Spontaneous-unconscious forms of thought processes: philosophical and psychological aspects of research

Gabdullin Il'dar Rustamovich PhD in Philosophy Associate Professor; Department of Philosophy, Cultural Studies and Sociology; Orenburg State University 460018, Russia, Orenburg region, Orenburg, ave. Victory, 13, of. 20806 i.gabd@yandex.ru

Orlova Elena Valentinovna PhD in Philosophy Department of Philosophy, Culturology and Sociology; Orenburg State University 460022, Russia, Orenburg region, Orenburg, Vishnevaya str., 14, sq. 2 orle-@mail.ru

Introduction

In modern philosophical and psychological sciences, the concept of "consciousness" appears to be such a complex phenomenon that it has become the subject of special interdisciplinary research, united by the name of cognitive sciences. These studies are conducted in a wide variety of fields of scientific and cognitive activity, from epistemology to neuroscience and computer science ^[1]. When explaining higher cognitive processes, information processing models involved in research in the field of artificial intelligence began to be used ^{[2, p. 171]}. In this regard, objectively those approaches and methods that cover a larger number of research areas, as well as those that show a certain methodological continuity, turn out to be quite productive. One of these approaches, for example, is described by the term "systematic eclecticism", explained by its authors as an idea or principle that is associated with the search for such a theoretical system that will "accept the truth wherever it is found" and which assumes the "totality of human experience", allowing to fully and adequately assess human nature ^{[3; 4]}.

Thinking carries out a rationally conscious cognitive function of the psyche, and this is really an obvious given. But no less important for any ontological given is to clarify the causes, the origins of its appearance, since this allows us to understand the specific forms of the present state and possible directions of change in the future. In this regard, the possibilities of a new reading of well-known philosophical concepts regarding the origin of thinking open up. Thinking should be considered, though as the most important of all cognitive functions, but still as part of a more general whole encompassed by such broad concepts as consciousness, soul, and psyche. The latter provision expresses the authors' commitment to certain methodological guidelines, in particular, the principles of the dialectical relationship of the sensual and rational in cognition, the unity of the whole and the part.

      Although the above-mentioned complex of cognitive sciences studies primarily the human mind, thinking, as a rule, this also implies the coverage of the entire mental sphere. Thinking, as the highest cognitive ability, manifests not only the psychological, but also the philosophical aspects of its research. In accordance with the tasks set, two mutually complementary ways of implementing a single cognitive process in mental activity have been chosen. This is, on the one hand, the so-called automatic thinking, correlated with the unconscious and involuntary form of its manifestation, and on the other hand, consciously reflective, conscious mental activity, called guided thinking ^{[5, pp. 80-81]}. This choice is due to the fact that both scientific and psychological and philosophical approaches are combined here. In accordance with the chosen topic, the subject of this article is the first of the designated parties, namely unconscious forms of thinking.

 The concept of unconscious conclusions by G. von Helmholtz.

In the works of G. von Helmholtz, an outstanding physiologist and psychologist, the founder of perceptual psychology, the terms "unconscious inference" and "unconscious inference" were introduced. unbewusster Schluss) ^[6]. Although these concepts were originally used to describe an involuntary, pre-rational perceptual mechanism in the formation of visual impressions, in subsequent psychological research, up to the present time, these concepts in various but close interpretations have received fruitful scientific development.

The formation of visual impressions, as Helmholtz described them, is achieved primarily by so-called "unconscious judgments", the results of which "can never once be elevated to the plane of conscious judgments" and, thus, "are devoid of the cleansing and exploring work of conscious thinking." Despite this, Helmholtz noted, they "will, so to speak, be dragged to our consciousness, as if we were bound by an external force over which our will has no control." And he drew attention to the striking fact that once formed, the results of unconscious judgments are so beyond conscious control, so resistant to contradiction that they are "impossible to get rid of" and "their action cannot be overcome." So, whatever impressions this unconscious process of reasoning leads to, they strike "our consciousness as an alien and irresistible force of nature." It can be added that this is why "to see is to believe" and why, when in everyday language we refer to an expression demonstrated by another person, we are actually describing our own impression of him.

Exploring the visual phenomenon of localization of corresponding images, Helmholtz uses the concept of the eye, which means precisely the judgment of distances obtained through experience, thanks to which the meanings of local signs are interpreted. On the basis that "one knowledge gained through experience struggles with another, also gained through experience," it is concluded that "the idea that two visual images belong to the same object affects the judgment of their mutual position by the eye" ^{[7, p. 133]}.

Summing up the results of long-term experimental research, initially "combinations of ideas that arise in this way" were called "unconscious conclusions". They were called unconscious "because in them a large premise is made up of a number of private experiences, each of which has long disappeared from memory and penetrated into our consciousness only in the form of sensory observations, even if not in the form of sentences." Although later, by his own admission, Helmholtz abandoned the term "unconscious inferences" in order to avoid incorrect interpretations by other authors, the thesis remained that "we are dealing here with an elementary process that actually underlies all so-called thinking, although it still lacks that critical research and replenishment of each individual step, which we find in scientific education of concepts and conclusions" ^{[7, pp. 160-161]}.

Modern interpretations and development of the theory of unconscious reasoning.

Some researchers note that in the field of computer science, ideas about unconscious inference have been used to hypothesize that the cerebral cortex contains a so-called generative model of the world. Following Helmholtz, they considered the human perception system as a mechanism of statistical inference, the function of which is to draw conclusions about the probable causes of sensory input. Experiments conducted in this direction have shown that a device (mechanism) of this type can learn to draw these conclusions without requiring the teacher to label each sensory input vector with its main causes. In this regard, a statistical method has even been proposed to detect the structure inherent in a set of patterns ^[8].

The concept was further applied in special socio-psychological research. In particular, the ability to so-called spontaneous inference about signs was noted. People sometimes use this kind of mental operations involuntarily (spontaneously) when they judge other people's traits from their behavior, without initially intending to do so. In this regard, it is assumed that conclusions about signs do not necessarily have to be the result of conscious, reflexive causal thinking, but both signs and causes can be embedded in the structures of implicit knowledge. This manifests itself and is activated as predispositions that manifest themselves only under certain conditions and find expression in such phenomena as self-fulfilling prophecies in social interaction and are fixed in social stereotypes ^[9].

Schematization of the cognitive process as an initial prerequisite for the formation of the conceptual structure of thinking

Despite the fact that the terms themselves - automatic and controlled thinking - are predominantly accepted in scientific and psychological discourse, they have a strong philosophical rootedness. The fact is that one of the main properties of the psyche is involved here, leading to the formation of thinking as the highest cognitive (cognitive) ability - abstraction. If we single out, first of all, specific cognitive mechanisms for the realization of this ability, then this is the so-called schematism in thinking and the accompanying process of rationalization. At the same time, the terms "scheme" and "schematism" may differ in meaning depending on the philosophical or psychological aspects of consideration ^[10].

The philosophical meaning of the studied process associated with the abstracting activity of thinking was first theoretically developed in the "schematism of pure reason" of I. Kant's transcendental philosophy. Analyzing the origins of the formation of a priori knowledge and faced with the need to remove or smooth out the opposition of rationalism and empiricism, Kant comes to understand that, in general, the cognitive process cannot be reduced only to the rational or only to the sensory levels of consciousness. The concepts of "schematics" and "schematization" were needed to solve the "true problem of pure reason" in answering the fundamental question "How are synthetic judgments possible a priori?" ^{[11, p. 52]}. Ideas about schemes and schematization played one of the key roles in determining the relationship between the sensory and intellectual levels of cognitive activity of the subject of cognition. M. Heidegger, when studying the corresponding section of the Critique of Pure Reason ("Schematism of pure rational concepts"), highlights this part of I. Kant's transcendental philosophy ^{[12, pp. 55-56]}.

The concept of a schema can be considered in semiotic discourse. From these positions, thinking is expressed, first of all, in a sign form and is guided by the relations that "every sign must correspond to some organization of the content of thinking, every object can have its referent in the world of signs" ^[13]. These relations are mutually directed, but not mutually reversible, that is, they make possible not only an adequate representation of reality (truth), but also distortion (delusion).

If we apply the theoretical and methodological interpretation described above in the practice of human communication, then here the scheme expresses a special form of fixation and preservation of knowledge about the world around us ^{[5, p. 81]}. This is especially important for the demarcation of the "normal" and "deviant" behavior of an individual. One example of divergent behavior is the inability to distinguish between previously established patterns of behavior (social stereotypes) from newly emerging guidelines of behavior, as a result of which imaginary scenarios are "invented".  This may be due to the purposeful influence of means of psychological processing of consciousness. Of course, on an individual level, this can mean a special psychopathology, which even has a special name - Korsakov syndrome ^[14], which is expressed in the loss of the ability to remember new events and, as a result, there is disorientation in time, space and the surrounding reality.

The mechanism of categorization as a fundamental process of formation and functioning of thinking

In the process of cognitive evolution, the human psyche has developed various ways of organizing and optimizing adaptive human behavior to the outside world, one of which was the categorization of thinking. It is also possible to distinguish both psychological and philosophical interpretations of the term "categorization" itself, since the cognitive process described by this term covers the widest range of applications, including the cumulative social experience ^[15].

       The problem of categories has been of interest to philosophers since ancient times, declaring itself "as the need to think consciously and systematically, fully equipped with the categorical apparatus of thinking" ^[16]. In Aristotle's understanding, the category initially appears primarily as a universal characteristic of Being, the Universe ^[17], but in the course of further theoretical analysis it also turns into a function that provides a correctly chosen strategy of argumentation and proof, warning against the substitution of some meanings by others ^{[18, p. 229]}.

In psychology, categorization is considered mainly in the context of the theory of perception (J. Bruner) as a basic act closely related to language, and "categorization of an object or event – attributing it to some class or identifying it - can be likened to what in set theory is called attributing an element of a certain set to some subset of it based on such ordered pairs, triples or n signs as man —woman, mesomorph — endomorph— ectomorph or, say, the height of an object with an accuracy of up to a centimeter" ^{[19, p. 15]}.

 I. Kant defined the process of category formation as the result of deduction of rational concepts, and "all possible perceptions as conscious, i.e., Self-related, contemplations are necessarily subordinated to categories" ^[20], where the act of combining the "intuitive" (in I. Kant's terminology, correlated with the "sensual", "contemplative") and the "discursive" is carried out" levels of cognitive activity of the subject ^{[21, p. 101;]}. In this regard, it is noted that "we cannot think of any object except with the help of categories; we cannot know any conceivable object except with the help of contemplations corresponding to categories" ^{[21, p. 149]}.

Based on the results of research in cognitive psychology, which distinguishes between figurative-spatial (perceptual) and sign-symbolic (logical-verbal) forms of thinking, it is possible to interpret the principle of deduction more broadly. Within the framework of the cognitive-evolutionary approach to understanding cognition ^[2], the concept of deductive inference is applicable not only to the processes of logical-verbal thinking. The explicit form of the latter is inference, determined by the activity of the left hemisphere of the brain. It was found that right-hemisphere activity often "accompanies" analytical, symbolic left-hemisphere activity. This turned out to be a fundamental feature of cognitive activity "due to the interhemispheric cooperation formed in humans during the evolution, the consciously controlled activity of the left hemisphere (verbal, logical-analytical, etc.) is coordinated by the intentionality of the right hemisphere." At the same time, the so-called "law enforcement activity" itself often remains in the "shadow", out of the focus of consciousness ^{[2, p. 221]}.

 Conclusion

            Thus, the main conclusions in the attempted study of unconscious processes of mental activity are: 1) the provision on the inextricable connection, interdependence of conscious and unconscious acts of the psyche. Such a connection is more connected at the level of perceptual thinking in the formation of ideal spatial-figurative structures; 2) the spontaneous-unconscious form is due to the complementarity of various mental structures of the psyche, fixed by the corresponding biological mechanism – the right-left hemispheric structures of the brain; 3) the concepts of "consciousness" and "thinking" are not universal in scientific and philosophical terms They are determined by a certain methodological context of consideration. In this paper, such contexts are special philosophical and psychological research approaches. According to the authors, the cognitive-evolutionary approach developed in Russian philosophical discourse seems promising in epistemological research as a possible way of further research.

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