangle is bigger than that circle’, and so on? Or, speaking the ‘language’ of sensations, does it mean that the animal establishes the difference and identity of sensations by association of the sensations themselves with one another?
p Members of the associationist trend in philosophy and psychology are inclined to answer that in the affirmative. From their standpoint, since a yellow object is always a yellow object, the invariance of an object’s yellowness is fixed through many repeated observations (through similarity in memory) as a common property of it. All its other properties that are not discovered through repeated observations are cut away in the same way that a sculptor creates a statue from a shapeless granite slab by chipping away all the surplus stone. The invariant, in this sense, is periodically repeated signals that are singled out through repeated superpositions of each other on the chaotic (‘surplus’) background noise precisely because they are repeated periodically and so distinguished from noise (i.e. there is a fixing of the difference between periodically repeated signals and chaotic, ‘surplus’ noise).
p These associationist conceptions (as already said) do not stand up to criticism either historically or logically. They have also been refuted by experiment. Aquarium fish distinguish yellow from some other colour, not because they have established an identity ’yellow = yellow’ through direct comparison of a number of sensations of yellow, but because the sensation of yellow is associated with the 61 posilive emotion of a satisfied need for food. It is not the repetition of the sensations in themselves but the repetition of the emotions evoked by these sensations that underlies an animal’s capacity to single out certain phenomena in special groups according to their similarity. In other words, it is not an association between two sensations that takes place here, but an association between sensation and emotion.
p The chain of results of an animal’s separate actions during its direct interaction with the environment is thus linked in its psyche through correlation of each of them with the inner emotional experience evoked by them. Information about events in the outside world accessible through the sense organs is not perceived by an animate system as a simple mirror reflection of them, but is actively transformed by the system.
p This process can be represented in very simplified form as follows. Vitally important external irritation perceived is projected along nerve channels on the neurophysiological ‘screen’ of the self-preservation instinct, so receiving an emotionally experienced ‘appreciation’.^^10^^ This projection leaves a trace on the screen, preservation of which through periodic repetition of analogous irritation creates conditions for an expectation of the previously experienced emotion. The capacity to preserve traces of experienced sense perceptions in a neurophysiological ’memory or storage device’ has an important place in the mechanism of anticipatory reflection of reality. The perceptions of events preserved in the memory, after they no longer exist, are traditionally called representations.^^11^^ Since the emotionally experienced consequences of previous events are fixed by a living organism in its memory, new impressions of them are ‘appreciated’ now in a certain dependence on the results of past experience. A time connection arises between the traces of emotional ‘appreciations’ and sensations of a given stimulus. Since the sensation of yellow is repeatedly preceded by an earlier positive emotion of satisfaction of the need for food, this sensation is experienced as expectation of a similar emotion. The experience plays the role of a setup of sorts determining the animal’s choice of the chain of subsequent, fruitful, effective actions in response to this sensation: viz., movement toward the yellow object to the point of contact with it; the finding of food; swallowing of the food; satisfaction of the need for food. It happens that when the first result begins the animal anticipates in 62 adVance, as it were, the occurrence of the end result in the future, forestalling the development of events.
p Prof. P. K. Anokhin, Fellow of the USSR Academy of Sciences, wrote, when describing the principles of anticipatory reflection of reality:
p Pavlov’s discovery of the conditioned reflex was essentially the discovery of anticipatory reflections of the external world in a highly specialised substratum, viz., the nervous system. In fact, when a dog secretes saliva in response to a bell, that happens not because the saliva must ’digest the sound’ but rather because food is going to appear soon that will have to be digested. Consequently, by virtue of repetition of a sequence of definite effects of the environment we have created a line of simplified reactions in which the first impulse is sufficient for a chemical reaction of protoplasm to spread like that of a miner’s fuse along the nervous system in the future, anticipating the subsequent development of external events.^^12^^
p Something similar also happens, in spite of its specific features, when there are periodic changes in the conditions of the environment, for example, with the succession of the seasons, or of day and night. Regular rhythmic recurrence of events, caused for example by seasonal phenomena (spring— summer—autumn—winter—spring ...), over the millions of years of the adaptation of life to external conditions, has developed in animal organisms a mechanism of inner biochemical restructuring (remarkable for its purposefulness) that anticipated the happening of subsequent events. That is displayed in the fact, that when a phenomenon which evokes the initial result is fixed by the organism, the internal chain of biological (physiological) processes leading to the subsequent results, is switched on.
p Such anticipatory reflection of reality is clearly discoverable even in insects, which prepare in good time to survive the severe conditions of winter. As an illustration we may cite the example, given by Prof. Anokhin, of the biological restructuring that takes place in the organism of the larva of a certain species of wasp.^^13^^
p The grub’s body contains much water, yet surprisingly it does not perish in frosts of—40°C (frozen water should destroy all the protoplasmic compound sin its cells); it turns out that with the onset of the first autumn frosts glycerine is rapidly formed and accumulated in the grub’s cells, considerably lowering the critical freezing point.
p At the same time such anticipatory reflection is only ’an information model of the probability of the occurrence of 63 the anticipated event^^1^^.^^14^^ When the previously repeated sequence of external events is altered by some cause, the inner processes in the living organism, operating with the previous sequence, lead to disturbances of the balance in its connections with the environment and, depending on their seriousness, to death of the organism.
p During adaptation to changing conditions of the environment, many species of highly organised animals, however, have acquired a capacity to avoid the fatal ’miner’s fuse’ reaction, and have learned when necessary to stop or suspend the sequence of inner processes triggered off. That increased their chances in the struggle for existence, and made il possible to react more flexibly and selectively to unexpected changes and situations suddenly arising in their relationships with the environment. A hungry predator, for example, that has received a visual or olfactory signal of the proximity of presumable prey, goes in pursuit of it and attacks it. But if the supposed prey puts up fierce resistance that is dangerous, the predator will prefer to alter the programme of its behaviour radically, despite its hunger, and save itself from harm.
p The origin of ever more complex forms of sensory reflection, dictated by living necessity, went hand in hand with complication and differentiation of the animate systems themselves, involving the material substratum of anticipatory reflection, including the nervous system. Along with congenital experience having the character of unconditioned reflexes, a capacity emerges in highly developed animals to form conditioned reflexes, and to accumulate individual, intravital experience both by imitation of the example of parents and in the course of ‘self-training’. But however complicated the forms of psychic reflection of reality were, at the level of the organism’s direct link with the environment according to the two-member scheme S +± N, this reflection could not pass from fixation of phenomena to discovery of their essence, or to discovery of the operation of inner, objective causal connections in the external sequence of events. It could not happen because in the organism’s direct relationship with the environment, it is not the external world that operates as the direct source of the systematic integration of perceptions but the active integral character of the animate system itself in its striving to survive.
p In that connection we must specially stress that the statement made above is wholly in agreement with the thesis of 64 the objective content of sensibility developed in works on the theory of knowledge of dialectical materialism. In fact, ’the recurrence of instinctive actions already necessarily ! reflects the pattern of reality’.^^15^^ If it did not, animals simply could not adapt themselves to life in conditions of an environment existing and changing independently of their behaviour. But the objective content in animals’ direct sensory reflection of reality is not perceived by them as an objective content. The animal interacting with its natural environment according to our two-member scheme, does not and , cannot know about the patterns of reality. It only adapts to them, reflecting the objective order of things, their properties and relations as an orderliness of its own behaviour that enables it to maintain its integrity as an animate system, and to realise its instinctive, unconscious striving to continue life. If animals could philosophise, they would have incontrovertible grounds, from their standpoint, to claim that it is they who introduce order and a regular con- i nection into phenomena of the natural environment.
p The real paradox is that uncritical transference of the scheme S =pt N to analysis of people’s conscious activity creates the illusion that it is the human mind, rather than nature, that is the creator of order and regular connections in nature; and that illusion is taken seriously as the allegedly scientific grounds on which subjective idealists erect their philosophical systems. One of the epistemological roots of subjective-idealist conceptions lies here in fact, including attempts to substitute a doctrine of probability relations, as a surficial consequence of recurring events, for determinism.
p With the two-member ‘subject—object’ scheme, the objective premises for passing from sensory reflection of reality to its logical reflection remain outside the field of view.
p j
p i
p ^^1^^ V. P. Tugarinov. Filosofiya soznaniya (The Philosophy of | Consciousness), Mysl, Moscow, 1971, p. 48.
p ’
p ^^2^^ ’Humanised nature’ can be interpreted in the broad sense of j the term as the whole cultural environment that men have created in the course of their social and historical practice, including both material and spiritual culture. But i since it is not a matter in this case of men’s relations to each other, but of the aggregate of their relations 65 precisely to the natural environment, the term ’humanised nature’ is used here in a narrower sense, to signify those objects and forces of the natural environment that man has transformed by his labour and put into his serviceAs for the concept ‘human’, or ‘man’, it is used here as a generic one, i.e. to designate a certain whole aggregate of men living and acting together, united, for example, in a primitive clan, rather than the separate ‘isolated’ individual.
p ^^3^^ The problem of Lhe transition from irritability to sensibility is outside the scope of our book. We would refer readers to the works of A. N. Leontiev, in which he treated the problem of the interconnection and difference between irritability and sensibility stemming from the interconnection and difference between directly vital and indirect (orientating) external influences (see his Problems of the Development of the Mind, sections I and II). Allowing for the fact that we have in mind the sensory reflection already formed in animals and are considering it in very general form, signal effects (e.g. the hum of an insect perceived by a frog) and direct vital functions (e.g. the frog’s swallowing of the insect) do not go beyond the limits of our S *± N scheme.
p It must also be stressed that the development of reflection at the level of consciousness transforms the sensory level of reflection qualitatively as well. At the same time there is something in common between the analysers of humans and animals, since man’s sensuality is genetically linked with the sensibility of his animal ancestors. Consideration of the qualitative difference between sense reflection in animals and man should therefore be preceded by explanation of the transition from sensory to rational reflection. In any case, sensory reflection is ’living contemplation’ of reality, which includes, in accordance with the historically determined evolution of the sensory apparatus, perception of light, sound, smells, etc.
p ^^4^^ See Ritchie R. Ward. The Living Clocks (Knopf, New York, 1971), p. 305. See also V. B. Chernyshov. The Precision of Biological Clocks. Priroda, 1974, 12: 87-88.
p ^^6^^ In order to visualise the idea of the relationship of the internal and external factors in inherited variability, the following simplified scheme is suggested. Let us depict the direction of possible mutations of an organism by broken 66 arrows radiating in various directions, and the trend of changes in the environment by a solid arrow. Then the mechanism of natural selection of mutations of a number of organisms (.4, B, C ...) will^appear as follows:
p B
p In this scheme mutations have a greater chance of survival the more the direction of their realisation coincides with the trend of changes in the environment.
p ^^6^^ See the entry ’Dialekticheskii materializm’ in Filosofskaya entsiklopediya, Vol. 4 (Sovetskaya entsiklopediya, Moscow, 1967), p. 550.
p ’ Frederick Engels. Dialectics*^)/ Nature. Translated by Clemens Dutt (Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1974), pp. 178-179.
p ^^8^^ See A. V. Napalkov and N. V. Tselkova. Informatsionnye protsessy v zhivykh organizmakh (Information Processes in Living Organisms), Vysshaya shkola, Moscow, 1974, p. 24.
p • The idea of a close connection between sensation and the emotional background of experience has already been developed in the Soviet philosophical literature (see, for example, I. S. Narsky. A Contribution to the Problem of Reflection of the Properties of Objects in Sensations. In Problemy logiki i teorii poznaniya [Izd-vo MGU, Moscow, 1968], pp. 50-61). We must note, however, that sensations, perceptions and representations are sometimes treated in isolation from the emotional aspect of sensibility in a number of works on dialectical materialism devoted to sensory understanding and its forms, especially in textbooks.
p ^^10^^ Our use of the term ‘appreciation’ when considering the emotional relation of animals to stimuli is arbitrary, because it is usually employed to designate a human capacity rather than an animal one. Although this relation could be designated by other words (e.g. ’emotional 67 overtone’—1. S. Narsky), we have refrained from introducing a new term, assuming that the reader will be able to understand from the context in what sense we are using ‘appreciation’.
p ^^11^^ It remains debatable whether animals have the faculty of forming representations. Without going into this question, we would note that animals’ capacity to retain traces or ’image copies’ in their memories of previously encountered, vitally important situations, objects, etc., has been confirmed by many observations, and there is no doubt about its existence.
p The problematic character of this question is something else, namely whether animals are capable of evoking in m mory, and reproducing images, of a previously experienced situation in the absence of a similar situation, or whether a reproduced image arises only when it is ‘provoked’ by an effect. Man, of course, is capable of creating reproduced images and using them irrespective of whether the events that generated them exist at the moment.
p ^^12^^ P. K. Anokhin. The Philosophical Sense of the Problem of Natural and Artificial Intellect. Voprosy ftlosofii, 1973, 6: 95.
p ^^13^^ Ibid.
p ^^14^^ See B, S. Ukraintsev. Samoupravlayemye sistemy i prichinnosf (Self-Regulating Systems and Causality), Mysl, Moscow, 1972, pp. 150-151.
^^15^^ See A. M. Korshunov. The Role of Perception in the Process of Understanding. In F. I, Georgiev et al. Chuvstvennoe poznanie (Izd-vo MGU, Moscow, 1965), p. 117. See also I. S. Narsky (Ed.). Problemy logiki i teorii poznaniya (Izd-vo MGU, Moscow, 1968), pp. 3-76.
Notes
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