Consciousness is a complex philosophical term that characterizes a person's ability to cognize the surrounding reality, as well as determine his place, role in this reality.
What were the views of ancient scientists on the nature of consciousness
Since ancient times there have been heated debates about what consciousness is, how it is conditioned and what can influence it. At first, only philosophers and theologians participated in them, then, as science developed, scientists of various specialties - for example, biologists, physiologists, psychologists. To this day, there are no clear, generally accepted criteria of what is meant by consciousness and how it arises.
The famous ancient Greek philosopher Plato believed that the consciousness of every person is due to the existence of an immortal soul. After life ends, the soul leaves the body and returns to its higher, unknown "world of ideas", which is immeasurably more developed than the material world where people, animals and inanimate objects of nature exist. That is, the philosopher Plato was actually one of the founders of the popular philosophical doctrine, later called dualism.
This term, implying the duality of consciousness and physical objects, was officially introduced into use many centuries later by the famous French scientist René Descartes, who lived in the first half of the 17th century. The popular expression "I think means I exist" is also attributed to him. The basis of Descartes' philosophical reasoning about the nature of consciousness was the postulate that a person is a kind of thinking substance that can doubt anything, even the existence of the surrounding world, except for his own consciousness. That is, the nature of consciousness lies outside the domain of the laws of the material world. The famous German philosopher Hegel considered consciousness, first of all, as the ability of an individual to correlate his personality with the world around him.
What did materialistic scientists think about the nature of consciousness?
The term "materialism" was officially introduced only at the beginning of the 18th century by the famous German scientist Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. But the adherents of this philosophical teaching, according to which consciousness is just a product of the activity of the human body (first of all, its brain), have been known since ancient times. And since the human body is living matter, then consciousness is also material. The most famous adherents of materialism in the XIX - XX centuries. were Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels and Vladimir Ulyanov-Lenin. Despite the colossal achievements of science, an exact interpretation of the nature of consciousness has not yet been given.
