Forms of mental reflection. Psychic reflection as a process. Forms and levels of mental reflection, their characteristics Stages of mental reflection of reality
According to the positions of Soviet psychology, already at the level of animals, not so much the stimulation itself, which initiates acts of reflection and causes subjective impressions of various modalities, is mentally reflected, but the experience of the individual in relation to the perceived situation, which reveals how this stimulation is able to change and what actions can change it. . It is this experience that exists in the form of skills, abilities, expectations, cognitive schemes, etc., and not the external and internal influences that actualize it, that is the main determinant that determines the content of mentally regulated activity. No matter how rich the individual, as well as the species, genetically transmitted experience of a biological individual, it can in no way be compared with the continuously accumulating experience of all mankind, which is the source and basis for the development of mental reflection processes in society. The appropriation of this experience by an individual, continuing throughout life, equips him not only with a complex of sensory ideas about the immediate environment and the possibilities of its direct transformation, but with an interconnected and generalized system of knowledge about the whole world, its hidden properties, interactions occurring in it, etc. In Soviet psychological literature, this system of appropriated representations, in which everything that is reflected is inevitably localized and enriched in content, in recent years has come to be generally called the "image of the world." The general thesis developed in these works states that
“The main contribution to the process of constructing the image of an object or situation is made not by individual sensory impressions, but by the image of the world as a whole” (Smirnov, 1981, p. 24).
The most important role in the process of appropriation by a person of the experience of social origin, gradually developing into an increasingly complex "image of the world", is played by language. The language itself - its morphology, reflecting the fundamental structure and universal forms of objective relationships, a system of interrelated concepts that actually designate a hierarchy of phenomena and relations between them of varying degrees of generalization, etc. is a concentrated product of socio-historical experience, accumulating the most significant and settled in a wide practical application of its elements (see Vygotsky, 1982; Leontiev, 1963; Luria, 1979). Assimilated language is already an expanded, holistic and ordered “image of the world”, in which, with the help of conceptual identification, directly sensually reflected phenomena and situations are recognized. Of course, language is not the only source of formation of the human "image of the world", setting only a kind of framework, the skeleton of such an image, which is gradually filled with more differentiated and refined content based on the appropriation of special knowledge (using the same language and other sign systems) , experience embodied in objects created by man and forms of actions with them, transmitted by means of art, etc.
As a result of mediation by appropriated social experience, mental reflection acquires a number of new qualities. A. N. Leontiev wrote about this: “Animals, a person live in an objective world, which from the very beginning acts as a four-dimensional one: it exists in three-dimensional space and in time (motion). ... Returning to man, to man's consciousness, I must introduce “one more concept - the concept of the fifth quasi-dimension, in which the objective world is revealed to man. This is a "semantic field", a system of meanings. We are talking about the fact that the phenomena reflected by a person, as a rule, are categorized, called, that is, they are identified not only by sensory parameters, but also in a system of meanings. This automatically localizes them in the “image of the world”, revealing all the many features inherent in them: origin, functional qualities, hidden connections, further fate, etc. Answering the child’s questions “Why is it that they put a stone in every cherry?”, “Why snow on the roof? After all, they don’t ski or sled on the roof?” (Chukovsky, 1966, p. 124), an adult explains in a detailed form what, when perceiving these phenomena, is immediately revealed to him as a matter of course: where does the snow come from, how does it get on the roofs, etc. The “image of the world” of the child does not yet have such information contains, nevertheless it already exists, actively manifests itself and endows the perceived phenomena with entertaining qualities for an adult: snow specifically for skiing, cherries for eating, etc. making them independent of the parameters of the actually perceived situation and pushing them back to the boundaries of universal human knowledge, or rather, to the limits of what a particular person knows from this knowledge. One of the consequences of having quasi-measurements» values lies in the fact that it practically removes restrictions on the reflection of space-time dimensions of reality. Getting acquainted with history, a person is easily transported in his thoughts through the centuries and to any depicted place, with astronomy through sensually unimaginable stretches of time and space.
Just as freely, he is able to imagine events that are possible in the most distant future. Similar distractions from the present situation, although not so impressive, are also required by everyday affairs, in carrying out which a person usually controls both the previous preparations for them and the future more or less distant consequences without noticeable effort.
And in this case, the spatio-temporal parameters of the reflected content are determined not by external stimulation, but by " way of the world”, or rather, that part of it that can be called “the way of your life”. Along with the change in physical dimensions, the content of the human psyche is also expanding significantly along the line of reflecting the most diverse internal relationships and interactions that are found in the entire range of space-time extension. " Quasi dimension» values should undoubtedly be represented as multidimensional, conveying fundamentally different characteristics. objective reality: classification, attributive, probabilistic, functional, etc. To understand the changes in the motivational sphere of a person, the qualitative leap that occurred in the reflection of cause-and-effect relationships is especially important. The main phenomenon here is that any phenomenon reflected by a person, in addition to other more or less general characteristics, as a rule, also receives an interpretation from the point of view of deterministic relations: everything that exists is reflected as a consequence of certain causes, usually a whole branched complex of them, and in turn as the reasons for the expected changes.
The desire to clarify the causal conditionality of phenomena is so characteristic of man that one can speak of his inherent tendency to see everything in the world as necessarily determined. As A. I. Herzen wrote,
This is manifested both in the child's statements that clouds are made by steam locomotives, the wind - by trees, and in adults filling in the blank spots in the knowledge of causal relationships with such explanatory constructs as fate, witchcraft, cosmic influences, etc. Processes of reflection in the presence of orderly ideas about the surrounding reality and their place in it acquire the features of human consciousness, which is the highest form of reflection. One can think that it is the global localization of the reflected phenomena in the “image of the world”, which provides an automated reflection by a person of where, when, what and why he can talk about his inherent tendency to see everything in the world as necessarily determined. As A. I. Herzen wrote,
“It is so natural for people to get to the cause of everything that is happening around them, that they prefer to invent an absurd reason when they don’t know the real one, than to leave it alone and not deal with it.”
This is manifested both in the child's statements that clouds are made by steam locomotives, wind-trees, and in the filling in of blank spots in the knowledge of causal relationships by adults with such explanatory constructs as fate, witchcraft, cosmic influences, etc. Processes of reflection in the presence of orderly ideas about the surrounding reality and their place in it acquire the features of human consciousness, which is the highest form of reflection.
It can be thought that it is the global localization of the reflected phenomena in the “image of the world”, which provides an automated reflection by a person of where, when, what and why he reflects and does, which constitutes the concrete psychological basis of the conscious nature of mental reflection in a person. To be aware means to reflect the phenomenon as “prescribed” in the main system-forming parameters of the “image of the world” and to be able, if necessary, to clarify its more detailed properties and connections. Description and clarification of the mentioned and a number of other features of reflection in the human psyche require the designation of the processes of their formation. Let us note the most important provisions in this respect. Knowledge and skills deposited in language and other forms of socio-historical experience cannot be transferred directly to a person; for their assignment, he must be involved in a specially directed activity, determined by other people or materialized products of this experience and reproducing such methods of transformation of the objective world (or its sign equivalents), as a result of which new and more and more complex properties of it are revealed. It is activity that comes into practical contact with external reality, the activity of other people and its products, which, by its form and composition, removes the first copy from various constituents of the objective world, which subsequently, as a result of repeated reproduction, folding and transition to the internal plane, becomes the basis for the mental reflection of these generators.
Without going into a detailed discussion of the idea of the activity origin of the human psyche, we emphasize that it stems from the reflex concept of the psyche laid down by I. M. Sechenov (1953), which explains subjective reflection by the internal performance of those actions that have developed in practical activity with reflected objects. Qualitative differences between the subhuman and human levels of mental reflection are explained not by differences in the fundamental way of forming these levels (since in both cases reflection is a collapsed product of forms of activity that have developed in practice), but by differences between the processes that form these levels - the behavior of animals that experience the external world with the possibilities of individual organism, and the activity of a person who experiences this world on the basis of experience and means accumulated by many generations of people. A number of features of the human psyche are associated with the fact that when they acquire new experience, there is a constant reduction in the initially developed processes of activity into more and more compressed and automatized forms.
It is especially important that along with the disappearance of numerous repetitions, search, trial or clarifying actions from the activity, there is a gradual reduction in its external-executive elements, and as a result, the subject gets the opportunity to perform it exclusively in the internal plan, mentally. This most intimate in the formation of the psychic and in many aspects mysterious phenomenon " rotation” the content of activity into the internal plane was called internalization: “Internalization is known to be a transition, as a result of which processes external in form with external, material objects are transformed into processes that occur in the mental plane, in the plane of consciousness; at the same time, they undergo a specific transformation - they are generalized, verbalized, reduced and, most importantly, they become capable of further development, which goes beyond the boundaries of the possibilities of external activity.
It is the reduction and internalization of the initially developed activity that creates the possibility of appropriation by a person of an almost unlimited amount of knowledge. In a more specific description, this is ensured by the fact that something that required at the first stages of mastering the full impact and continuous efforts of the subject is subsequently reflected easily and fluently in the form of concepts, ideas, skills, understanding and other forms of human reflection, which are characterized by a minimal expression of the initial procedural and maximum-productive-meaningful moments. In such a final expression, the newly formed elements of experience can be compared, generalized, in every possible way "tested" by each other, that is, used in the further activity of appropriation already as its object or means. This creates the possibility of forming more complex, generalized and mediated "units" of experience, which also pass (after appropriate development and internalization) into the resulting form of spontaneously understood meanings, principles, ideas, used in turn to form generalizations of an even higher level, and so Further.
A kind of accumulator for such multi-stage transitions from expanded to collapsed, from external to internal form of activity is the individual “image of the world”, which is the final ordered product of the appropriation of knowledge about objective reality and oneself by a person. As noted above, the localization of reflected phenomena in “ image of the world” is one of the main signs of a conscious reflection of reality. Data on the development of the ability of awareness in ontogenesis indicate that initially it also goes through the stage of an extended process directed by an adult (or then by the person himself) with the help of questions like: “What does this mean?”, “Why are you saying this?”, “K what could it lead to?" The solution of such questions, which contributes to the reflection of phenomena in an ever wider context of reporting on what is happening, like any other actions when repeated in similar conditions, is reduced and automated, and, having become a kind of operation of recognizing phenomena in the system of the “image of the world”, ensures the emergence of phenomena of conscious reflections. Thus, the activity interpretation allows us to characterize consciousness from a concrete psychological side as a folded form of once mastered actions to localize the reflected phenomena in the “image of the world”, as a skill of identifying these phenomena in an ordered system of knowledge. The spontaneity and instantaneous awareness of well-known phenomena create the impression of complete automation of this process, its independence from the activity of the subject.
However, this is not quite true. As you know, not everything is reflected by a person with an equally complete development of the content that characterizes the perceived phenomenon. What is reflected in the most detailed and distinct way is what appears in the “fixation point”, the “focus” of the mental image, which is perceived as a “figure” on the “background” constituting the “periphery” of consciousness, in other words, what the subject’s attention is directed to. The ability of attention to improve the quality of the reflected content was often considered its most significant feature and was put into definitions characterizing it as “a state that accompanies a clearer perception of some mental content”, “provides better results for our mental work”. S. L. Rubinshtein wrote about this:
“Attention is usually phenomenologically characterized by the selective focus of consciousness on a certain object, which is realized with particular clarity and distinctness” (1946, p. 442).
Thus, although the reflection of repeatedly and diversified played and as a result of this firmly mastered material is largely automated and does not require the subject's expressed efforts, he must detect some minimal activity (in the form of directing attention). Naturally, in cases where the degree of mastery of knowledge is not high enough, the subject must make special efforts to update them: finding out what a professional immediately reflects (for example, the ability to troubleshoot a technical system) may require many hours of intensive mental work from a beginner .
Due to varying degrees of assimilation, the experience of social origin in the individual psyche is presented inhomogeneously and along with knowledge that is automatically updated when attention is directed to some content, there is less mastered knowledge that is extracted as a result of the subject’s arbitrary attempts to “remember” something, to check whether the case is in front of him, etc. This means that the content actually reflected at some point by a person depends not only on the experience he has mastered regarding this content, but also on the specifics of the task facing him, which determines which particular aspect of this experience will be active for him. extract and reflect.
The ability of a person to arbitrarily manage the processes of reflection, update and view those aspects " image of the world”, which are necessary from the point of view of the tasks facing him, is the most important feature of a socially developed psyche, thanks to which he gets the opportunity to completely abstract himself from the actually perceived situation and reflect any necessary elements and components of the acquired experience. Manifested in internal activity, the ability of voluntary regulation significantly changes the course of "natural" mental processes, constituting one of the most characteristic features of the so-called higher mental functions. Thinking as a kind of summary product of the development of these functions, as an “intelligence integrator” is carried out with the help of, in particular, higher (arbitrary) forms of attention, memory, imagination and consists in the process of arbitrary search, actualization and playback in the internal plan of the experience necessary for solving tasks facing man.
The emergence of the ability to voluntary regulation is associated with the fact that not only the content, but also the form of human activity is determined by its social origin - the fact that it is carried out either under the direct or indirect (for example, written text) guidance of other people, or in cooperation with them. with the inevitable consideration of their interests and capabilities, the results of their work, etc. Communication, as one of the most characteristic forms of human activity, permeates almost every kind of human activity, serving not only to satisfy the corresponding need, but also as a universal means-catalyst for the formation of mental neoplasms. Therefore, an adult transfers his experience to a child not by the type of one-sided transfer of all new information through activity into his “image of the world”, but rather in the mode of dialogue with this image with the constant exteriorization of already acquired knowledge from it into activity and their use for the formation of more complex neoplasms. It is clear that the system and continuity necessary for this between individual acts of formative activity, its entire organization can only be set in communication with other people who offer the child in a language accessible to him and in a certain order to do something, compare, repeat, “think”, etc. e. As a result, the “image of the world” that is being formed in the activity acquires interconnectedness and consistency.
The external ways of organizing activity laid down by other people are gradually mastered by the person himself and, having become, as a result of internalization, internal means of its regulation, they endow the psychic reflection that is formed in it with new qualities. Particularly important in this regard are the consequences of the gap between motivation and action that is formed when performing activities under the guidance of an adult due to the fact that actions are directed not by urges that arise in a situation, but by an adult, to whom motivation (cooperation with him, playful, cognitive) seems to convey this function. The development of skills that allow one to act independently of immediate impulses becomes the basis for a person's ability to arbitrarily regulate internal and external activities. This is evidenced by special studies that have shown that the ability to voluntarily regulate activity in ontogenesis is formed gradually: first, as the ability of a child to act, obeying the verbal commands of an adult, then, fulfilling his own detailed commands, and, finally, according to folded orders to himself at the level of inner speech. . It should be noted that the formation of this feature of the human psyche is also mediated by language - it is speech that serves as a universal means by which a person masters his own mental processes and behavior.
Arming the human psyche with the "image of the world" and especially the ability to arbitrarily actualize the content reflected in it contributed to the modification and development of a special internal structural entity-subject. This formation is an ontologically elusive, but functionally clearly manifested regulatory instance, which, on the one hand, reveals motivation in the form of incentives for goals, on the other hand, the conditions for achieving these goals, including their own possibilities of action, and the most general purpose of which is to organize their achievement. We are talking about the instance, which W. James called "I" as "the cognizing element in the personality" (1911 p. 164), 3. Freud - "I", or "it".
Psychic reflection not mirror, not passive, it is associated with the search, choice, is a necessary side of human activity.
Mental reflection is characterized by a number of features:
- it makes it possible to correctly reflect the surrounding reality;
- is carried out in the course of vigorous activity;
- deepens and improves;
- refracted through individuality;
- is preemptive.
Mental reflection ensures the expediency of behavior and activity. At the same time, the mental image itself is formed in the process of objective activity. Mental activity is carried out through a variety of special physiological mechanisms. Some of them provide the perception of influences, others - their transformation into signals, others - planning and regulation of behavior, etc. All this complex work ensures the active orientation of the organism in the environment.
The most important organ of mental activity is the cerebral cortex, which provides complex mental activity of a person.
In the mental life of a person, a special role belongs to the frontal lobes. Numerous clinical data show that damage to the frontal lobes of the brain, along with a decrease in mental abilities, entails a number of disorders in the personal sphere of a person.
Basic functions of the psyche– ensuring adaptation
1. reflection of the surrounding reality
2. ensuring the integrity of the body
3. regulation of behavior (2)
Mental processes:
The basic concepts of general psychology are mental processes(cognitive, volitional, emotional), mental properties (temperament, character, abilities, orientation) and mental states (2).
"mental process"- emphasizes the procedural nature of the studied mental phenomenon.
"mental condition"- characterizes a static moment, the relative constancy of a mental phenomenon.
"mental property"- reflects the stability of the phenomenon under study, its recurrence and fixation in the structure of the personality.
Criteria of the psyche:
Severtsov: the psyche is a factor in evolution. In what environment does the organism live, what are its vital tasks and whether the psyche is needed to solve them.
Hypothesis about the origin of sensitivity:
2 media types
The first form of the psyche is sensitivity, the ability to feel. This is a special case of irritability.
Irritability- the ability to reflect something vital.
Sensitivity- the ability to reflect the biologically neutral (abiotic) properties of the environment, which are objectively associated with biotic properties and, as it were, point to them.
The psyche performs signal function.
3 parts of action (Halperin):
1. Approximate - here the psyche is already needed to prepare the movement
2. Executive
3. Control
The predictive function of the psyche is necessary to control one's behavior.
A higher kind of sensitivity is differentiated sensations.
The transition from irritability to feelings is the complication and narrowing of the functions of organs, their specialization as sense organs.
Today it can hardly be denied that along with the laws of the material world there is also a so-called subtle plane. The mental level is closely connected with the energy structure of a person, which is why we have individual feelings, thoughts, desires, moods. The entire emotional sphere of the personality is subject to the laws of the psyche and completely depends on its well-coordinated work.
A person with a healthy mental organization feels happy and quickly restores inner balance. He strives for self-realization, he has enough strength for new achievements and ideas. Anyone who lacks energy for activities that would bring him pleasure sometimes has a weak psyche, and he is often visited by a feeling of vulnerability, insecurity before life, which now and then throws him new tests. Self-confidence largely depends on mental processes and the emotional sphere.
The psyche is an amazing and mysterious system that allows him to interact with the surrounding reality. The inner world of a person is an extremely thin non-material substance that cannot be measured by the laws of the material world. Each person is unique, each thinks and feels individually. This article examines the processes of mental reflection and their connection with the inner world of the individual. The material will be useful to all readers for the formation of general ideas about the human psyche.
Definition
Mental reflection is a special form of active interaction of an individual with the world, which results in the formation of new needs, views, ideas, as well as making a choice. Each person is able to model their own reality and reflect it in artistic or any other images.
Process Features
Mental reflection is accompanied by a number of characteristic conditions that are its specific manifestations.
Activity
The individual perceives the surrounding space not passively, but seeking to influence it in a certain way. That is, each of us has our own ideas about how this world should be arranged. As a result of mental reflection, there is a change in the consciousness of the individual, an exit to a new level of understanding of reality. We are all constantly changing, improving, and not standing still.
Purposefulness
Each person acts in accordance with the task to be solved. No one will spend time doing something just like that, if it does not bring material or moral satisfaction. Psychic reflection is characterized by awareness and intentional desire to transform the existing reality.
Dynamism
The process called mental reflection tends to undergo significant changes over time. The conditions in which the individual acts are changing, the very approaches to transformations are changing.
Uniqueness
We should not forget that each person has bright individual characteristics, his own desires, needs and desire for development. In accordance with this circumstance, each person reflects psychic reality in accordance with his individual qualities of character. The inner world of a person is so diverse that it is impossible to approach everyone with the same yardstick.
Leading character
Reflecting the objects and phenomena of the surrounding world, the individual creates for himself a kind of reserve for the future: he acts to attract the best and most significant conditions into his life. That is, each of us always strives for useful and necessary progression.
Objectivity
Mental reflection, although characterized by subjectivity, individuality, nevertheless contains a set of certain parameters so that any such process is correct, complete and useful.
Features of mental reflection contribute to the formation of an adequate perception of these processes by a person.
Forms of mental reflection
Traditionally, it is customary to distinguish several areas:
1. Touch form. At this stage, there is a reflection of individual stimuli associated with the senses.
2. Perceptual form. It is displayed in the unconscious desire of the individual to fully reflect the system of stimuli as a whole.
3. Intelligent shape. It is expressed in the appearance of a reflection of the connections between objects.
Levels of mental reflection
In modern psychological science, there are several significant steps in this process. All of them are necessary, none can be rejected or discarded.
Sensory-perceptual level
The first level is closely related to the feelings of a person, it is the main one on which others begin to build later. This stage is characterized by constancy and transformation, that is, it gradually undergoes changes.
Presentation layer
The second level is closely related to the imagination and creative abilities of the individual. Representations arise in a person's head when, on the basis of existing images, as a result of certain mental actions, new models of the surrounding world and judgments are formed.
Such a phenomenon as creative activity, of course, in most cases depends on how developed the emotional-figurative sphere of a person is. If an individual has bright artistic abilities, then his ideas will develop according to how often and quickly new images will interact with existing ones.
Verbal-logical level
This level is characterized by the presence of a speech-thinking process. It is known that the ability of a person to speak is closely connected with thinking, as well as with other cognitive processes. It must be recognized that reflection at the level of concepts contributes to the development of rational knowledge. Here, not just ideas about some phenomena or objects are formed, but entire systems arise that allow you to build subject connections and relationships. In the process of conceptual thinking, language acts as the main sign system, which is actively used to establish and maintain contact between people.
The highest form of mental reflection is, of course, human consciousness. It depends on the degree of its development, as well as motivation, whether a person can independently move through life, take active steps to achieve his desires, act purposefully.
This concept is philosophical, because this reflection is not in the literal sense. It is a kind of phenomenon that manifests itself with the help of images and states of the personality passed through the consciousness.
In other words, mental reflection is a special form of a person's dynamic connection with the world, during which new desires appear, a worldview, positions are formed, and specific solutions to some problems are developed. Any individual is able to manage his personal reality, presenting it in artistic or some other images.
Features and properties
Psychic reflection has a number of specific moments, which are its individual manifestations. There are some features of mental reflection:
- Mental images appear in the course of a person's active pastime.
- Psychic reflection makes it possible to carry out some kind of activity.
- It has a forward character.
- Allows you to accurately represent the world around you.
- Progress and improve.
- Changes through personality.
Characteristics of this process
As for a healthy person, he has the following criteria for mental reflection:
1. Dynamism. Throughout life, each person's thoughts, attitudes and feelings are modified. That is why the mental reflection can also change, because various circumstances influence it very significantly.
2. Activity. This process cannot coexist with passive behavior or regression. Thanks to this quality of the psyche, the individual, without understanding it, is constantly looking for the best and most comfortable conditions.
4. Subjectivity. Despite the fact that this process is objective, but it is also influenced by the past of the individual, his environment and his own character. That is why characterization includes subjectivity. Each of us looks at the same world and events in our own way.
5. Speed. Our ability to solve some problems with lightning speed exists thanks to the psyche. It has the right to be called superior to reality.
Stages and levels
Although this process seems to us something integral, it is still divided into several stages. The main stages and levels of mental reflection include:
The degree of importance and significance of incidents or phenomena has a great influence. Some of these incidents disappear, only the most necessary episodes remain.
An individual, thanks to thinking, creates his ideals, makes plans, controls his consciousness as best he can. This is how personal experience comes about.
2. Sensory criterion. This level is also called the sensory level. On it, mental images are built on the basis of what we feel through the senses. This influences the transformation of information in the required direction.
3. Logical thinking. At this level, real events don't matter. A person uses only those skills and abilities that are present in his mind. The universal human experience, about which the person knows, is also important.
All stages of mental reflection naturally intersect and interact. This process occurs due to the complex work of the sensual and rational activity of the individual.
Forms
Reflection is not alien to all living organisms in contact with other objects. Three forms of mental reflection can be distinguished:
2. Biological. This form is characteristic only for living beings, and this is its peculiarity. Thanks to it, such organisms can "mirror" both living and alternative nature.
The biological form of mental reflection is divided into several types:
- Irritability (the response of living beings to the realities and processes of this world).
- Sensitivity (the ability to reflect other objects in the form of sensations).
- Mental reflection (the ability to change one's character depending on the situation).
3. Mental. The most difficult and progressive form of reflection. She is not considered an inactive mirror duplicate of this world. It is clearly related to scanning, solutions.
First of all, it is an actively reflected world around in connection with a specific problem, danger or need. This form has:
- Reflection as stages of overcoming by an individual of himself, his own life and habits.
- Reflection as self-control and development.
- Reflection as a stage in the study of others by the personality.
- Reflection as a stage of an individual's study of social life and relationships.
Understanding the psyche as part of a certain type of reflection allows us to assert that it does not arise suddenly or accidentally, as something incomprehensible in nature. Psychic reflection can be studied as a transformation of derivative imprints into subjective experience, and on this basis a spatial image can be built.
Thus, the foundation of mental reflection is the primary interaction with the environment, but this process requires auxiliary activity to create images of objects in the field of the subject's behavior. Author: Lena Melissa
2. Reflection characteristics
3. Levels of mental reflection
1. The concept of mental reflection
.
Categoryreflections
is a fundamental philosophical concept, it is understood as a universal property of matter, which consists in reproducing the features, properties and relations of the reflected object. This is such a form of interaction of phenomena, in which one of them -reflected
, - while maintaining its qualitative certainty, creates in the second -reflective
specific product:reflected
The ability to reflect, as well as the nature of its manifestation, depend on the level of organization of matter. In qualitatively different forms, reflection appears in inanimate nature, in the world of plants, animals, and, finally, in man.(According to the book of LEONTIEV "
Activity. Consciousness. Personality"
)
In inanimate nature, the interaction of various material systems results inmutual reflection , which acts as a simple mechanical deformation.
An essential property of a living organismis irritability reflection of the influences of the external and internal environment in the form of excitation and selective response. Being a prepsychic form of reflection, it acts as a regulator of adaptive behavior.
The next stage in the development of reflection is associated with the emergence of a new property in higher species of living organisms -sensitivity, that is, the ability to have sensations, which are the initial form of the psyche.
The formation of the sense organs and the mutual coordination of their actions led to the formation of the ability to reflect things in a certain set of their properties - the ability to perceive the surrounding reality in a certain integrity, in the formsubjective image this reality.
The formation of a person and human society in the process of labor activity and communication through speech led to the emergence of a specifically human, social in nature form of reflection in the formconsciousness andself-awareness. For the reflection inherent in man, it is characteristic that it is a creative process that is social in nature. It involves not only the impact on the subject from the outside, but also the active action of the subject himself, his creative activity, which is manifested in the selectivity and purposefulness of perception.
2. Reflection characteristics . Features of the process Mental reflection is accompanied by a number of characteristic conditions that are its specific manifestations:– Activity. Mental reflection is not mirror, not passive, it is associated with the search and choice of methods of action adequate to the conditions, thisactive process.
- Subjectivity. Another feature of mental reflection is itssubjectivity: it is mediated by the past experience of the person and his personality. This is expressed primarily in the fact that we see one world, but it appears to each of us in different ways.
- Objectivity . At the same time, mental reflection makes it possible to build an "internal picture of the world" adequate to objective reality, and here it is necessary to note one more property of the mental - itsobjectivity. Only thanks to the correct reflection is it possible for a person to know the world around him. The criterion of correctness is practical activity, in which mental reflection is constantly deepened, improved and developed.
- Dynamism. The process called mental reflection tends to undergo significant changes over time. The conditions in which the individual acts are changing, the very approaches to transformations are changing. Uniqueness We should not forget that each person has bright individual characteristics, his own desires, needs and desire for development.
- leading character . Another important feature of mental reflection is itsforward character, it makes possible anticipation in human activity and behavior, which allows decisions to be made with a certain temporal-spatial lead in relation to the future.
The most important function of the psyche isregulation of behavior and activity, thanks to which a person not only adequately reflects the surrounding objective world, but has the ability to transform it in the process of purposeful activity. The adequacy of human movements and actions to the conditions, tools and subject of activity is possible only if they are correctly reflected by the subject.
3. Levels of mental reflection. Mental reflection serves to create a structured and integral image from dissected objects of reality. B. F. Lomov singled out the levels of mental reflection:
1. Sensory-perceptual - this is the basic level of constructing mental images, which arises in the process of development in the first place, but does not lose relevance in subsequent activities. The subject, based on the information coming through the stimulation of the senses by real objects, builds his own tactics of behavior. Simply put, a stimulus causes a reaction: an event occurring in real time affects the subsequent action of the subject, causes it.
2. Presentation layer. The image can arise without the direct influence of the object on the subject's senses, that is, it is imagination, memory, imaginative thinking. Due to the repeated appearance of the object in the subject's perception zone, some of the most important features of the first are remembered, eliminated from the secondary ones, which results in an image that is independent of the direct presence of the stimulus. The main function of this level of mental reflection: planning, control and correction of actions in the internal plan, drawing up standards.
3. Verbally logical thinking or speech-thinking level. Operations of this level are even less related to the event series of actual time. The individual operates with logical concepts and techniques that have developed in the course of the cultural and historical development of mankind. Abstracting from his own direct experience, from imagination and memory of the events that took place in his life, he orients himself and builds activities based on the experience of mankind as a whole. Those concepts, definitions and conclusions that were not produced by him. This provides an opportunity to plan and regulate events of various directions and temporal remoteness, up to planning the life path of an individual. Despite the significant difference between the third and first, initial levels: the processes of sensory and rational regulation of activity incessantly flow from one to another, forming a mental reflection in the variety of its levels and images.