Читать книгу: «Other People's Children»

01 Civilizations

Writer: It was a warm, dry Moscow day. We were strolling through the alleys of VDNKh. Without any particular destination – wherever our feet would take us, wherever our thoughts would lead. Just chatting. The conversation turned to photo sharing social networking services. I wasn’t registered yet and, frankly, didn’t understand what exactly I would photograph and share publicly if I got an account. Back then, this trend was just starting; many people were photographing and posting pictures of their food and selfies. And then, a manhole cover caught my eye. An idea! I’ll photograph and post pictures of manhole covers – them and only them! Since then, I’ve collected a collection of over several hundred unique manhole covers from all over the planet! Some people bring back magnets or figurines from their travels, but I photograph manhole covers in any new place, whether it’s a vacation or a business trip. At some point, friends and acquaintances also started photographing and sending me photos of manhole covers from their trips. I post those too. So now the geography of published manhole covers is wider than my personal experience. The only thing is, my friends complain that they’ve “gotten hooked on it“ and now, instead of the usual tourist attractions, they first look under their feet in search of a new unique manhole cover :) They complain, but they find them, photograph them, and send them to me. And I post them. It’s been almost ten years now.

Consultant: And remember how I almost got arrested in St. Petersburg because of your manhole covers! :) So, there I was, walking early in the morning to the Hotel Indigo for the fourth week of organizational development in the Gestalt approach. I still had some time, so I decided to take a walk to the Neva River. I see a manhole cover. Old, worn, with the barely discernible inscription “DEFENSE OF LENINGRAD.“ Just as I photographed it, out of the corner of my eye, I see another one like it a few meters ahead, but with a clearer inscription. I photograph the second manhole cover – and out of the corner of my eye, I see the next one, and move towards it. The third manhole cover had the clearest inscription. I’m delighted, carefully focusing my camera on the manhole cover, and suddenly someone shouts from behind me: “What are you doing here? Show me what you’re photographing!“ I turn around, finally lifting my head. In front of me stands an officer, and behind him, the entrance to a building with a sign “FEDERAL SECURITY SERVICE OF THE RUSSIAN FEDERATION – DIRECTORATE FOR THE CITY OF ST. PETERSBURG AND LENINGRAD OBLAST,“ Liteyny Prospekt, No. 4! To be honest, I’m not sure what he found stranger in the end: the fact that a person was photographing manhole covers near the FSB building, or that I started showing him my social media feed with pictures of manhole covers from all over the world.

Engineer: Did he let you go?

Consultant: He let me go :) He didn’t look any further at my feed. It even felt a bit disappointing, I wanted to show him more manhole covers.

Engineer: And do you know why most manhole covers are round?

Writer: I’ve never thought about that. Why?

Engineer: You think about it for a while. And I want to raise another question that has been bothering me for a long time… What is “civilization“? Is sewerage really civilization? If there’s sewerage, there’s civilization. No sewerage – no civilization? Where does humanity fit into all of this?

Consultant: Wow, you’re aiming high! Or rather, digging deep. Are you planning to lay a new foundation again? You’ve already defined “love,“ maybe you’ll define “civilization“ too?

Engineer: I will. Both the definition of “civilization.“ And the definition of “human.“ I just wanted to hear your thoughts on it first.

Consultant: Alright. I’ll try to formulate it from my perspective. Civilization is a large organization of people, a large-scale organization. Everyone is united by a common mission and values. There’s a common culture and education to transmit behavioral norms: culture – in a soft form of absorption, and education – in a hard form of drilling. And, of course, a common language for communication.

Writer: And could one say the opposite? Not that civilization is a large organization, but that an organization is a small civilization?

Consultant: Well, one could say that, of course. It sounds logical, I don’t hear any contradictions. But it just seems to me that civilization is still something large, global.

Writer: Then civilization today is less about sewerage and more about globalization. There’s one global civilized world and the rest, the uncivilized world. For me, the cornerstone of this worldview is language. I’ve conducted an experiment several times with my “globalist“ friends and acquaintances, always with a similar result: first, I agree that human history is moving towards a single global civilization with a single language, and at this point, I receive full approval; but then I add that I only agree with this if that single language is Russian – and at this point, my interlocutors’ mental fuses blow… And mind you, I’m asking Russian people who speak Russian.

Consultant: Still, I can understand their logic. If people speak the same language, then communication, and indeed joint activities, become more effective.

Writer: The Tower of Babel as an example of ultimate efficiency, but of evil intent. One could say that from Noah until the construction of the Tower of Babel, there was one civilization on earth. But then the Lord confused the languages and destroyed the tower. The next stop – Apocalypse: “All nations (languages) will come and worship before You, for Your judgments have been revealed.“ (Revelation 15:4). It turns out that in Orthodoxy, many languages and peoples are God’s providence.

Consultant: And did you know that the European Parliament building in Strasbourg closely resembles the unfinished Tower of Babel from Pieter Bruegel’s painting?

Writer: I can offer a metaphor. Civilization is a ship. And what does every ship have that is also its symbol? That’s right – an ANCHOR! (In Russian – YAKOR as abbreviation: Language (YAzyk), Culture (Kultura), Education (Obrazovanie), Religion (Religiya)). Noah’s ark didn’t have an anchor: everything it needed was inside. Ultimately, the ark came to rest on land and gave rise to a proto-civilization that existed until the Babylonian confusion of tongues. Now every ship-civilization has its own anchor.

Engineer: I think now is the perfect time to voice my definitions. All three. About love and the two new ones. And then we’ll discuss everything, like before. Here they are, I’ll write them on the board so we always have them in front of us:

Consultant: I see there are also three axioms here. Are you perhaps planning to create a new science of civilizations?

Engineer: Not a science, no, but a new theory of humans, based on a review and rethinking of existing facts – yes, I am. I have several fundamental hypotheses, and I want to discuss them with you.

Writer: To be honest, I’m already a bit tired. Let’s wrap it up. By the way… so why are manhole covers round?

Engineer: It’s all about people and their safety. Round covers are made slightly larger in diameter than the wells into which people descend to service the systems located in the channels. Such a cover, no matter how you turn it, will never fall into its well. But with any other shape, it’s possible.

Consultant: Civilization takes care of the person who, in the line of duty, takes care of civilization :) Dear Writer, give me the link to your manhole covers.

Writer: Catch. See you again, my friends!

02 The Human

Consultant: A joke. Stierlitz wakes up in his cell in the morning. His head aches after yesterday. He muses: “If I’m with the Germans, then I’m SS-Standartenführer Stierlitz. If I’m with our guys, then I’m Colonel Isaev.“ The door opens, a policeman comes in and says: “Well, you really got plastered yesterday, Comrade Tikhonov!“ (Remark – Vyacheslav Tikhonov played the film role of the Soviet intelligence officer Isaev, who infiltrated under the name Stirlitz)

Engineer: :)

Writer: What, are you suggesting we surrender too?

Engineer: It also seems to me that everyone has long guessed that we are one and the same person, the author of this book.

Consultant: Surprisingly, I don’t feel like some incomplete part of anyone. Of course, formally, we are different experiences in different situations. But when I remember something, I’m sure you were there too. But when I speak – only I speak, on behalf of the whole.

Engineer: Okay, taking over control! Actually, what you’re saying resonates with me. Like in a triathlon: when it’s the road – you run, you get on the bike – you pedal, you jump into the water – you swim. And it’s all you, but – different behavior, depending on the situation.

Consultant: But if you never learned music and you’re put at a piano, you wouldn’t be able to play, would you?

Writer: Well, that’s why there aren’t thousands of us, just three… Three I’s?

Engineer: Personally, I am an engineer, I can prove it.

Consultant: And I am a consultant. You, Writer, are a writer. And we all live somewhere in the author’s psyche and on the pages of this book.

Writer: We live… Imagine you are reading a book by an author unknown to you. You mentally agree or disagree with them, and at that moment the author is living somewhere, doing something, or is already dead, but when you read – you know nothing about it, you just read the book, mentally agreeing or disagreeing with the author.

Consultant: An author lives or comes alive when their books are read. A composer lives or comes alive when their music is performed.

Engineer: The music and lyrics are traditional, performed by descendants :)

Writer: And why do We-I write this book?

Consultant: Well, firstly, it’s a point of assembly and synchronization. Unlike a triathlete, we not only have the opportunity to act differently in different situations, but also to look at the same situation differently. In my worldview, the situation was reflected in one way, in yours – in others. You know something, I know something. We lay it out, connect it, and get shared knowledge: co-knowledge. And then everyone takes this co-knowledge for themselves, and it becomes con-sciousness. Our personal and collective con-sciousness increases. As the Engineer wrote in the definition of civilization – con-sciousness (shared science) of Genesis and of oneself (itself) increases. Square, triangle, circle…

Secondly, let’s be honest, we are not three geniuses here by ourselves. Everyone stands on the shoulders of predecessors or contemporaries, with whom we also have shared knowledge. And for us, it is a responsibility and a duty – to actualize them in the consciousness of our civilization.

And thirdly, our children or great-grandchildren are reading this book now. A hundred, two hundred, a thousand years have passed. And, if we did everything right, and if the Apocalypse hasn’t happened yet, then we, dear great-grandchildren, are talking to you across time right now in Russian, and you are mentally agreeing or disagreeing. You are us. We have passed on knowledge to you through blood and language. Knowledge about a human being – an eternal theme…

Writer: I have prepared a table of authors whom we have read and to whom we refer. With dates of their lives.

Engineer: Since we’re talking about children, I suggest we try to explain things so that even a child can understand.

Writer: I promise metaphors.

Consultant: I promise diagrams and pictures. Here’s the first one for you – The Human. Psyche and body.

Writer: Within which science shall we develop the theory? Anthropology?

Consultant: I suggest we don’t spread ourselves too thin and rely on what we have personal experience in. From my side – it’s change management and organizational development in the Gestalt approach. So, more like psychology or sociology.

Engineer: If we study ancient humans by excavated tools, then modern humans should be studied by computers, cybernetic systems, and artificial intelligence. This is also more about the nervous system than about bones, nails, and hair.

Writer: I see that, as usual, we will be digging from different sides and deeply :) By the way, about excavations. There is only one science of the soul – psychology, but there are many sciences of the Earth: geo-logy, geo-graphy, geo-physics, geo-chemistry, geo-desy, geo-metry…

Engineer: As a mathematician by basic education, I responsibly declare that geo-metry is not about the Earth :)

Writer: Well then, perhaps psycho-logy is not about the Soul?

Consultant: I propose to call our research an anthropological initiative.

Engineer: Godspeed!

Writer: See you again, my friends!

03 The Cycle of Experience

Consultant: You’ve probably noticed that some people, before going on vacation somewhere, meticulously research the place beforehand, its attractions, and make lists of must-see sights. I, apparently, belong to the opposite group: minimal preparation (local currency, type of electrical outlets, weather for the upcoming week); on the spot – I completely surrender to impressions, and only upon returning, if something captivated me, do I start reading, watching, studying: I connect my personal lived experience with socially accumulated knowledge.

Last year, to my shame and happiness, I discovered the music of Sergei Rachmaninoff in the same way, and then the man himself. A great Russian composer! Amazing. While in Malaysia, my wife and I went to a classical music concert. Before that, the composer’s surname only told me that he was Russian. And then the concert began… I lost all sense of time and space. I didn’t understand what was happening in my soul. I didn’t understand why a tear was rolling down my cheek… I just sat there and dissolved into the music, flying away somewhere with it and returning. I was definitely hearing this concert for the first time, but I had the feeling that I was remembering a lot. For some reason, out of the entire symphony orchestra, my gaze most often rested on the musician who periodically hit the big drums… And a silly thought kept running through my head – “I wonder what the sheet music looks like for a performer who only hits the drum a few times during the entire concert?“

Engineer: Does the drummer in an orchestra have the same sheet music as all the other musicians?

Consultant: Obviously, but unexpectedly so, right? I was recently rewatching “Piano Concerto No. 2“ performed by Denis Matsuev and an orchestra. To be honest, Rachmaninoff is often in my headphones now. So, I noticed that in front of the drummer, and indeed in front of all the other musicians in the symphony orchestra, there were open scores, while the pianist played from memory, without sheet music. For about thirty minutes. Not the simplest, but, of course, a great musical piece.

And then an interesting thought occurred to me, which I want to discuss with you. It concerns the cycle of experience from the Gestalt approach in organizational development. I showed it to you once. It is usually drawn as a line resembling a hill (a Gaussian distribution curve), starting with “Sensation“ and ending with “Withdrawal“ passing through the stages of “Awareness“, “Energy mobilization“, “Action“, “Contact“ and “Assimilation of experience.“

So. I put the concert on to watch from the beginning. Applause. The pianist and conductor walk onto the stage. A bow. The pianist sits down at the piano, the conductor takes his position. The pianist’s hands are poised over the keys. A dead silence in the hall… The right hand comes down, the first contact happens! The first sound of the piano, the concert has begun. The music flowed, incorporating the streams of all the instruments: violins and other strings, woodwinds and brass, percussion. And in my head, the image of the first touch on the keys remained, and the word “contact“ persistently spun around. Half an hour flew by incredibly quickly, it felt, and then – the final chords… The entire orchestra in a single impulse, the pianist’s hands frantically flying across the keys. Boom-boom-boom, boom-boom-boom, boom-ba-ba-boom! The pianist’s hands soar up above the keys. A dead silence in the hall… A fraction of a second. “Bravo!“ Applause!

And in that moment, it dawned on me! “Contact,“ as it is understood in the Gestalt approach, is not the pianist’s first touch on the key, but the entire concert: from the first touch to the last! It is not a point on the cycle of experience, but a segment between points. And the same applies to all seven stages of the cycle.

But this is not the main conclusion. Usually, the cycle of experience is considered starting from “sensation.“ Which is logical, in principle. And the Gestalt approach itself once began with the study of recognizing complete images, perception. But a cycle is a cycle for a reason, to constantly repeat, maintaining the sequence of stages. So why don’t we change our approach and start considering the cycle of experience not from “Sensation,“ but from “Contact“? After all, in the example of Denis Matsuev playing Rachmaninoff’s Second Concerto from memory without sheet music, there were no random improvisations; the entire concert, as a ready, complete contact, was already in the pianist’s psyche at the moment of the first touch of the key, and only unfolded along with the playing of the orchestra and conductor from the beginning to the end of the concert! Why don’t we shift the emphasis in our approach from the Gestalt of perception to the Gestalt of behavior?

Writer: Contact = Concert?

Consultant: Quite possibly, that’s precisely why initially in Gestalt psychology there was a “Cycle of Contact“. But if we focus, emphasize the manifested action, behavior, then very roughly the entire cycle turns into:

1. “preparation of behavior“

2. “behavior in the situation“

3. “analysis of the results of behavior“

Engineer: And the result of the behavior – that’s not the last strike on the key, but the entire concert performed, right?

Consultant: I think it’s both. Each performance of the concert (read: each contact) adds to the bank of experience. And, having been analyzed, it influences the preparation and performance of the next concert (read: the preparation and performance of the next contact).

Writer: Performance… What a beautiful word: “Per-form-ance“ (forth-filling/completion). You can feel here that it’s not about the final chord, but about the complete work!

Consultant: Remember when the Engineer was talking about the moment between the past and the future – the present moment? Here and now. In the past – a bank of experience. A bank of knowledge about contacts that have occurred. The background from which Gestalts of behavior emerge. In the future – the performance of the work. But the paradox is that at the moment of initiating action (moment 1 on the cycle of experience), the concert is already prepared (contact, 1-2 on the cycle of experience)!

Engineer: To be honest, moment 2 of the Cycle of Experience (CoE) – the result, which includes the real experience of achieving it (1-2 CoE) – seems very important to me. As well as the crucial stage of analyzing the experience (2-3 CoE). After all, if the result (2 CoE) is satisfactory, then the contact (1-2 CoE) is better remembered (2-3 CoE) for use next time in a similar situation. If the result (2 CoE) is unsatisfactory, then the contact (1-2 CoE) is better changed (2-3 CoE), corrected. And if we haven’t reached the result (2 CoE) yet, then there’s nothing to discuss.

Pyotr Anokhin: “Indeed, what does the acceptance of the proposition that a reflex ends not with an action, which is only of an intermediate nature, but invariably with the achievement of a result, commit us to? Classical physiology, in developing the concept of the reflex, never analyzed this crucial point. In fact, having said ’scratch reflex,’ we stopped there, as the classical ’arc’ ended there. But even in this simple act, we usually did not analyze the subsequent stage – the cessation of the irritating action on the skin – which is the result, i.e., the main organizing factor of this entire behavioral act. <…> From the point of view of a more general assessment of behavior, we see that we are dealing here with the same regularity – human behavior in the space-time continuum appears before us as a continuum of large and small results with the indispensable assessment of each of them through afferent feedback. Thus, we have defined in the given formula the law of the construction of behavior in living beings, according to which it represents a continuous chain of results with a subsequent assessment of their adequacy.“

Consultant: This opens up a vast field for questions and discussions. “What if there’s a situation, there’s knowledge, but no experience, and this is the first experience?“ “What if there’s a situation, there’s experience, but it’s not remembered or not conscious?“ “What if there’s a situation, there’s experience, but someone else behaves differently in the same situation?“ And so on…

Writer: And I find stage 5-6 of the CoE interesting – the choice of the best co-respondence to the situation from the experience of behavior. This is about “coming to the concert with the right sheet music“ :) True, for the same drummer, it’s also important not to miss the beat, to stay in rhythm… Con-tact!

Engineer: Action in the moment must correspond to the moment of the situation. At the same time, any situation is not a single moment, but a sequence of events that can unfold over seconds, minutes, or even years. Tying shoelaces, a concert, or a hundred-year war. But each time, con-sciousness outpaces time, prepares a scenario for behavior in accordance with the anticipated scenario of the situation and launches it in order to hit the beat. Did we hit the beat or not? Did we hit it everywhere or partially? Do we need to change our behavior because we can do better in this situation, or perhaps because the situation has changed? Consultant, thank you! The cycle of experience is a most powerful tool for the analysis and synthesis of behavior!

Writer: Have you tried singing in a choir? When you hear a song for the first time, you can’t sing along at all, you just listen. Then you start to be able to sing along with the endings of the verses. Then you can sing the whole song, but every time you sing in a choir – you sing and listen carefully so as not to fall out of the choir. Con-cert. Con-tact… You know what depresses me in all of this… Where is the free will of the drummer? He can, through continuous perfection, bring his performance to the highest mastery and learn to hit the drum with such precision in timing and quality as no one before or after him. But even in this mastery, he remains a slave to the notes written by someone else…

Consultant: But written nonetheless! Sergei Vasilyevich Rachmaninoff, for example, was a pianist, a conductor, and a Russian composer! By the way, speaking of concerts, experience, and psychology. His first written concerto had an unsuccessful premiere. The composer fell into depression, composed almost nothing. Only after hypnosis sessions with the then-famous psychotherapist Nikolai Vladimirovich Dahl was the creative crisis overcome, and in 1901 Rachmaninoff wrote Piano Concerto No. 2, which is still in the repertoire of practically all pianists in the world. There was a second creative crisis, which many associate with his forced departure from Russia in 1918. A world-famous Russian composer who longed for his homeland. During the Great Patriotic War, he gave several concerts in the USA, anonymously sending all the proceeds to the Red Army fund and advising all Russian émigrés to also contribute. He transferred the proceeds from one of his concerts to the USSR Defense Fund with the words:

Sergei Rachmaninoff: “From one of many Russians, all possible aid to the Russian people in their struggle against the enemy. I want to believe, I believe in complete victory.“

Engineer: Now, 80 years later, in 2024, these words resonate in rhythm once again… Another cycle of experience.

Writer: See you again, my friends!

04 Neurology

Engineer: I wanted to talk to you again today about the human nervous system, nerves, and the connections they form. But I can’t help but digress to the amazing connections that people themselves form! Did you know that Sergei Rachmaninoff invested $5,000 (a huge sum at the time) in a technology company and was its vice president? This company was called “Sikorsky Aero Engineering Corporation,“ and its president was Igor Ivanovich Sikorsky – a Russian and American aircraft designer, inventor of the world’s first four-engine airplanes “Russky Vityaz“ and “Ilya Muromets,“ and the world’s first mass-produced helicopter. Igor Sikorsky, like Sergei Rachmaninoff, was born in the Russian Empire, in the city of Kyiv. And they met in the USA in 1923.

Writer: The relics of Ilya Muromets rest in Kyiv, in the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra.

Engineer: Yes, I saw them personally when we were in the Lavra caves. And my grandmother is from Kyiv, although then the empire was called the USSR. And two of my grandfathers were military aviation engineers. And my father, in general, is a fighter pilot. Maybe that’s why I remembered Sikorsky?

Consultant: Whatever thread you pull, that’s the tangle that will unravel. You were going to talk about the nervous system. Could I ask you to try to unravel this tangle not from inputs to outputs, but the other way around: from behavior to perception? With a focus not from the outside in, but from the inside out.

Writer: If an egg is broken from the outside, life ends. If an egg is broken from the inside, life begins!

Engineer: I’ll try. We’ve already talked about different behaviors depending on the situation. Imagine this: a small child is brought to a neurologist for the first time. The doctor takes his little hammer, approaches the unsuspecting child sitting on a chair, and hits him on the knee with the hammer. The leg jerks, everything is fine – the knee-jerk reflex has been checked. But the second time, the picture will be completely different! It seems like the same doctor, the same hammer, and the same child. But the child is no longer sitting quietly on the chair, but, upon seeing the hammer, tries to hide behind a parent and not let the doctor near. Different behavior! What has changed? The child has changed, or rather – his attitude to the situation has changed, because he remembered how unpleasant it was the previous time. And now behavior is determined not only by the neurons involved in the knee-jerk reflex, but also by other neurons in which the situation and past experience of interaction were remembered. At the same time, it must be understood that even the second time (if the child is held down) the leg will jerk when hit with the hammer. If a child (and an adult too) is sleeping, the knee-jerk reflex will also work perfectly. Here it is important to highlight two sources of preparation and initiation of behavior: unconscious and conscious. The child did not learn the knee-jerk reflex but inherited it from his parents. But this is very simple, one-step innate behavior, and one should not think that all others are just as simple. Take breathing, for example.

Pyotr Anokhin: “First of all, it must be noted that the formation of a complex of effector excitations in the motor part of the respiratory center is the result of the synthesis of many diverse afferentations coming to it. The respiratory center receives afferentation from the lungs, airways, for example, the trachea. It also receives humoral excitation from the level of partial pressure of CO2 and O2 in the blood. <…> As we have seen, the respiratory center sends to the respiratory muscles such a quantity of excitations that precisely corresponds to the integration of all afferent excitations that have reached it, i.e., it accurately reflects the body’s need for a certain volume of air (K.D. Gruzdev). And this, in turn, means that the alveoli expand in full accordance with the volume of contraction of the respiratory muscles, and, consequently, the respiratory center must receive from the lung, i.e., from the results of this inhalation, such feedback afferentation that is quantitatively precisely correlated with the efferent excitations sent by the respiratory center itself to the periphery, to the respiratory muscles. This closes the circle of the self-regulating respiratory system.“

Engineer: And do you know what is most amazing about this whole complex of neurons in the respiratory system? At the moment of a child’s birth, it is fully formed, but it only starts working at the very moment of birth, with the first baby cry! That is, the child in the womb already “knows“ how to breathe, but only gets the first experience with the first inhale and first exhale.

Sean Gaffney: “Changes are long in the making but happen quickly.“

Consultant: On the one hand, breathing seems more complex than the knee-jerk reflex, but on the other hand, it’s quite similar: I breathe unconsciously, but consciously I can hold my breath or start breathing faster. The muscles are the same, but the commands come from different centers from two different sides.

Writer: Allow me to burst into your fascinating dialogue with my metaphor! You constantly mention “centers.“ What if we imagine any such center as a city center? Cars drive to the city center, then they drive away from the center. In the city center is “kilometer zero.“ This means that when you are driving on a road and see a post with a blue sign and a number, it is a “kilometer marker.“ It indicates how many kilometers are left to the city center. And on the other side, it will also indicate how many kilometers you have traveled from your starting point, which may be the destination for cars moving towards you. I’m not sure if distances in the psyche can be measured in kilometers, but you can substitute the number of neurons on the path for kilometers.

Engineer: Roads with cars, or canals with ships – that’s more about the circulatory system. Neurons send and receive signals.

Pyotr Anokhin: “Consequently, the very fact of the appearance of “signaling“ and “temporal connections“ can be recognized as one of the most ancient regularities in the development of living matter. It is in this sense that one should understand I. P. Pavlov’s expression “temporal connections are a universal phenomenon of nature.“ <…> Therefore, naturally, we must ask ourselves: what characteristic of the conditioned reflex is most typical for it, defining it? Of all its possible qualities, the quality of “anticipation,“ or “signaling“ about upcoming events in the external world (“anticipatory activity,“ according to I. P. Pavlov) is its most decisive quality. Neither variability, nor strength, nor acquiredness, etc., can compare in purpose with this biological quality of it. Precisely because animals have the opportunity to prepare by signal for the still upcoming links of sequentially developing events, it has become the central point of progressive evolution. And its discovery is the greatest merit of our teacher I. P. Pavlov.“

Engineer: Imagine that one neuron is a signal tower. There are twenty such watchtowers in the Moscow Kremlin, each of which is for signaling (sensory (afferent) neurons) and for repelling external attacks (motor (efferent) neurons). But a watchtower does not work by itself; there must be a watchman on each tower.

Engineer: So, a signal tower plus a signalman on it is one neuron. Now imagine that there are 100 billion such neurons in the nervous system! That’s how many neurons a newborn child has, or as many people as have ever lived on Earth (if, of course, scientists are not lying – in both the first and second cases). 100 billion signal towers, located over a large territory, some of which are built into the “fortress walls“ of a person, but most of them inside transmit signals to each other: to the centers, from the centers. And on each signal tower – a signalman and a signal fire. The fire, or smoke from the fire, is “visible“ from a great distance both day and night. I put “visible“ in quotation marks, as a universal way of receiving a signal. Because there are sensory neurons of the sense organs that see, hear, smell, touch, taste. But then they give a signal, and other neurons in the chain “see“ this signal.

Engineer: Let’s consider one neuron (one of 100 billion) as such a signal tower. How can we reason about this?

– 

a signal tower needs a constantly replenished supply of firewood (or oil) to light a signal fire;

– 

one tower can only give one signal, but this tower can “see“ signals from many other towers;

– 

there are towers that look outward (sensory neurons), and there are towers that look at other towers (interneurons, transmitting neurons);

– 

there are towers that light a fire, not for a signal, but to boil tar and pour it on the enemy’s head outside the walls (motor neurons);

– 

there are central towers that make final decisions (neurons of “kilometer zero“);

– 

on each tower, the fire is managed by a signalman who remembers everything, learns all his life, and decides when exactly to light his fire, depending on the behavior of other signal towers in his line of sight;

– 

if there is heavy fog, the signal may not be visible (for example, a pain signal does not reach the brain during opioid intoxication)

– 

and so on… But some of the most interesting towers are those that can launch a “rainbow“! Of course, in the real world, there were no such towers. But in our world of neural towers, there are endocrine towers that, through glands, launch rainbows (hormones) into the sky: “happiness“ hormones (serotonin, dopamine, endorphin, oxytocin, …), “fear“ hormones (cortisol, adrenaline, norepinephrine), and so on, depending on the situation. Different hormones – different rainbows (the stripes alternate differently, like on national flags). And why rainbows, you ask? It’s very simple – there are billions of signal towers, and if it is necessary to notify a large number of them simultaneously about some important situation (to mobilize or give a signal to remember the current situation), then the most effective way is to launch a rainbow into the sky that many will see (release hormones into the bloodstream).

Consultant: So, in the case of the boy at the neurologist’s, one signal tower lights up from the hammer blow, another watchtower sees this signal and immediately extends the muscle. Meanwhile, these lights are visible on other towers, which transmit the signal inwards. And somewhere these signals meet with signals that came from the optic nerves and were transformed into a picture of “a man in a white coat with a hammer.“ They meet and combine into one situation. A rainbow is launched, the situation is remembered by many neurons for the future.

Writer: Just some fiery waves, going from the periphery to the center and back, if you look at this whole multi-billion tower system from above!

Engineer: And if identical waves from the “signal towers of the left ear“ arrive a little earlier than the same waves from the “signal towers of the right ear,“ then the towers of the auditory center will calculate the direction from which the sound is coming.

Writer: Or on the central auditory towers, they will “suddenly“ pay attention to the rhythmically lighting up and going out lights – the ticking of a wall clock. Although they were ticking all the time, the signalmen were busy analyzing brighter lights from other towers.

Engineer: Of course, this is all a metaphor. But it’s a metaphor that allows us to make hypotheses that can then be experimentally tested. Although now, with modern equipment, scientists and doctors can “look“ into the nervous system and see how millions of neurons light up and go out, how waves of excitation roll through the layers of the psyche in different directions. Can you imagine how difficult it was to “look“ into the nervous system in ancient times? Only 150-100 years ago, our great physiologists: Ivan Mikhailovich Sechenov, Ivan Petrovich Pavlov, Alexei Alexeyevich Ukhtomsky – studied the nervous system in spinal frogs, in which, for physiological research, the connection of the spinal cord with the brain was severed by a transverse transection. Such a frog lay very calmly, and the reflex activity of vertebrate animals could be studied on it. Pavlov’s genius was that he began to study the behavior of dogs that had not undergone such an operation, and thus to observe the entire nervous system as a whole! Nikolai Alexandrovich Bernstein studied man and his psyche through movements and dexterity, Lev Semyonovich Vygotsky looked into human thinking through speech, Alexander Romanovich Luria also studied the connection between consciousness and language, Leontiev Alexei Nikolaevich connected activity, consciousness, and personality.

Pyotr Anokhin: “The work of our laboratory, carried out over the past 10 years, gives us more and more reason to think that the functional systems of the body are formed on the basis of two factors that are different in nature – architectural and energetic. Both these principles of the central nervous system’s operation are organically combined in the formation of a wide variety of functional systems with different final adaptive effects. <…> From the enormous variety of innate and life-experience-created functional systems of the body, which constitute its primary value, the energy factor helps “bring to the stage“ precisely this, and not another, activity. In these complex relationships, the initiative role in when and which functional system to “release onto the stage“ undoubtedly remains with the cerebral cortex, where afferent synthesis takes place. <…> Now it is required to understand: by what mechanisms this increased food excitability turns into a “drive requiring satisfaction.“ By what mechanisms does this drive form the goal of a certain behavior and the realization of this goal in specific behavioral acts? We must also understand the physiological mechanisms of the formation of what I. P. Pavlov called “basic drives.“ It is impossible not to recognize as a huge shortcoming of our work that this main driver, the impetus for purposeful actions, remains outside the field of our research interests. Such a phenomenon can only be explained by the fact that I. P. Pavlov boldly posed the question of the reflex of the goal when the physiology of the nervous system as a whole was not yet ready for its resolution. We did not know, for example, on the basis of what specific physiological processes a person’s life goal is maintained at a high energy level for a long time, absorbing, and often subordinating, all his other activities. At present, we know this physiological basis. It has a universal activating effect on the higher levels of the nervous system and can energetically support ever wider associative connections. As is now known, the substrate of this “blind force,“ in the words of I. P. Pavlov, is located in the hypothalamus and reticular formation of the brainstem (Magoun and Moruzzi 1942, Bremer 1953, et al.). Thus, the purely energetic side of the long-term maintenance of a once-set goal of action in a dominant state currently has a fairly convincing explanation. At this point, the problem of the reflex of the goal is very closely related to the problem of the dominant, developed in our domestic physiology by A. A. Ukhtomsky.“

Engineer: We’ve talked a lot about energy factors today, I suggest we discuss architectural factors next time.

Consultant: Agreed.

Writer: See you again, my friends!

05 Architecture

Engineer: So, let’s smoothly transition from discussing energy factors to considering architectural factors. Smoothly, because before we start discussing the architecture of the human nervous system, I wanted to tell you an interesting fact from the world of technology, related to both energy and architectural factors. We’ll be talking about the watch battery. This miniature power element, resembling a button or a pill, can now be found not only in wristwatches but everywhere: in toys, musical books and cards, remote controls, trinkets, and even in shoes that light up when you walk :) But initially, such batteries were used specifically in wristwatches, which determined their flat cylindrical shape. Why isn’t the shape square, or triangular, but specifically round? This is due to the architecture of wristwatches. In classic pocket watches, which are already 250 years old, and which at the end of the 19th century migrated from the pocket to the arm of a soldier, there are only three main interconnected systems:

1. Energy source

2. Oscillating system (balance wheel)

3. A system of gears connecting the first system to the second (with hour, minute, and sometimes second hands on the gears).

So, initially, the energy source in wearable watches was a wound spring, rotating a drum with small teeth, into which it was placed. A feature of such watches is that they need to be wound regularly (compressing the spring), otherwise the watch stops. So, they came up with the idea of replacing the spring with a battery. And since all the other systems of the watch remained architecturally in their places, the battery had to be made in such a shape and size that it would fit in place of the flat cylinder with the spring.

Writer: And did you know that “spring“ (the mechanism) and “spring“ (the season) are written and read the same way in English? There’s something to that. The spring in a watch, like spring in the year, is a source of stored and unfolding energy.

Engineer: Let’s take a step from technology to humans. But first, another digression necessary to clarify the concepts of “boundary“, “internal“, and “external“ in relation to living beings. We discussed the “pill“ battery, and now imagine a real pill. Ascorbic acid, for example. Imagine that you are holding it tightly in your hand. From your point of view, is the pill inside you or outside?

Consultant: Outside.

Engineer: Now, mentally put the pill in your mouth. And now?

Consultant: Well, it seems to be inside now. Although, to be sure, I would swallow it.

Engineer: Swallow it!

Consultant: Done! Swallowed it. Now the pill is definitely inside.

Engineer: Yes and no. A human, like many other animals, such as a worm, is a tube. And the pill, having been swallowed, simply began a journey from the entrance to the exit :) The pill is designed so that it will, of course, dissolve and be absorbed by the body. But if it were a raw bean seed, it would most likely survive. Even more so – it would defend itself: beans contain phytic acid in their shell, which is not digested or absorbed by the body. Moreover, it blocks the absorption of magnesium, calcium, iron, and zinc in the intestines, and also interferes with the absorption of fats and proteins by blocking digestive enzymes in the stomach.

Writer: But on the other hand, thanks to all of the above, some gourmets can afford to enjoy the most expensive coffee in the world, kopi luwak :)

Engineer: I brought up this example to show that “internal“ and “external“ may not be as obvious as they seem at first glance, and that inside a person there are also boundaries with the external world. So, let’s return to the human nervous system. To its architecture. I have a hypothesis, the assessment of which by a strict reader may vary from “nonsense“ or “everyone has known this for a long time“ to “this is a Nobel Prize!“

Firstly, it is already clear that all neurons can be divided architecturally into at least two levels in the human psyche:

1. The area of preparation and implementation of human behavior;

      2. The area of receiving and storing knowledge about the surrounding Genesis and about oneself.

The first area includes nerve complexes whose neurons send signals to muscles and glands (outputs). The second area includes all sensory organs, whose neurons are located on the border between humans and Genesis (inputs).

Consultant: A joke. The Gestapo blocked all the exits, but Stierlitz left through the entrance…

Writer: :)

Engineer: So, I propose to identify a third area in the human psyche, by dividing the second area into two parts. The third area will include the deep layers of the psyche that have no direct connection with the external world. Imagine the area of receiving and storing knowledge about the surrounding Genesis and about oneself as an egg.

Engineer: The egg white perceives the external world. It “feels“ light, heat. And through the layers of egg white, light and heat reach the yolk. The yolk, it turns out, also “feels“ the external world, but the paradox is that the external world for the yolk is the egg white… And the paradox of paradoxes is that we can also assert that the yolk, in turn, is the external world for the egg white!

Engineer: So, we get a three-part architecture of the human psyche:

1. Area No. 1 – preparation and implementation of human behavior;

      2. Area No. 2 – direct reception (and storage) of knowledge about the surrounding Genesis and about oneself (“egg white“);

      3. Area No. 3 – indirect reception (and storage) of knowledge about the surrounding Genesis and about oneself (“yolk“).

You can call them parts, zones, levels, floors, blocks, modules, areas of the psyche. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that there are three of them and each of them is a group of interconnected neurons (neural networks). The first two interact directly with the surrounding world (Genesis). The third does not interact directly with the external world, but interacts directly with the previous two. The sum of all neurons in all three areas constitutes the entire human psyche.

Alexander Luria: “This block is located in the anterior parts of the brain and includes its frontal lobes: it does not provide cortical tone, does not receive information from the external world, does not process or store it. It is connected to the external world only through the apparatus of the second block and can only work successfully if the first block provides the necessary level of cortical wakefulness.

However, its function is crucially important: the third brain block is a powerful apparatus that allows for the formation and retention of intentions, the formulation of action programs, the regulation of their course, and the control of their successful execution. This is the block of programming, regulation, and control of human activity.“

Consultant: At this point, I feel like my brain’s egg white is already cooked, and the yolk is still soft-boiled, but just a little more and it will be hard-boiled… This all needs to be processed. I suggest we take a break.

Writer: See you again, my friends!

06 Worldview

Consultant: Here’s what I was thinking… You, Writer, write poems and stories. You, Engineer, write computer programs. And I, as a philosopher, probably write a worldview…

Writer: If it’s “in motion“, then it becomes a motion picture. For a 5D cinema, or better yet, for a virtual reality cinema. Although, why do we need virtual reality if we can’t even experience much of actual reality in our lifetime?

Engineer: Have you ever noticed that when you go to an unknown place, the way back always seems shorter? This is because on the way back, you already have a map (read: picture) in your head, recorded on the way there, and it’s always faster to go with a map than without one. Moreover, this is true even if you go “there“ using a navigator or a paper map (an external map), because on the way back, the map is already internal, given to a person through experience. The only “but“ is that you first have to get somewhere. And in this case, the internal map can be used repeatedly, refining it each time you retrace the path. Right up to the point of automatism, when it’s hard to even remember how you got there if someone asks. How different this is from the first time, both in terms of time and the effort spent on attention. And yet, this is just one road from point A to point B :)

Engineer: There’s also a downside to the automation of constructing an internal worldview. Motorists will understand. For example, a road was always two-way, and then one day they made it one-way and put up a “do not enter“ sign. But drivers, for some time, automatically drive under the prohibition sign. In general, of course, it’s interesting how a person perceives, records, and rewrites the world around them onto their internal picture throughout their entire life… Oh, by the way! About pictures… You know that in a computer, pictures can be stored in different formats. It’s difficult for an ordinary person to understand how they differ. At most – by size and quality. Some are large in size – they take up a lot of computer memory, others are smaller, often without significant loss in quality. What is a picture on a computer screen? A set of glowing dots (pixels) of various colors. If the picture is rectangular, say, 1280 by 853, then that’s 1,091,840 dots, each of which has a color, and this information must be saved for subsequent reproduction if necessary.

Consultant: A joke. Two Jews are arguing. One is trying to convince the other. Is white a color? – It is! And is black a color? – It is! So, I did sell you a color TV!

Writer: :)

Engineer: Well, even if the picture is black and white. In this case, the color can be encoded with 1 bit: if the color is white – zero, if black – one. But even so, the specified picture will take up more than 1 million bits of memory if you save every pixel. This is exactly the format “BMP“. Then the “JPEG“ format appeared, which took up less space because it used lossy compression algorithms but preserved image quality. But the most interesting thing wasn’t the size of the pictures, but the way they were transmitted over the network when the Internet first appeared, and we used slow analog modems to transmit data over telephone lines. A “BMP“ file was transmitted in pieces (pixels and lines) from top to bottom. You could say the picture was assembled from rectangular puzzles. Everything that loaded was clear, but if the connection dropped, the picture was displayed partially. And, if the most interesting part was at the bottom, you had to start loading again and wait for the full picture. But a “JPEG“ picture started loading completely, but in layers. Although initially the image was blurry, with each new layer it became clearer and clearer. It seems to me that the same principle is preserved now: if the connection is bad, then a blurry (and small in size) picture comes first. Technically, there can be very different algorithms. As an example, if you remove every second pixel, the picture will become twice as small, although what is depicted on it will be easily recognizable.

Consultant: A fully finished picture is cut into puzzles. But I’ve never seen artists paint that way. Their style is more like “JPEG.“ First, they sketch the outlines, then they apply layers of paint.

Engineer: I also remembered about printers that print on paper. An inkjet printer draws an image line by line. But a color laser printer has rotating drums inside that apply the image to the paper in layers.

Consultant: So how does a person paint a worldview: in pieces, or all at once, adding details as they appear? What does a person have in their head at birth: a blank slate or a contour map that just needs to be colored in? …

Writer: Allow me to offer a metaphor. Imagine a “Train of Life“ that travels through the World and makes stops. Each stop is a situation. Each passenger is a person who gets off at the stops, takes out an easel and brushes, and starts painting. A landscape, a portrait… Each passenger has their own carriage where they store finished paintings, unfinished paintings, and empty canvases.

Consultant: So it’s not one big worldview, but many small ones? I propose we discuss a person and their paintings using this metaphor.

– 

encountering the same situation (getting off at the same stop), a person doesn’t paint a new picture, but takes out the one they painted here before. They correct something, add to it, if necessary;

– 

if there wasn’t enough time, and the picture isn’t finished, then it’s unlikely to be put away far, but placed near the exit so it’s easier to find;

– 

over time, there are fewer empty canvases and more fully painted pictures;

– 

one picture is painted at a time;

– 

different people paint the same situation differently;

– 

painting is labor, so sometimes there are “good enough“ pictures;

– 

a person physically cannot be at all the stops in the entire Universe at all times, and in their carriage, there are only those pictures that they painted themselves.

Engineer: Allow me then to reflect on how this metaphor applies to the model of the human psyche that I presented to you earlier. I’ll try to use my philosophy as a method. A method of analysis and synthesis. I remind you of the division of the human psyche into three areas:

1. Area No. 1 – preparation and implementation of human behavior;

2. Area No. 2 – direct acquisition (and storage) of knowledge about the surrounding Genesis and oneself.

3. Area No. 3 – indirect acquisition (and storage) of knowledge about the surrounding Genesis and oneself (deep layers of the psyche, having no direct connection with the external world).

Let’s place the artist, along with the carriage and paintings, in Area No. 2, and call him the “painter“. In Area No. 3, we’ll settle an “art critic“ who studies the “painter’s“ pictures, understands and evaluates them, and issues reviews. And in Area No. 1, we’ll have a “traveler“ who uses the “painter’s“ pictures and the “art critic’s“ reviews to build maps of reality and use them in their travels around the world. The main thing is not to forget that they all “live“ inside the psyche of one person!

Engineer: The “art critic“ does not perceive the external world directly, does not leave the carriage, so to speak. And his compartment has no windows. But he has the opportunity, unlike the “painter“ (who is busy with one, at most, a few pictures at a time), to study many works of art in the carriage-museum. This allows the “art critic“ to build a single, consistent worldview! It’s worth noting that when we talk about the “painter’s“ pictures, these are not pictures in the usual sense of the word. The “painter“ perceives with all senses simultaneously both the external world and the internal states of a person. All this, and in dynamics, like the melody of a concert, is laid onto the canvas of the “picture“ of the situation. The “traveler“ tries each time to choose the best of the maps (pictures or reviews), and if the map is not accurate, the “painter“ has to repaint the pictures, and the “art critic“ has to reconsider the reviews. At the same time, the paradox is that the pictures painted by the “painter“ are seen only by the “art critic“ and the “traveler.“ Other people never see them. If a person wants to show another person a picture of a situation or a collection assembled and described by the “art critic,“ then in this case, the “traveler“ needs to depict it for others… But it may happen that the “traveler“ is quite a poor artist! And this attempt to transfer a picture from the inner world to the outer world is first seen by the “painter,“ and then by the “art critic“… And some pictures (and maybe many of them) will never see the light of day.

Consultant: So it turns out like this:

– 

there is a world that is “everything at all times“ – Genesis;

– 

there are situational worldviews, painted and accumulated by “painters“;

– 

there are connected, consistent worldviews, assembled by “art critics“;

– 

there are “travelers“ who interact with Genesis, verifying and refining these pictures.

Writer: Colleagues-art critics! I suggest we let the paints dry on our Worldview, go wash our brushes, and rest a bit :)

See you again, my friends!

07 Periscope

Consultant: At first, it was so beautiful: a ship-civilization! But when we got to the human being, it turns out that some are sitting in the hold without portholes. And in general, it’s not a ship, but some kind of submarine! And we don’t see objects directly, but on radar monitors connected to our sense organs!

Engineer: So what if it’s a submarine! For a specific person, in the context of my concept of the three-component psyche, it’s even more accurate. How does a captain observe a combat situation without surfacing? That’s right – through a periscope. And a periscope is, essentially, two mirrors. A double reflection!

Pyotr Anokhin: “The reflective process unfolds in such a way that an external object, through a continuous series of physical and physiological processes, is, as it were, assimilated by the organism, i.e., it is reflected first in its structures, and then in consciousness. This order of development of reflective processes leads to the natural conclusion that, in essence, this process, from stage to stage, is formed in accordance with the theory of information transmission. <…> Information transmission in living and technical objects usually occurs with an exceptionally large number of specific links; however, it obeys one important law: there must be precise and adequate informational equivalence between the initial and final links of this transmission. <…> Here it should be noted that the decisive condition for encompassing the parameters of the external world is the throughput capacity of our sense organs, which have a very definite range of sensitivity. <…> Thus, the external real world has many more parameters from which a real image of the external world could be composed (reflected), but the ecological characteristics of each animal and its individual evolution contributed to the development of particular sensors that perceive particular parameters. This set of parameters ultimately determines the reflected images of reality in different animals: a nocturnal moth “sees“ a bat with the help of nervous processes caused by a peculiar ultrasonic vibration; the image of the general situation for a cockroach in the dark is determined by the different temperatures of bodies, and, consequently, by different infrared radiation. As for humans, the world they reflect is much richer in terms of the number of physical parameters of the external world, and this ensures the creation of a more complete and detailed image of the external world. It is this process of forming the latter synthetic stage that is the subject of special attention in the gnoseological approach to the theory of reflection.“

Writer: I remember from childhood the Soviet electronic arcade game “Sea Battle“. The little ships floated there, and you had to launch torpedoes, aiming not at the ship itself, but slightly ahead of it, to hit it. Just like in real life.

Engineer: That’s already an anticipatory reflection of reality!

Pyotr Anokhin: “Several years ago, I already presented our concept regarding the “anticipatory reflection of reality“ in a more detailed form. It is to this work that I refer readers for a more detailed acquaintance with this concept. Now I have only briefly outlined those new considerations that we have been developing in this direction over the past few years. <…> For the development of life, the cardinal condition was not a simple sequence of events, but a periodically or rhythmically repeating sequence of individual fragments from the infinite continuum of phenomena in the overall picture of the world. Only under these conditions did the adaptation of the living to external events and the progress of its material organization become possible. Naturally, the reflective activity of the organism also acquired a special stimulus from rhythmically repeating phenomena for the formation of stable structures. The temporal structure of the world actually became such that, in its essence, having shorter and longer sequentially repeating phenomena, it contributed to the emergence of life itself. Such constant cycles as autumn, winter, spring, summer, or morning, day, evening, night, were fundamental developing cycles, and this contributed to the adaptation and consolidation of primary living organizations. If we analyze our entire life, then, in essence, the process of repeated impacts of world events on our nervous system will turn out to be the most significant temporal factor. We walk along the same street many times, many of the same objects repeatedly act on us, and all this constitutes the main temporal factor of the reflective activity of our brain. <…> In other words, with the appearance of living substance, a fundamentally new type of reflective activity arose – the macroworld, through a whole series of transformations over long intervals of time, is reflected in the microworld, i.e., in the rapid molecular rearrangements of the protoplasm of a living cell. From this follows the conclusion that living protoplasm acquires the property of accumulating informational messages from the external world, condensing them in micro-interval connections. <…> Thanks to the multiple, and for some external phenomena, perhaps even multi-million, repetition of the same series of molecular rearrangements, very favorable conditions were created for the reproduction of the entire series of molecular rearrangements in the protoplasm under the action of only the initial link in the chain of external events. Thanks to the chemical coupling of a whole series of processes, conditions were created for the reproduction of the entire chain of protoplasmic processes from the initial impulse from the external world. Protoplasm acquired the ability, thanks to the development of its molecular processes, to anticipate in time and space the regular course of successive events in the external world. Several years ago, we called this property of living organisms the anticipatory reflection of reality (Anokhin, 1962), and this ability of the nervous system, stated much earlier, was called “anticipatory excitation“ (Anokhin, 1957). Broadly assessing this property of living substance, we must say that organisms, having acquired the ability to anticipate the course of external events, thereby began to adapt with the greatest benefit to future, often dangerous, phenomena of the external world long before these phenomena would take place. <…> I will not dwell here on the fact that the most perfect form of this peculiar “peeking“ into the future is the activity of the nervous system. <…> It is precisely thanks to these brain, mainly neurochemical, mechanisms that the reflection of the external world in consciousness has become the highest point of the reflective function of the organism. This is the reflection of reality that the classics of dialectical-materialist philosophy spoke about. Neurophysiological analysis of brain function shows that the reflection of the external world actually cannot be otherwise, non-anticipatory, because from an informational point of view, every external influence on the organism inevitably mobilizes in the nervous system also the molecular experience of the past associated with a given situation or with a given irritant – a stimulus. This circumstance allows the brain to unite the past with the present and, on this basis, to predict in detailed parameters the onset of future events. We therefore believe that the concept of anticipatory reflection of reality is only a creative development of the basic propositions of Lenin’s theory of reflection. At the same time, the reflective process itself, which most accurately transmits all the parameters of the objective world around us, is a product of the evolutionary development of animal organization over many millions of years. And therefore, in every act of reflection of an adult human, we have a genuine organic clot of the reflective experience of generations and present reality. We have uncovered those regularities on the basis of which the entire experience of reflection of the external world by organisms, fixed in phylogeny by heredity, returns again to this same external world through the development of animal embryos. This regularity of “fitting“ the reflective abilities of the organism to its ecology we once called “systemogenesis“. Systemogenesis serves as a genuine instrument of evolution, which acts as an intermediary in the transmission of the historical accumulation of the reflective activity of ancestors to their descendants in exact accordance with their specific ecological factors. Here we encounter one of the strongest arguments of the theory of reflection: with the reflection of objective reality in the structure and function of countless generations of animals, i.e., with the historical accumulation of reflective experience (of generations).“

Consultant: As I understand it, the historically accumulated anticipatory reflection of reality is inherent in all animals and is transmitted through genes?

Engineer: Yes, it is inherited through genes and refined through individual experience. But have you, by any chance, forgotten about the “periscope“? That’s already a double anticipatory reflection!

Lev Vygotsky: “A careful investigation shows that in significantly higher forms, compared to the elementary scheme presented, we see this structure in higher mental processes. The mediating member of the scheme here, as one might imagine, is not simply a way to improve, to perfect operations; possessing a specific function of reverse action, it elevates mental operations to higher and qualitatively new forms, allowing a person, with the help of external stimuli, from the outside, to master their behavior. The use of a sign, which is simultaneously a means of auto-stimulation, leads in humans to a completely new and specific structure of behavior, breaking with the traditions of natural development and creating for the first time a new form of cultural-psychological behavior. <…> For dialectical thinking, the position that the whole does not arise mechanically from the sum of individual parts, but possesses specifically unique properties and qualities that cannot be derived from a simple combination of partial qualities, is not at all new. In the history of a child’s cultural development, we encounter the concept of structure twice. Firstly, this concept arises from the very beginning of the history of the child’s cultural development, forming the initial moment, or starting point, of the entire process; secondly, the process of cultural development itself must be understood as a change in the basic initial structure and the emergence on its basis of new structures characterized by a new relationship of parts. We will call the first structures primitive; this is a natural psychological whole, conditioned mainly by the biological characteristics of the psyche. The second, arising in the process of cultural development, we will call higher structures, as they represent a genetically more complex and higher form of behavior.“

Writer: I see that from the depths of the animal kingdom, we are slowly surfacing towards humans and human communities. Thinking and speech have loomed on the horizon, which, as a humanities person, cannot but make me happy :)

See you again, my friends!

08 Harmonization

Writer: Double reflection… Imagine yourselves on a quiet, cloudless night, sitting on the shore of a lake. And you look at the dark surface of the water, in which the Moon is reflected. But first, the Sun was reflected in the Moon, and only then was the Moon reflected in the lake! The Sun’s light was reflected twice: first from the Moon, then from the smooth surface of the water in the lake.

Engineer: And having hit the retina of a person’s eye, it is first reflected in their psyche, and then in its deeper layers, which do not directly interact with Genesis. Double reflection…

Writer: But if there is no Sun, then there is no reflection. No Sun – no Moon!

Engineer: And if there is no person who sees this – there is nothing: no Sun, no Moon, no lake, no Earth, no stars…

Consultant: A joke. Dear Sherlock Holmes, what do these millions of stars above our heads mean? It’s elementary, Watson! While we were sleeping, our tent was stolen!

Writer: :)

Engineer: Well, of course, I’m exaggerating when I say that if there is no person, then there is nothing. Ultimately, God created man on the sixth day; by that time, the entire World had already been created.

Writer: “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.

And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness. And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.

And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters. [And it was so]. And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so. And God called the firmament Heaven. [And God saw that it was good]. And the evening and the morning were the second day.

And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so. [And the waters under the heaven were gathered together unto their places, and the dry land appeared]. And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas: and God saw that it was good. And God said, Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed [after its kind and likeness], and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself, upon the earth: and it was so. And the earth brought forth grass, and herb yielding seed after its kind [and likeness], and the tree yielding fruit, whose seed was in itself, after his kind [upon the earth]: and God saw that it was good. And the evening and the morning were the third day.

And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven [to give light upon the earth and] to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years: and let them be for lights in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth: and it was so. And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: he made the stars also. And God set them in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth, And to rule over the day and over the night, and to divide the light from the darkness: and God saw that it was good. And the evening and the morning were the fourth day.

And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life, and fowl that may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven. [And it was so]. And God created great whales, and every living creature that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly, after their kind, and every winged fowl after his kind: and God saw that it was good. And God blessed them, saying, Be fruitful, and multiply, and fill the waters in the seas, and let fowl multiply in the earth. And the evening and the morning were the fifth day.

And God said, Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind, cattle, and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after his kind: and it was so. And God made the beast of the earth after his kind, and cattle after their kind, and every thing that creepeth upon the earth after his kind: and God saw that it was good.

And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, [and over the beasts], and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them. And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, [and over the beasts], and over the fowl of the air, [and over every cattle, and over all the earth], and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.

And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat. And to every beast of the earth, and to every fowl of the air, and to every thing that creepeth upon the earth, wherein there is life, I have given every green herb for meat: and it was so. And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good. And the evening and the morning were the sixth day.“ Genesis 1:1-31, Old Testament.

Engineer: You know, I think I’ve read “Genesis,“ even a few times. But only now did I realize that on the second day, God created the Earth’s atmosphere with clouds – water above the firmament. And the firmament is the air space.

Consultant: See, the Writer looked at the Moon and saw the Sun there. But if you look more closely, you can see the Earth there too! What is a crescent moon, if not the light of the Sun plus the shadow of the Earth on the surface of the Moon?!

Engineer: I think little children and ancient people wouldn’t have understood you. For them, the moon is just the moon that hangs in the night sky with the stars. It’s us who are so clever. We know that the Sun is the closest star to Earth, a huge incandescent ball. That the Moon is Earth’s satellite. That the Earth is not a disk resting on three elephants standing on a turtle… Although we haven’t seen this ourselves, adults told us, and we believed them.

Consultant: Another joke. After the Americans’ flight to the Moon, the General Secretary summons the Soviet cosmonauts and orders them to fly to the Sun. To the General Secretary’s order, the cosmonauts say: – We’ll burn up, it’s impossible! But the General Secretary categorically states: – What, do you think there are fools sitting in the Politburo? You’ll fly at night!

Writer: :)

Engineer: The movement of the celestial bodies, the Earth and the Moon, as well as their rotation, set the cyclical nature of Genesis and, however paradoxical it may sound, a certain fundamental constancy on Earth. The constancy of the repeatability of basic events, their inevitability. Such events, for example, as sunrise and sunset. If we consider any other cycles, then in most cases they are derivatives of the basic cycles.

Consultant: May I summarize? So, at the current moment, we can identify several key “emergences“:

– 

Genesis (from non-being);

– 

The Living (from Genesis);

– 

Humans (from the living). By the way, there’s an opinion that humans are not particularly different from animals. In the sense that humans are also animals, and all animals differ from each other in one way or another.

Engineer: And here we have arrived at, if not the most important, then a very important point. The cyclical nature of Genesis allows living organisms to work proactively and better maintain homeostasis – the dynamic balance of the internal and external environment. Anticipatory reflection of reality. And the presence of deep layers of the psyche, isolated directly from this boundary between the internal and external environment of the organism, gives rise to a double anticipatory reflection of reality. Anticipation squared! And one would like to say that it is precisely the presence of region No. 3 that distinguishes humans from all other animals. This would be very simple and beautiful, but, unfortunately, the current understanding of the brain physiology of various animals and humans does not confirm this hypothesis. But, undoubtedly, region No. 3 is very developed precisely in humans. The question is – why? Let’s not consider the simplest organisms that do not have deep layers of the psyche. Let’s consider those living beings that possess a developed brain with all three regions. What basic behavioral scenarios are necessary for such a creature?

1. Nutrition;

2. Reproduction;

3. Safety.

In all three behavioral scenarios, an important aspect is the recognition of related objects in the external environment. Recognizing food objects seems not difficult (by taste, smell, appearance). But recognizing danger that threatens the organism’s life is even simpler. It’s understandable. You can skip a meal, but the time you get eaten is the last time. Therefore, danger must be recognized quickly, and these should not be complex objects in the psyche that require a lot of processing time. Saw two glowing dots in the dark – freeze, or run, or attack yourself! Reproduction seems more complex than the previous two, but this is not the key point either. The key point is sociality. Social animals do all the same things as non-social ones (eat, reproduce, defend against threats), but they do it collaboratively. A troop of monkeys or a flock of birds copes with external challenges more successfully than a solitary animal. This is a plus. But the side effect is that social animals “have to“ live and interact with each other. Have you already guessed what is the most complex object in the external world that a person has to hold and process in their psyche?

Writer: Another person?

Engineer: Exactly! Another person! Other people of the social community to which the given individual belongs. There is nothing more complex for a person than another person and interaction with them. If conditional bananas and tigers calmly “live“ in region No. 2 of the human psyche, then other people (not all people on the planet, but precisely those with whom active interaction occurs in life) “live“ in region No. 3. Maybe not only them, but they definitely do. Another person, for building effective interaction with them, is the most complex dynamic (changing) object.

Consultant: And what about the psyche of other social animals? After all, they also fit into this scheme.

Engineer: They do fit. And their brain is quite developed. But in a dolphin’s region No. 3 “live“ other dolphins, in a raven’s – other ravens, and so on. And in the deepest and most developed layers of the human psyche live other people.

Writer: But what about a dog, man’s best friend? It also has an image of its owner in its head.

Engineer: That’s one person (the owner). But a person themselves can accommodate up to several hundred other people in their head in detailed description, allowing for effective interaction with them! Those interested can be referred to the research of the English anthropologist Robin Dunbar. But before we completely focus on humans, I would like to say a couple more words about the double anticipatory reflection of reality, inherent in social animals (and maybe not only them, but in a simpler, rudimentary state). “Reflection“ is not a completely accurate word when we talk about how the external World shapes the internal world of a living organism (including humans). But the metaphor of a mirror will help me explain the phenomenon of the harmonization of worlds. Imagine a person looking in a mirror. Let’s consider four cases:

1. The person looks in the mirror and sees what they expect to see. They like everything. Nothing in their behavior changes;

2. The person looks in the mirror, and they don’t like what they see. The behavior will be aimed at correction, but, of course, not of the mirror, but of what is reflected in it;

3. The person looks in the mirror and doesn’t see there what is actually present nearby… For example, a vampire, who, as is known, is not reflected in mirrors. Scary, right? But you can live if you remove all the mirrors in the castle :) But the scariest option is option number four…

4. The person looks in the mirror and sees there something (or someone) that (who) is not actually there as if…

Writer: How creepy! Good thing it’s not nighttime, or one might not sleep peacefully after this.

Engineer: It is precisely the anxiety from the discrepancy between the external World and the internal world that most strongly influences human behavior, motivating them to eliminate this very discrepancy. And since we are already living in a model of double reflection of reality, we can talk about at least double harmonization: psyche region No. 2 is harmonized with the external World and region No. 3, and region No. 3 is harmonized with region No. 2. In fact, we have the external World, the picture of the World (region No. 2, the “Painter“), the conscious picture of the World (region No. 3, the “Art Critic“), and all three Worlds are harmonized with each other (unconsciously and consciously) for the “Traveler“ to find peace of mind.

Engineer: Initially, I wanted to call this the synchronization of Worlds. But, the word “synchronization“ contains time (“chronos“), so I intuitively decided to call this phenomenon the harmonization of Worlds. After all, God created “lights in the firmament of the heaven [to give light upon the earth and] to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years“ only on the “fourth day.“

Consultant: In the work of an organizational development consultant using the Gestalt approach of the Cleveland model, there is a method called intervention. It consists of the consultant being near the client-system (a person or a group), observing, and then at a certain moment sharing some important observation in the format “saw – heard – felt“. And if the intervention is successful, then processes of change in the behavior of the client-system are initiated, for the sake of which the consultant was approached. From the outside, this may seem like pure magic, but after your description of the harmonization of Worlds, the method of phenomenological intervention seems less magical and more practical. Since in region No. 2 of the human psyche we have direct perception of the external World by the senses (I see, I hear, I feel), and in region No. 3 some awareness and explanation occurs (World No. 3), then a successful phenomenological intervention hits precisely World No. 2, which manifests in the behavior of the client-system. And, if World No. 2 and World No. 3 are not harmonized (do not correspond), then irreversible processes of harmonization of Worlds are launched within the person (one, several, everyone in the group). And the consultant “merely“ pointed out the actual life processes of the client-system that were occurring (World, World No. 2), but were not reflected in the mirror (World No. 3). And this also brings to mind Sigmund Freud with his death drive principle, which can now be strongly disputed: “We are accustomed to considering the principle of self-preservation of the living organism and the principle of its adaptation to the conditions of the environment in which it has to live as the main explanatory principles of all biological sciences. The striving to preserve one’s own life and that of one’s kind and the striving for the fullest and most painless adaptation to the environment are the main driving forces of all organic development. In full agreement with these presuppositions of traditional biology, Freud at one time put forward the proposition of two principles of mental activity. Freud called the highest tendency to which mental processes are subject the pleasure principle. The pursuit of pleasure and aversion to unpleasure, however, do not solely and exclusively direct mental life. The necessity of adaptation calls for an accurate awareness of the external world; this introduces a new principle of mental activity – the reality principle, which sometimes dictates the renunciation of pleasure in the name of ’more reliable, albeit delayed’ satisfaction. <…> More fundamental than this principle, according to Freud, paradoxical as it may sound, is the death drive principle, which is the basic, original, and universal principle of organic life. <…> The task of this drive is, as Freud says in another book, ’to return all living organisms to a lifeless state’, i.e., its goal is ’to restore a state disrupted by the emergence of life,’ to return life to the inorganic existence of matter. <…> However, if in the deep layers of mental life lies the biological conservatism of the tendency to preserve inorganic equilibrium, – then how can one explain the development of humanity from lower forms to higher ones? Where to look for the root of the rapidly developing historical process? Freud gives us a highly interesting and profound materialistic answer to this: if conservative tendencies of ancient biology still remain in man in the depths of his psyche, if in the final analysis we even reduce eros to them, then the only forces leading us out of the state of biological conservatism, compelling us to progress, to activity, are external forces; we will say – the external conditions of the material environment in which the individual exists. <…> Thus, the history of the human psyche is formed, according to Freud, from two tendencies: conservative – biological and progressive – sociological. It is precisely from these moments that the entire dialectic of the organism is formed, and it is they that lead to the peculiar ’spiral’ development of man.“ L.S. Vygotsky, A.R. Luria – Preface to the Russian translation of the work “Beyond the Pleasure Principle.“

Sigmund Freud: “The facts which have caused us to believe in the dominance of the pleasure principle in mental life also find expression in the hypothesis that the mental apparatus endeavours to keep the quantity of excitation present in it as low as possible or at least to keep it constant. <…> On closer inspection we shall also find that this tendency which we attribute to the mental apparatus is a particular instance of Fechner’s principle of the tendency towards stability, with which he linked the sensations of pleasure and unpleasure. <…> Under the influence of the ego’s self-preservation instinct, this principle is replaced by the ’reality principle,’ which, without abandoning the ultimate aim of achieving pleasure, postpones the possibility of satisfaction and temporarily tolerates unpleasure on the long indirect road to pleasure. <…> Once, by some completely unknown forces, the properties of living matter were awakened in inanimate matter. It is possible that this was a process similar to that by which consciousness was later to be formed in a certain layer of living matter. The tension that then arose in previously inanimate matter strove to be equalized: this was the first striving to return to the inanimate. The living substance could then easily die, the path of life was probably short, its direction was predetermined by the chemical structure of young life. For a long time, living substance could be created again and again and could easily die, until external, determining causes changed so much that they forced the remaining living substance to greater and greater deviations from the original path of life and to more complex detours to achieve the goal – death. These detours to death, reliably protected by conservative drives, now give us the picture of life phenomena. If one adheres to the opinion of the exclusively conservative nature of drives, one cannot arrive at other assumptions about the origin and purpose of life.“

Consultant: And now we have a choice:

– 

The striving for harmonization of Worlds from the Engineer, and

– 

The striving for death from Sigmund Freud.

Engineer: If we remain within the framework of one specific person and their attempts to find harmony (a certain correspondence) between the external World and the internal world, without considering World No. 3, then Freud is absolutely right. These attempts are doomed to failure: the World is large, the person is small, personal life is short to embrace all of external Genesis within oneself. And then the death of a person seems to be the only way to find harmony. Remember? – and if there is no person who sees this – there is nothing: no Sun, no Moon, no lake, no Earth, no stars… Nothing is harmonious with nothing. But this is a trap from the evil one! A person will die, but Genesis will continue its existence. But if we begin to take into account World No. 3, then it contains not only the personal knowledge of a specific individual, but the collective knowledge about Genesis, accumulated by all previous generations of the civilization to which they belong. And if there is a desire not to lose this knowledge, but to accumulate, verify, and refine it, then, with each new generation of their civilization, a person will have an increasingly harmonious understanding of Genesis. And this is also stability. But based on the striving for life! Probably, summing up, concluding our meeting today and building a bridge to the next one, I want to recall three axioms that I introduced:

A1. Genesis is cyclical.

A2. All living things are born from living things.

A3. A human develops from a single cell.

Writer: The striving for life versus the striving for death. In an attempt to find the harmony of Worlds… See you again, my friends!

09 The Birth of Human

Writer: You say that the key to understanding human consciousness lies in its sociality, that the most complex object in the external world that a person holds and processes in their psyche is another person. Yet, you constantly draw only one person.

Engineer: Point taken. This might complicate the perception and understanding of the human psyche’s structure, but it might also clarify some things. Look, I’ll try to depict the interaction of two people.

Engineer: Let me remind you that I proceed from the existence of a real world – Genesis. Let’s call it World No. 1, especially since human behavior, prepared and realized by area No. 1, occurs precisely in it. Furthermore, World No. 1 is reflected through individual perception into World No. 2 (area of the psyche No. 2). World No. 2 is unique and unrepeatable, just as each person is unique and unrepeatable. In World No. 2, both the external world (World No. 1) and the person themselves with their behavior are reflected. But in the deeper layers of the psyche (area No. 3) “live“ other people and a holistic picture of the world – World No. 3. And, if areas No. 1 and No. 2 can be called areas of personal experience, then area of the psyche No. 3 is the area of public consciousness (or – civilizational con-sciousness).

Consultant: We remember, we remember. The psyche is like an egg. So, if we assume people are “eggheads,“ then not only are the worlds harmonized within a single person (World No. 1 with Worlds No. 2 and No. 3, World No. 3 with Worlds No. 1 and No. 2), but also Worlds No. 3 between different people within an interaction? Since you say that Worlds No. 2 are strictly individual, and World No. 3 contains shared knowledge, it means the “yolks“ harmonize with each other.

Engineer: That’s exactly right. If we want to interact effectively in the world, we need to harmonize (synchronize) our worldviews.

Writer: And what if we don’t want to? Don’t want to interact effectively? Who said that this is the defining and driving factor?

Consultant: Well, you’re a writer! Remember Ivan Krylov’s fable “The Swan, the Pike, and the Crayfish“!

Engineer: I agree, survival is not mandatory, it’s everyone’s choice :) But seriously, there isn’t much of a choice. A person is born and grows up in a society of other people. Cycle after cycle, second after second, year after year, the harmonization of worlds takes place. I now realize that when I drew the three-part diagram of the human psyche, I wasn’t taking a specific person, but the diagram itself – on the one hand, it’s philosophy (an ideal understanding of how a person is structured), and on the other hand, it’s a method for studying a person. What became important was the identification of area No. 3 (the deep layers of the psyche that process interaction with other people), which no longer allows us to consider a person in isolation from the civilization to which they belong. It’s like, for example, considering men separately and women separately. You can, of course, but you need to understand that if there were no women, men would disappear. If there were no men, women would disappear. The unity and struggle of opposites “man – woman“ is resolved in their synthesis – the child. And the unity and struggle of opposites “person – civilization“ is resolved in their synthesis – consciousness! Without human as such, there would be no civilization. And without civilization, there would be no human. Human with a capital H, a person possessing self-con-sciousness. We’ve already talked about this (“Applied Love“, Chapter 09. Development), but now there’s a diagram as a method, and we can discuss it in more detail. We’ll be talking about human ontogenesis – the individual development of an organism from fertilization to the end of life. Part of the discussion will be embryogenesis – the development and formation of the human embryo and its brain, as well as systemogenesis, the emergence of consciousness and self-awareness. Before this, I drew a diagram with the body and the psyche. I divided the psyche into three areas. We talked about the reflection of worlds and billions of nerve cells. But a person develops from a single cell! The entire human being after fertilization, in which a man and a woman participate, is a single cell called a zygote. Then begins the process of cell division and cell differentiation. The brain, however, starts with three germ layers, or vesicles, which, through further cell division, form the human nervous system as we know it. Here, my main hypothesis is that all three areas of the nervous system (No. 1, No. 2, No. 3) are laid down at the very earliest stage, and then develop harmoniously (or disharmoniously in the case of pathologies). Imagine a cloverleaf. It’s small at first, but it already has all three small leaflets. And then all the leaflets grow in size as the plant grows and develops.

Engineer: So, there you have it. The areas of the psyche develop. Worldviews are written. The world is tasted. The external world and the possibilities of the internal world are mastered. The first clumsy movements in each cycle of experience develop, forming various levels of movement construction in the child’s psyche according to N.A. Bernstein:

A. “The level of tonus“ (the boundary between the internal and external world);

B. “The level of muscular-articular linkages“ (the internal world);

C. “The level of space“ (the external world);

D. “The level of action“ (chain reflexes of the internal world’s action in the external world).

Nikolai Bernstein: “According to the crudest scheme, levels A and B divided the territory of the body between them: level A – the trunk and support, level B – the movers (limbs). Of course, this division is very simplistic, primarily because the work of both levels in humans is dominated by the higher, cortical regions of the brain. But, in addition to this, the indicated division of labor was complicated by inevitable mutual interference. Level B necessarily had to participate in the work of the torso muscles, since the ancient and rather weak ’motors’ of level A could not cope with the powerful and rapid movements of the whole body and lagged behind the limbs. Conversely, level A found such an important and responsible application in controlling limb movements that it firmly established itself there in very prominent roles, but only as a ’background level’. <…> It (level A) provides all limb muscles with tonus, i.e., what could be called background tension; it gives the entire movement a basic priming, upon which newer and more finely articulated (differentiated) levels can then draw the patterns of the fast, agile, or forceful movements they produce. <…> Again, thanks to the closest connection of level B with all the sensory input of movement, under its control, movements always turn out very well-coordinated and harmonious. They come out gracefully even in very ungraceful people. They are perfectly adjusted not only at any given moment; this same level masterfully organizes movements in time as well, controls the rhythm of movement, ensures the alternation of work between flexor and extensor muscles, and so on. What is also very characteristic of movements for which this level takes control is the extraordinary, sharply defined uniformity of successive repetitions of the movement (its so-called cycles) in all sorts of rhythmic movements. Successive steps in walking or running turn out as identical as coins of the same minting: successive cycles of movements when working with a saw, file, scythe, hammer, etc., resemble each other much more than two drops of water. This property is very closely related to the formation of motor skills, and we will return to it in the next essay. With such rich possibilities, it would seem that the level of muscular-articular linkages (B) could control a very large number of all sorts of movements. The obstacle to this is the already mentioned gap in its sensory information: in humans, it is poorly connected with the telereceptors of vision and hearing, the neural pathways of which have gone upward from it. Therefore, as it is very easy to imagine, it is perfectly adapted to ensure the entire internal linkage of movement, to coordinate the behavior of muscles among themselves, to establish the necessary synergies, etc. But to adapt a complex and harmonious movement composed in this way to external conditions, to the real surrounding environment – this is beyond its capabilities. <…> As an enlisted background level, it works for the most part without engaging consciousness – this is generally the fate of all backgrounds. Much in its functions is involuntary, completely or to some extent, although they are incomparably more accessible to voluntary intervention than the deep, ’subterranean,’ tonic backgrounds of level A. One cannot, of course, expect that the level of muscular-articular linkages would have, in some pre-prepared form, background, auxiliary coordinations for all possible movements and skills acquired by a person during their life. This is not actually the case. Level B is well adapted in humans to assimilate life experience, to build new coordinations, and to store them in the treasury of motor memory. <…> However, the sensory signaling on which the sensory corrections of the level under discussion rely does not serve it in its raw form. It has already been mentioned that from the bottom up through the levels, the processing of sensory material increases more and more, the fusion of signals from different sense organs with each other, and their interweaving with numerous traces of previous memories. The complex, finely articulated connection, or synthesis, on which the work of level C rests, we call the spatial field. <…> The spatial field is, firstly, an accurate objective (i.e., corresponding to reality) perception of external space with the cooperation of all sense organs, relying additionally on all previous experience preserved by memory. <…> One cannot fail to mention several basic properties of the spatial field, which are very important for understanding the work of the construction level under discussion. Firstly, this field of space, in which we ’possess’ every point in the indicated sense, is extensive, stretching far in all directions from our body. Secondly, we perceive it with certainty as something immovable. When we, for example, turn around a full circle, it never seems to us for a moment that the entire surrounding world has turned around us, although the raw, direct sensations of all sense organs tell us precisely this. Those cases (for example, dizziness) when we begin to imagine that it is not we who are turning, but the external world, we attribute, of course, to pathological disturbances of the normal work of the level of space. Thirdly, we perceive external space as completely homogeneous, identical in all its parts. Our eyes, as is known, depict all objects to us in perspective: close ones – large, distant ones – small; parallel rails seem to our eyes to converge at a single point on the horizon, etc. And for our sense of touch, and for our muscular-articular sense, different points of space are certainly not equivalent to each other: on the skin, highly and weakly sensitive areas alternate, with tactile points frequently or sparsely located on them; the muscular sense also has a very different degree of sensitivity (depending on the position of the body or limbs, etc.). And yet, despite all this, the internal processing of these raw impressions in the brain is so profound that when the integral and fused perception of the spatial field reaches our clear consciousness, all its parts and pieces have already become as homogeneous with each other as in a geometry textbook. All those, very numerous, distortions of reality contained in the direct readings of the sense organs are extinguished, excluded, and corrected so completely that we do not even suspect many of them. Many of these distortions of reality (so-called sensory illusions) were only discovered by science in the last century – so completely can the finished, ’fair-copied’ representation of the spatial field, as it enters our consciousness and as it guides the corrections of level C, free itself from all of them. To these three most important properties of the spatial field – its extensiveness, immovability, and homogeneity – we must add that we clearly perceive the sizes of things in it and the distances between them, clearly realize the shape of objects surrounding us, correctly estimate angles and directions, recognize and can reproduce (for example, draw) figures and forms similar to each other, etc. It is in this spatial field that the movements of level C unfold. <…> With the level of actions (D), things are completely different. The very earliest rudiments of its manifestations are found only in the most developed mammals: in the horse, dog, elephant. There are noticeably more of them in monkeys, but even in them, actions are still so few, they are so rudimentary, that level D can, with full justification and without stretching the point, be called the human level. Perhaps man became man to a large extent thanks to this level and in connection with it. First of all, it is necessary to explain what we mean by actions. Actions are no longer just movements. For the most part, these are whole chains of successive movements that together solve a particular motor task. Each such chain consists of different movements that replace each other, systematically bringing us closer to solving the task. All movements – links in such a chain – are connected by the meaning of the task being solved. Miss one of these necessary links or confuse their order – and the solution of the task will be thwarted.“

Consultant: It’s like “hitting the wrong note“ when playing a piece of music!

Engineer: Nikolai Alexandrovich also identified level E as the level of meaning. But, what’s important for me to note is: levels A, B, C definitely relate to areas No. 1 and No. 2, while levels D and E relate to the deeper layers of the psyche (area No. 3). Each level possesses memory and develops automatisms throughout life. But let’s return to the young child and the main feature of area No. 3 – processing the most complex objects – other people. First, mom appears there. Then – mom and other people (the reaction to mom and to “other“ people are two radically different reactions). Then close relatives appear and the experience of interacting with them. As you remember, one of my important hypotheses is that for area No. 3, the external world is area No. 2. It is there that the child recognizes other people. And since area No. 2 contains information about both the external (for the child) world and the internal world (both pieces of information are necessary for organizing movement, levels A, B, C according to Bernstein), then at a certain point (3-5 years old), among all the people “living“ in area No. 3 of the psyche, the most special person stands out – the child themselves! And it becomes possible to organize interaction with them (self-control). In area No. 2 are located – the World and people. In area No. 3 are located – the World, other people, “I“. Self-awareness appears. But if there were no other people and no need to process them in the psyche to organize interaction, then even self-awareness would not have appeared. It turns out that other people are a necessary step on the path to a person finding themselves.

Writer: The second birth of human. Or, rather, the birth of Human!

Engineer: But that’s not all!

Consultant: Finish us off!

Engineer: A distinctive feature of humans from all other living beings on Earth is that after birth, a child sees around them not just other people, but people who accompany all their actions with speech! And every person, every object, everything – has a name or a designation.

Writer: “Now the Lord God had formed out of the ground all the wild animals and all the birds in the sky. He brought them to the man to see what he would name them; and whatever the man called each living creature, that was its name.“ Genesis 2:19, Old Testament.

Engineer: I propose we dedicate our next meeting to language.

Writer: It’s surprising that language has only now appeared on the scene. Although con-sciousness, and even self-awareness, are already on the discussion table!… See you again, my friends!

10 Programming Languages

Consultant: A joke. Vovochka said the word “ass“ in class. “There’s no such word, Vovochka!“ said the teacher. “Well …“ Vovochka was surprised. “The ass exists, but the word doesn’t?!“

Writer: :)

Engineer: As we’ve already noted, in the deep layers of the human psyche, in area #3, “live“ people who speak languages, which means that at least one of the worldviews located in consciousness is a linguistic worldview. Any object in the external world, after a double reflection, has itself in the form of a word in the linguistic worldview. But I wanted to draw your attention to another surprising point that I realized relatively recently. Usually, when we mention language, we mean conversation, communication between people. So, as you remember, I am a software engineer, and in this field, there are no languages of communication… There are communication protocols. And yet, there are many languages, but they are all programming languages! If we are talking about human language, I would always consider it from two functional positions:

– 

as a communication protocol,

– 

and as behavior programming.

Engineer: In this, agreement on both sides about a uniform method of transmitting messages is critically important in a communication protocol. It’s not enough to receive a message. You also need to decipher it. Moreover, it needs to be deciphered using the same logic in which the message was encrypted. A child hears their native language from childhood, thereby establishing a uniform communication protocol with the community in which they grow up.

Lev Vygotsky: “The entire history of a child’s mental development teaches us that from the very first days, their adaptation to the environment is achieved by social means through the people around them. The path from an object to the child and from the child to an object lies through another person. The transition from a biological path of development to a social one is the central link in the process of development, a cardinal turning point in the history of a child’s behavior. The path through another person is the central highway for the development of practical intelligence, as shown by our experiments. Speech plays a paramount role here.<…> In the first stage, speech, following action, reflecting it and reinforcing its results, remains structurally subordinate to action, evoked by action; in the second stage, speech, shifting to the initial moment of action, begins to dominate action, directs it, determines its theme and its course. Therefore, in the second stage, the planning function of speech is truly born, and in this way, it begins to determine the direction of action in the future.“

Consultant: I remember when my daughter was four years old, learning to swim in the pool, when her strength began to wane, she started to encourage herself: “Come on, Zlata, come on!“

Writer: This is egocentric speech. It is directed by the child towards themselves. A child’s conversation addressed to themselves. Later, this speech transitions into inner speech.

Consultant: Exactly! My son, when he was a little older than four, once, after giving the answer to an addition problem, added: “And do you know how I answered so quickly? I first counted with my inner voice, and then I just told you the answer!“

Lev Vygotsky: “We must say that, apparently, egocentric speech, in addition to a purely expressive function and a discharge function, in addition to simply accompanying childish activity, very easily becomes thinking in the proper sense of the word, i.e., it assumes the function of a planning operation, of solving a new problem arising in behavior.<…> Thanks to the planning function of speech, directed at one’s own activity, the child creates, alongside stimuli coming from the environment, another series of auxiliary stimuli, standing between them and the environment and directing their behavior. It is thanks to this second series of stimuli, created with the help of speech, that the child’s behavior rises to a higher level, acquiring relative freedom from the immediately attractive situation, and impulsive attempts are transformed into planned, organized behavior.“

Engineer: In fact, language, used for communication and influencing other people, transforms into a language for programming one’s own behavior as a person develops!

Writer: Pro-gramming… “Pro“ – from Greek “before, prior to“, “grammar“ – from Greek “writing.“

Engineer: You know, you’re right! Programmers write programs (or, as they often say, write code). At the same time, while I’m writing a program, it’s just text. Text in one of the programming languages. But for the written program to work, it first needs to be compiled. During compilation, syntax errors are checked, and the program is translated from a human language (programming language) into machine code (instructions that the computer understands). And only after that (after compilation) can the program be launched for execution! So, we have three stages:

– Programming (modifying the program in a programming language);

– Compilation (translating the program into machine code);

– Running the program.

Consultant: Listen, well, as a user, I don’t program anything, I just run various programs on my computer.

Engineer: That’s the point. What if the program doesn’t work correctly? It was written for one set of conditions, but your situation and tasks have changed. The program needs to be changed. For this, you need a programmer who will open the program’s source code, modify it, and compile it again so that it can be run.

Writer: As I understand it, you’re applying this computer analogy to the human psyche as well?

Engineer: Not one-to-one, of course. But the principle itself. It turns out to be very similar. Human behavior is formed through choice (or a volitional act) and the launching of a program for execution appropriate to the current situation. This could be an automatic program (already ready for execution) from area #2 – then it will launch quickly. Or it could be a program from the deep area #3 of the psyche, then there might be a delay because the program is being written (or recalled, or perceived from the outside) in a language, then transformed into muscle code (analogous to machine code during compilation on a computer), and only then launched for execution as a program of human behavior in that situation. It’s worth noting specifically (and discussing separately later) the process of choosing and launching a behavioral program for execution (Alexei Alexeyevich Ukhtomsky’s “dominant“ principle).

Alexander Luria: “Our central problem is the structure of consciousness, the ability of a person to go beyond the immediate, sensory reflection of reality, the analysis of the ability to reflect the world in complex, abstract connections and relationships, deeper than sensory perception can reflect. We said that this abstract and generalized reflection of the world and abstract thinking are carried out with the closest participation of language. The main question arises: how is language constructed, which allows one to abstract and generalize features of the external world, in other words, to form a concept? What features of language allow one to draw conclusions, make inferences, and provide the psychological basis for discursive thinking? Finally, what features of language allow it to transmit experience accumulated by generations, i.e., provide the path of psychological development that distinguishes humans from animals? We already know that language is a complex system of codes that has formed in social history. Let us now turn to a more detailed analysis of the structure of language, dwelling on this problem to the extent necessary for the psychological analysis of information transmission and for the study of the mechanisms of conscious human mental activity. First of all, we will be interested in the word and its semantic structure, i.e., the word as a carrier of a certain meaning. As is known, the word is the basic element of language. The word denotes things, the word highlights features, actions, relationships. The word unites objects into known systems, in other words, it codes our experience. How did the word, which is the main means of coding and transmitting experience, arise? How is the semantic structure of the word constructed, what exactly in the structure of the word allows it to perform this main role of designating things, highlighting features – qualities, actions, relationships? What allows the word to generalize immediate experience?“

Engineer: Allow me to remind you that immediate experience refers to psychic areas #1 and #2, which are then secondarily reflected in the deep area #3, where other people “live“ (and the person themselves from a certain age), who possess language.

Alexander Luria: “The enormous advantage of a person who possesses a developed language is that their world is doubled. A person without words dealt with those things that they directly saw, with which they could manipulate. With the help of language, which designates objects, they can deal with objects that were not directly perceived and that previously were not part of their own experience. The word doubles the world and allows a person to mentally operate with objects even in their absence. An animal has one world – the world of sensually perceived objects and situations: a human has a double world, which includes both the world of directly perceived objects and the world of images of objects, relationships, and qualities that are designated by words. Thus, the word is a special form of reflecting reality. A person can arbitrarily evoke these images regardless of their real presence and, thus, can arbitrarily control this second world. They can control not only their perception, representation, but also their memory and actions, because by uttering the words “raise your hand“, “clench your hand into a fist“, they can perform these actions mentally. In other words, not only the doubling of the world is born from the word, but also a volitional act, which a person could not perform if they did not have language. <…> Furthermore, thanks to the word, a person can operate with things mentally in their absence, perform mental actions, mental experiments on things. <…> Finally, the last thing: by doubling the world, the word makes it possible to transmit experience from individual to individual and ensures the possibility of assimilating the experience of generations. As we indicated, an animal has only two ways of organizing its behavior: using hereditarily fixed experience, deposited in its instincts, and acquiring new forms of behavior through personal experience. In contrast to this, a person does not necessarily always have to turn to personal experience; they can receive it from other people, using speech as a source of information. The overwhelming part of the formation of a person’s new experience (both everyday and received in the process of school education) uses precisely this specifically human path.<…> Thus, by abstracting a feature and generalizing an object, the word becomes an instrument of thought and a means of communication. There is, however, an even deeper and more important function of the meaning of a word. In a developed language, which is a system of codes, the word not only highlights a feature and not only generalizes a thing, relating it to a certain category, it performs an automatic and imperceptible to a person analysis of the object, transmitting to them the experience of generations that has developed in relation to this object in the history of society.“

Writer: This is interesting, the experience of which society’s generations is transmitted to my trilingual children, who speak Russian, French, and English fluently? You can speak to them in one language, and they will answer you in another. The words “яблоко“ (yabloko – Russian), “apple,“ and “la pomme“ (French) will equally evoke the image of an apple in their minds. That is, behind the words (no matter in which language, as long as it’s understandable), the concept of the object is stored in the head.

Alexander Luria: “According to N. Chomsky’s hypothesis, behind the countless number of ’surface syntactic structures’ (different for different languages) there exist ’deep syntactic structures,’ reflecting general schemes of thought expression, the number of which is relatively small; it is precisely this that gives a child the opportunity to master these ’deep syntactic structures’ in such a short period and to derive from them any ’surface grammatical structures’ of the language they speak.<…>

All this speaks to the fact that the word not only doubles the world, not only ensures the appearance of corresponding representations, but is a powerful tool for analyzing this world. By transmitting social experience regarding an object, the word takes us beyond the limits of sensory experience, allowing us to penetrate into the sphere of the rational. All this makes it possible to assert that the word, possessing object reference and meaning, is the basis of the system of codes that ensure the translation of human cognition into a new dimension, allows for a leap from the sensory to the rational, i.e., to the ability to both designate things and operate with things in a completely new, ’rational’ plane.“

Nikolai Berdyaev: “In the theory of knowledge, I started from Kant. But I rather quickly arrived at a distinctive theory of knowledge, which I tried to perfect throughout my life, although I was incapable of creating a system. It is directed against rationalism, which believes in the expressibility of being in concepts, in the rationality of genesis. But genesis is rational only because and only insofar as it is preliminarily rationalized and is itself a concept. According to the terminology I later refined, genesis, with which rational gnoseology and ontology deal, is already a product of thought. Initially, I formulated this to myself as follows: there is a primary genesis before the process of rationalization, and it is this that is true genesis, which is knowable not through concepts. This approximately corresponded to Kant’s distinction between the thing-in-itself and phenomenon. But I was struck by the fact that Kant did not explain at all why the world of phenomena, which is not the true, primordial world, was formed. It was also strange that the true, noumenal world (the thing-in-itself) is unknowable, while the secondary and inauthentic world (phenomenon) is knowable, and a universally binding and firm science is justified concerning it. This is the difference between Kant and Plato. But Kant’s doctrine of transcendental illusion (Schein) is brilliant. From the point of view of modern psychology, my initial theme could be formulated as the distinction between the unconscious and consciousness, but scientific psychology and its representatives are incapable of the philosophical substantiation and development of the doctrine of the unconscious. Of the Neo-Kantians, the school associated with Windelband, Rickert, and Lask was closest to me. Only this school recognized the irrational. For one summer semester, as a young man, I even attended Windelband’s lectures in charming Heidelberg. But by this time, I had already moved very far from Kantianism. My main theme was how to further develop and at the same time overcome Kant’s thought, trying to justify the possibility of knowing primordial reality before rationalization, before processing by consciousness. This could also be formulated as the distinction between primary and secondary consciousness. Secondary consciousness is associated with the split into subject and object; it objectifies the knowable. Primordial consciousness is immersed in the subject as primordial reality, or rather, in it the identity of subject and object is given.“

Alexander Luria: “<…> language is formed on the basis of a child’s real actions in the form of active interactions with objects, which create an extensive practical basis for the future ’subject – predicate – object’ relationship, which underlies the simplest (’nuclear’) structures of language.“

Consultant: Mowgli also actively interacted with objects… Let’s be honest: a person needs a person!

Alexander Luria: “It is necessary to go beyond the organism and look at how volitional processes are formed in the development of a child’s specific activity and in their communication with adults. Such was the main position of L.S. Vygotsky, who with this statement made a great contribution to the development of scientific psychology. The main idea of L.S. Vygotsky, explaining the organization of a volitional act, is based on the analysis of a child’s speech development. In the first stage of mastering speech, the mother interacts with the child, directs their attention (“take the ball“, “pick up the doll“, “where is the doll?“ etc.), and the child carries out these verbal instructions. By presenting these verbal instructions to the child, the mother restructures their attention: by singling out the named object from the general background, she organizes the child’s motor acts with the help of her speech. In this case, the voluntary act is divided between two people: the child’s motor act begins with the mother’s speech and ends with their own movement (L.S. Vygotsky, 1956). Only at the next stage of development does the child themselves master speech and begin to give verbal commands to themselves, first overtly – in external speech, and then covertly – in inner speech.“

Consultant: There you have it, Writer, the answer to your question. It doesn’t matter how many languages a child learns. What matters is the language in which their mother sang them lullabies and told them their first fairy tales!

Vladimir Propp: “What did we find? We found that the compositional unity of the fairy tale lies not in any peculiarities of the human psyche, nor in the peculiarities of artistic creation; it lies in the historical reality of the past. What is now narrated was once done, depicted, and what was not done, was imagined.“

Writer: Although you claim that words are rational, and as they say, you can’t throw words out of a song… but you can’t throw the music out of a song either! And music, it seems to me, is irrational to the extreme. So it turns out that the human soul is like a song: both rational and irrational at the same time… Shall we continue next time?

See you again, my friends!

11 Core

Consultant: A joke. An inspector goes into a bar and orders 50 grams of vodka. The bartender pours it, and the inspector immediately pours it into a measuring cup – 40 grams. The bartender is fined. A week later, the same inspector, in the same bar, with the same bartender, again orders 50 grams of vodka. He measures it – again 40 grams! He fines him again. Another week later, the story repeats. The inspector can’t take it anymore: – This is the third time I’ve come to you like this, you know me by sight, I fine you every time, but you still pour 40 grams! Bartender: – It’s easier for me to pay your fine than to mess up my hand!

Writer: :) Irrational behavior, by a willful act of choice, has triumphed over rational behavior (Latin: rationalis “calculating, accounting; reasonable“).

Consultant: It depends on how you count! From the inspector’s point of view, the bartender is acting irrationally, unreasonably. But that’s if we’re only talking about the fine. From the bartender’s point of view, the effort required to automate the action costs more.

Writer: And the inspector at the end is very emotional :) By the way, the Engineer uses the terms “rational“ / “irrational“, but in everyday life, people usually talk about “rational“ / “emotional“, “mind“ / “heart“…

Consultant: “Intellect“ / “Emotional Intellect“…

Engineer: And what do you associate with the expression of emotions in a person?

Writer: Emotions vary. Sometimes it takes your breath away, sometimes your heart beats faster and your face turns red, sometimes your face breaks into a smile or contorts into a grimace of terror, and sometimes, forgive me, you can “crap your pants“ from fear…

Engineer: Well, you’ve basically listed all the main things yourself. Emotions “live“ in area #1.

Pyotr Anokhin: “The decisive feature of an emotional state is its integrality, its exclusiveness in relation to other states and other reactions. Emotions encompass the entire organism; they give a person’s state a certain type of experience. By producing an almost instantaneous integration (unification into a single whole) of all bodily functions, emotions themselves, and primarily, can be an absolute signal of a beneficial or harmful influence on the organism, often even before the localization of the influence and the specific mechanism of the organism’s response are determined. It is precisely this property of the organism – to determine the quality of an influence through emotion, using the most ancient and universal criterion of all living things on Earth – survivability – that has given emotion its universal significance in the life of the organism. Along with this, the organism turns out to be extremely advantageously adapted to environmental conditions, since, even without determining the form, type, mechanism, and other parameters of various influences, it can react to them with life-saving speed with the help of a certain quality of emotional state, reducing them, so to speak, to a common biological denominator: whether this influence is beneficial or harmful to it.

How important this integration of the organism in an emotional state is can be seen in the example of a simple pain emotion, which every person has experienced to one degree or another in life. <…>

It can be said that all vital needs and functions, without exception, including manifestations of intellectual activity, are accompanied by a corresponding emotional tone, thanks to which the organism continuously remains within the channel of optimal vital functions.

Numerous facts established by psychologists and physiologists demonstrate a certain unified plan in the architecture of a living organism, thanks to which all its diverse functions are sanctioned or rejected on the basis of one and the same principle – the principle of their correspondence to a certain emotional state formed at a given time.

The neural substrate of emotions. The universal significance of emotional states, their guiding role in the formation of behavior, has long attracted attention. Initially, attempts to determine the substrate of emotional states were made in clinical settings, where the correlation of various kinds of brain damage with behavioral disorders in patients was studied.

It was established that a person’s emotional life was almost never noticeably disturbed if the brain damage concerned the new cerebral cortex – the neocortex (some exceptions to this rule are the frontal lobes of the cortex). And in complete contrast to this, a person’s emotional life is radically disturbed if subcortical formations are involved in the damage, especially the thalamus and hypothalamus. Thus, the concept gradually emerged that a person’s emotional life is determined by the function of subcortical formations (Charcot, Monakow, Bekhterev, et al.). <…>

More recent data have confirmed previous experiments, showing that the hypothalamus is directly related to the formation of emotion, and, in addition, the participation of the amygdalar complex, hippocampus, cingulate gyrus of the cortex, orbital cortex, and other brain regions in this process has been established. Thus, “intermediaries“ were identified between the hypothalamus and the cortex. A special system of neural formations was identified, which was called the “limbic system.“ It includes all those intermediate formations which, being intermediaries between the hypothalamus and the cortex in the formation of emotions, represent a remnant of very ancient neural formations evolutionarily associated with the olfactory system. <…>

The described subcortical formations, consisting of parts of the limbic system and developed on the basis of primary olfactory systems, are interconnected by the closest ties of continuous circulation of excitation. There is reason to believe that this continuous circulation of impulses serves as a kind of drive belt between humoral stimuli, which are contained in the blood and act on the hypothalamus region, and higher cortical functions – Papez (J. W. Papez), 1958; MacLean (P. D. MacLean), 1954. In this sense, the subcortical region can be recognized as a kind of energy reservoir, which, depending on the quality of the emotion that has arisen at a given moment, involves vast areas of the cerebral cortex in activity. <…>

External expression of emotions. The external expressions of emotions have been the best known and well-studied since the time of the first ancient observers. The signs of these expressions are so universally human and observed daily by people that they do not require special description. <…>

To assess the expressions of emotions, one should first list those components that are most characteristic and constant specifically for humans. In the first place, one must put the mimetic expression of emotions, since it clearly reflects the quality of the emotional state, serves as a signal for others, and, consequently, determines the social role of emotional experiences. <…>

Comparing all the presented material, we can conclude that facial expressions – this purely human expression of emotional states – in their main contrasting manifestations (suffering, pleasure) are largely formed already at the stage of embryogenesis. Such are the “starting positions“ on the basis of which, from the moment of birth, human facial expression develops and perfects in its entire range. In the neurophysiological aspect, this means that the primary, prepared connections of the hypothalamus and tectum region with the nucleus of the facial nerve serve as that innate foundation on which numerous additions and changes occur in subsequent stages of life, especially when the inhibitory functions of the cerebral cortex are included.

Another important and constant expression of emotional states are changes in cardiovascular functions. As a rule, emotions, reaching a certain level, include the heart and blood vessels as autonomic components. The path of excitation from the hypothalamus to the peripheral organs undoubtedly goes through the hypothalamic centers for regulating blood pressure levels. It is this peripheral common pathway that is widely used for the autonomic expressions of various emotional states. Here it should be particularly emphasized that the cardiovascular expression is closely dependent on the biological quality of the emotion. While a positive emotion, leading to an increase in blood pressure through increased heart work and vasoconstriction, does not produce large trace reactions and a delay in blood pressure at a high level, negative emotions (fear, anguish, grief) are characterized by the fact that, involving the heart and blood vessels through the same final pathways, they do so at a particularly high degree of excitation and with a large trace tonus. Such a difference is associated with two features of negative emotions: their generalization across the neural substrate and the prolonged retention of metabolic shifts based on humoral factors accompanying negative emotions (adrenaline, noradrenaline). <…>

In the effector expressions of emotion, in addition to the facial muscles and the cardiovascular system, other autonomic and somatic systems also participate. Such, for example, is the respiratory component of the expression of emotions. This component is expressed in an increased rate of chest excursions and deeper breathing. An extremely sensitive and constant component of the expression of emotions is the contraction of the smooth muscles of the stomach and intestines, especially their sphincter formations. <…>

The biological theory of emotions (Anokhin, 1949) is built on the concept of the integral physiological architecture of any adaptive act, which emotional reactions are.

The main sign of a positive emotional state is its reinforcing action, as if sanctioning a useful adaptive effect. Such a reinforcing action manifests itself only in a specific case, namely when the effector act associated with the satisfaction of some need has been accomplished with an absolute useful effect. Only in this latter case is a positive emotion formed and becomes a reinforcing factor. <…>

There is reason to believe that in all emotions, from crude lower emotional states to higher social emotions, the same physiological architecture is used. However, this physiological architecture can only be considered as a general pattern inherent in life phenomena of varying degrees of complexity, but by no means making them identical in their qualitative character, in their content. Similar general patterns are already known from the field of cybernetics. It is this pattern – the pattern of forming an apparatus for evaluating the results of an action before the action itself is performed and its results are obtained – that appears common to various classes of phenomena in living organisms, in self-regulating machines, and in social relationships. It is not surprising, therefore, that it was on the basis of this very pattern and according to this universal architecture that the development of human emotional states also occurred – from primary primitive sensations to the highest forms of satisfaction in specifically human activity.“

Engineer: So, we confirm the tripartite architecture of the human psyche:

1. Area #1 – preparation and realization of human behavior – the emotional sphere;

2. Area #2 – direct acquisition (and storage) of knowledge about the surrounding Genesis and oneself (“egg white“) – the irrational sphere;

3. Area #3 – indirect acquisition (and storage) of knowledge about the surrounding Genesis and oneself (“yolk“) – the rational sphere.

Writer: It seems to fit. The etymology of the word “emotion“ from Latin is: e+motion, e- (or ex-) “out of, from“ + motion (move) “movement.“

Engineer: The deep layers of the psyche (area #3) are rationalized by language. Whether we like it or not, vocabulary is limited. For some it is less limited, for others more, but in any case, it is not irrationally countless. Language structures are based on “subject – predicate – object“ relations. Here “live“ other people, the person themself (their irrational “I“ from area #2), and shared knowledge (co-knowledge / consciousness) about Genesis (external) and oneself (internal). But, I remind you, area #3 (codename – “yolk“) is, as it were, in virtual reality glasses, having no direct contact with external Genesis (irrational, because Genesis is “Everything“). For area #3, the external world consists of areas #2 and #1, with which interaction exists. However, area #3 sees Genesis as if through area #2, often without even realizing its existence.

Consultant: It’s as if we are watching a movie, mentally immersing ourselves in it. And then the movie ends, we turn off the computer and unexpectedly discover dust on the screen…

Engineer: Yes, if area #3 can be called the area of consciousness, then area #2 is the area of the unconscious, subconscious, pre-consciousness, around-consciousness (codename – “egg white“).

Consultant: Paradoxical! It always seemed that consciousness is right here, and the subconscious is somewhere in the dark depths of the psyche. But it turns out, the dark irrational unconscious envelops, stands between the external world and the inner light of consciousness!

Engineer: And area #1 connects these two areas (area #2, area #3) and external Genesis. Area #1 is the area of behavior, choice, and volitional actions, the emotional sphere. By the way, you can consciously hold your breath and “send greetings“ to your area #2. True, it can also “send greetings“ to you in area #3 through a “suddenly“ aching heart… Area #1 is, above all, behavior. Behavior in irrational Genesis, taking into account hereditary experience, personal experience, and knowledge obtained from other people. And, if in consciousness we separate the internal and external (self-awareness and the external world appear), then in each act (cycle) of behavior, both worlds (internal and external) are united and refined.

Kurt Lewin: “The psychological environment must be functionally regarded as part of one integrated field, the life space, the other part of which is the person. This fundamental fact is the leitmotif of the field theory approach. In psychology, it is increasingly recognized in various forms and can be simply expressed by the formula: behavior (B) = function of person (P) and environment (E) = function of life space (LS). <…> In principle, it is generally accepted that behavior (B) is a function of the person (P) and the environment (E): B = F (P, E) – and that P and E in this formula are interdependent variables.“

Consultant: And did you know that Kurt Lewin came to Moscow in 1933 and met with Lev Semyonovich Vygotsky? And it wasn’t just a casual meeting. One hundred years ago (in 1924), the so-called “Vygotsky Circle“ (otherwise: “Vygotsky-Luria Circle“) began to form. The group included psychologists, educators, psychiatrists, physiologists, and neurologists primarily from Moscow, Leningrad, and Kharkov (and, partly, from Central Asia and Georgia). Participants on the periphery of the circle also included film director Sergei Eisenstein and German-American psychologists Kurt Lewin and Kurt Koffka. Besides Kurt Lewin, participants in the “circle“ included his students who had moved to Moscow (Gita Birenbaum, Bluma Zeigarnik). Other well-known participants (besides, of course, Lev Vygotsky and Alexander Luria) can also be mentioned: Nikolai Bernstein, Leonid Zankov, Alexei Leontiev, Daniil Elkonin. At various times, the “circle“ included more than forty scientific, medical, and party-administrative workers, as well as figures in education and culture. The group’s work concerned the theory of social and interpersonal relations, and the practice of empirical scientific research. Thanks to the work of the “circle,“ a new direction in psychology developed – cultural-historical psychology. In the pre-war period, the group members began to synthesize the ideas of Vygotsky-Luria’s “instrumental“ psychology with the theoretical constructs of German-American Gestalt theory.

Writer: A hundred years have passed, and here we are again, going around the same “circle“ :) But hopefully, on the next turn of development. Although, as the Engineer said, Genesis is cyclical… Will it really be useful for us to rewatch Eisenstein’s film “Alexander Nevsky“ every hundred years?

See you again, my friends!

12 Guess the melody

Consultant: A joke. Two friends meet. One says to the other: – My wife won’t let me in when I’m drunk. – Well, do what I do: I get completely undressed in front of the door, ring the bell, and as soon as the door opens, I throw all my clothes into the house. My wife’s conscience won’t let her leave me naked on the street, so she lets me in. A simple sequence of actions. – I’ll try it! Sometime later, they meet again. – I tried it. As soon as the door opened, I threw in all my clothes, including my underwear, and then a strange female voice said: “Caution! The doors are closing, next station – Taganskaya.“

Writer: :)

Consultant: I recall someone promised to talk about Ukhtomsky’s “dominant.“ This was mentioned precisely in the context of discussing the selection and execution of behavioral programs.

Engineer: Absolutely, but first, I want to make another small lyrical digression into the realm of mathematics and computer programming. And so you don’t get bored, I’ll say that this will be directly related to the Gestalt approach! We’ll need to recall the experience cycle and the formula from Kurt Lewin’s field theory: B = F (P, E) – human behavior is a function where the parameters are the interconnected person and the situation they find themselves in.

Writer: Drawing on the joke just told, I would also draw attention to a nuance like the adequacy of behavior. In the same situation, different behaviors can seem more or less adequate. Why do I say “can seem“ and not “can be“ (more or less adequate)? – I remember the previous joke about the bartender and the inspector and that what appears to be the same situation can be perceived differently by different people.

Alexei Ukhtomsky: “In other cases, they try to understand reflection specifically as representation. If ’casting off’ primarily meant the motor expression of physiological reflection, then representation draws attention particularly to reception, and specifically to reception aimed at the adequate reproduction of a given environment for the sake of sufficient correspondence of current activity to current external conditions. <…> A person is inclined to build a philosophy from their behavior. This is to justify their behavior to themselves and to others. Even a hebephrenic will probably try to somehow justify their delusions to you. An autist and a scholastic will justify their behavior based on one or another general premise. The tragedy of man is that he has no portable, convenient, and handy ’criterion of truth’ other than the real testing of his expectations in direct confrontation with concrete reality. <…> Creativity is necessary even for simple perception, if it’s not about simply hiding from a stimulus, but about moving towards it, about actively recognizing it! How would I approach it and recognize it if I didn’t try to assume that it exists! But in this creative process, what emerges is not immediately an exact and adequate snapshot of real objects, but only a certain tentative approximation, which only in further practice, through repetitive corrections, becomes an increasingly adequate reflection of the regularities of the environment. Creativity spontaneously yields a certain synthesis of features and, having it in hand, goes again and again into the reality of the next moment with the question: is it so or not? In repetitive encounters with the newly met environment, the former project and tentative synthesis are refined more and more, approaching a certain adequate reflection of the environment. A frog reflects the environment, and Newton reflects it too. Their organs of perception are almost identical. But the depth of reflection and the degree of foresight turn out to be very different!“

Engineer: The depth of reflection is precisely what creates the architecture of dual reflection of reality in the human psyche. And the deeper regions (the “yolk“ of the psyche, consciousness) act as an additional external environment, not separate from the primary external environment, but as its integral reflection, having passed through the layers of the superficial psyche (the “albumen“ of the psyche, the subconscious) and rationalized through the language of shared knowledge (co-knowledge) with other people of the com-munity (so-ciety).

Alexei Ukhtomsky: “The subconscious perceives more accurate imprints of reality than higher consciousness, and this is because the latter is incomparably more active in carrying out higher tasks; it has no time to deal with particulars and details, it interpolates hastily, supplementing from itself what it did not have time to examine! <…> The images and representations constructed by our consciousness always turn out to be hypothetical completions of pieces of reality through interpolation, hypothetical projects of reality! The hypothetical and conditional nature arises because they are always interpolated by consciousness itself, so that in them there is as much objective reality, independent of me, as there is of my projecting and interpolating activity! The projective character arises because my images and representations always have practical significance – they have in mind this or that activity and impact on reality on my part, this or that interaction with reality. All this holds true, and even more so, for images and representations of a person’s face and an interlocutor! When information and impressions about a human face acquire a certain completeness for me, it means that I have managed to sufficiently interpolate into a coherent image those data, always more or less fragmentary, which have reached me from the given interlocutor in experience. And interpolation here is drawn by me not from any other source, but from myself, from my moral personality! My representation of my interlocutor is a hypothetical project of a human face, composed by me from interpolated data of experience and for the practical need to come into contact with this person, to live with them, to do common work with them. The Gospel advice ’judge not’, i.e., not to condemn the interlocutor, threatening that in doing so you judge and condemn yourself, says: when you interpolate the face of your neighbor and interlocutor in a different direction, finishing his image in a negative way, you thereby predetermine for yourself the possibility of joint work with this person, and on the basis of your own negative traits with which you interpolated your interlocutor! Your interlocutor is to you as you have deserved him! By not finishing his image and not pronouncing final judgment upon him, you open up for yourself the possibility to idealize him, to love him, to project and realize with him a new, better life! One can build and expand life and common work only with someone one loves; one can love only someone one idealizes; and one idealizes only someone in whom one admits the possibility of something better and greater than he seems now; i.e., a progressive, expanding, mutually saving life is possible only with that interlocutor whom you interpolate and project with the best features that you can draw from your own moral resources! <…> ’Love is patient, believes all things, is not arrogant, does not seek its own.’ <…> That is why it, and only it, opens the possibility of common human work in God’s field.“

Engineer: Here, allow me to make an insertion, from mathematics and computer programming. We will talk about:

– 

interpolation;

– 

approximation;

– 

extrapolation.

I don’t know how programmers are taught now, but my diploma (with honors) says: “Awarded the qualification of mathematician-engineer in the specialty ’applied mathematics’.“ So, formally, I graduated from university as a ready-made programmer, but for five years we studied higher mathematics. The faculty was mathematical, the specialty – applied mathematics, the specialization – computing methods. The professors used to say (probably to increase our interest) that rockets fly on “all this mathematics“. One of my term papers was about forming an array of coordinates of points (nodes) around objects of complex shape. In fact, this was necessary to calculate functions on the surface of satellites. The surface itself is complex and continuous, but you can impose a three-dimensional grid on it and select all the grid nodes closest to the satellite’s surface – you get a kind of cover around it, but it already consists of a finite number of points in space, and this array can be fed into a computer and calculated, obtaining results on the surface of the grid-cover, taking it as the surface of the object (the smaller the grid step, the closer the “cover“ is to the object, the more accurate the approximation). But, ultimately, instead of an irrational real object, we take its rational representation to be able to calculate on a computer. The computer (from English: compute) is rational. So, interpolation… There is a discrete (countable) set of points, each defined by two coordinates (X, Y); one needs to construct a function Y = F(X) that will pass through these points, but in such a way that the function gives the correct result (Y) not only for the given set of points but also for any X between them. In fact, the task is to recognize an irrational contour of reality given a finite (rational) number of points on its surface.

Engineer: When we construct an interpolation function, it passes exactly through all points of the given set. If the given set of points is the result of measurements of a physical process, then we can hope that if all points of the given set lie on the curve, then any other points (additional measurements) will also be on it. Thus, we obtain a function inside the computer that reflects a physical process occurring outside the computer (in the physical world). If the physical process is cyclical, and the extreme points of the measurement set corresponded to its beginning and end, then we can reasonably assume that in the next cycle of the process, we will be able to predict its course (since we have constructed its function, a “digital twin“ in terms of behavior). If, however, the given set of measurements does not reflect the full cycle of the physical process, then we can construct an extrapolation function, which will also pass through all points of the set, but will predict the “future“ (the behavior of the process outside the set of measurements).

Consultant: A joke. They decided to shoot two meteorologists because none of their forecasts came true. They were brought to the square. The people expressed full approval. A drumroll. And suddenly, a man from the crowd shouts: – Stop! Don’t shoot them! They can still be useful to people! The judge (in doubt): – You think so? And what do you propose? – I suggest we hang them! At least then they’ll show the direction of the wind…

Writer: :)

Engineer: Nobody said it’s all simple and easy. Much, for example, depends on the quality and quantity of data. For instance, they say that during the coronavirus pandemic, the accuracy of weather forecasts decreased because the number of flights sharply declined, and data is also obtained from airplanes equipped with special instruments that read meteorological characteristics of the atmosphere during flight. High-performance computers are also needed for calculations. The world isn’t built “with a ruler“; interpolation (extrapolation) functions turn out to be complex. There is also a task close to interpolation, which consists in approximating a complex function with another, simpler function. If a certain function is too complex for efficient calculations, one can try to calculate its value at several points, and then build, that is, interpolate, a simpler function based on them. Of course, using a simplified function does not allow obtaining results as accurate as the original function would give. But in some classes of problems, the gain in simplicity and speed of calculations may outweigh the resulting error in the results (the obtained function is not required to pass exactly through the points of the given set, but with a given “quality level,“ the average distance from the curve to a point from the given set is no more than a certain value).

Engineer: During our studies, we wrote recursive (self-calling) approximation programs. There is a set of points. An initial approximating function with a set of weighting coefficients is given. Also, a parameter determining the acceptable quality is initially set (when the function will pass sufficiently close to the points of the set, and when one can stop and say that the desired approximating function has been found and can be used to describe the process whose measurement formed the given set of points). And then the program is called multiple times. The weighting coefficients are stored in memory and change slightly (relative to previous values) on each new call of the program. Multiple calls to the program stop when the selected weighting coefficients satisfy the quality level set at the beginning.

Consultant: This reminds me of how I learn to play the violin. Multiple repetitions to play perfectly!

Writer: Playing perfectly is interpolation (when you have to hit every note). Approximation is more humane :) Right, Engineer?

Engineer: Confirmed. We’re done with mathematics for now. Real life begins! Imagine any situation as a melody that a person must play or sing in unison with. With repeated repetition, the internal approximating function, corresponding to the external real process, becomes more and more accurate in its reflection of reality. And, being remembered (memory is a necessary condition for improving the function with repetition), the situation can be recognized “by the first few notes“, which means a person can predict and build adequate (to the situation) behavior!

Consultant: And there you have the experience cycle:

1. Recognizing the situation (sensation)

2. Choosing the best match for the situation from behavioral experience (awareness)

3. Preparing behavior (mobilizing energy)

4. Launching for execution (action)

5. Behavior in the situation: producing (the melody), contact

6. Assimilation of real knowledge (assimilation of experience)

7. Change of situation (rest) If this is training (playing the violin, an aikido exercise, etc.), then the situation is clear, does not change, and at the stage of assimilating experience (6), one can check the quality of the result and continue repeating stages (4, 5, 6) until complete satisfaction (with the result).

Writer: Or until complete exhaustion (of the organism)! But, if the changed behavior is remembered, then next time one can start from the place (level of performance quality) where one left off.

Consultant: But a person’s real life is not only training but also constantly changing, different situations. One needs to recognize the current most important situation (“guess the melody“), choose the best behavioral program. There will be great competition here: firstly, between recognizing situations (what exactly is happening), and secondly, between behavioral programs (how to act). Besides, two areas of the psyche are also competing with each other… Isn’t that right, Engineer?

Engineer: I remember your request to unravel the tangle of the psyche by the thread of behavior. So let’s move on to the “dominant“ – the program that has, in fact, won the internal competition, seizing the levers of control over human behavior, and which objectively realizes their contact with the external environment.

Alexei Ukhtomsky: “The dominant focus of excitation, which largely predetermines the character of the centers’ current reactions at a given moment, I began to designate with the term ’dominant.’ In doing so, I proceeded from the conviction that the ability to form a dominant is not an exclusive property of the cerebral cortex, but a general property of the centers; so that one can speak of the principle of the dominant as a general modus operandi (way of acting) of the central nervous system. <…> What surfaces in our consciousness from what lies deeper than consciousness already proves to be a complex and diverse synthesis at the very threshold. Who, then, is the creator of these syntheses in our organization? The work of the dominant here is perfectly clear. Every integral image we possess is a sufficient product of a dominant we have experienced. It has been molded by the aggregate of impressions associated with a specific dominant, which has had its history within us. From these residual products, the former dominant can be restored to a greater or lesser degree of completeness. When a former dominant is restored through its cortical components, it can be experienced economically as a fleeting ’recollection’ with negligible inertia. And then, without change, as a constant and unambiguous integral image, it will again hide in the storerooms of memory. But it can also be restored and experienced anew with almost its former fullness, with the revitalization of work in the entire somatic constellation. Then it once again occupies the work of the centers with its inertia for a long time, again selects biologically interesting stimuli for it from the new environment, and enriches the brain with new data. After such a vivid experiencing of the dominant, the corresponding image is again perceived as reworked and goes into the storerooms of memory more or less deeply reintegrated. <…> The old dominant is renewed either to cope with new data using old experience or to reintegrate old experience based on new data. <…> Our knowledge of the chronotope is always a tentative project of the forthcoming concrete reality based on preliminary signs. The truth or falsity of the project is decided by concrete verification. If the preliminary signs are assessed incorrectly, if their prediction is incorrectly foreseen – so much the worse for us. <…> Once again, returning to the principle of least action in human behavior, one can so often hear and feel a bitter reproach: well, the road is open before him, all achievements are before him, why doesn’t he go, why does he shy away and what else is he waiting for? From the point of view of the nearest and contact receptors, indeed, what is there to wait for when the path of least resistance is before you, when everything is given into your hands? But then the higher levels, these most far-sighted in space and time (in the chronotope) echelons, warn: it is very possible that this path of least resistance will lead to very great misfortunes for the one who is dearest to you; they stop, inhibit, perhaps enter into a very difficult struggle, into conflict with the lower centers and, obviously, deflect behavior far from the path of least action. What I have just told you, what I have drawn on my diagram – this is, after all, a commonplace in the work of the central nervous system. And so the higher echelons, these most far-sighted organs that best orient us in the chronotope, foresee the upcoming reality long in advance; in great people, they can foresee events in history hundreds of years ahead, for the chronotope of a genius is extremely vast, and it is precisely brilliant figures who, in their individual behavior for themselves, most often follow the path of greatest resistance, in order, however, to achieve the intended object in the best way and to open this achievement to others with the least expenditure of effort. The nervous system by no means begins with the least action as a given gift; it arrives at it as an achievement, in the end. Least action, when given from the beginning, leads only to reduction and decline; and when it is achieved in the end, it is only so that a new current activity, a new task, a new struggle with resistances may begin. The whole point is how powerful the dominant that governs behavior is, how much it prevails over the negative tendency towards rest, towards self-satisfaction, towards the pillow. From a general biological point of view, we understand that dominants, with their expansion, also led to exercise, to the enrichment of the organism with new possibilities; they also lie at the basis of the formation of new reflexes. <…> The dominant is the prevailing orientation of the subject’s reflex behavior in their immediate environment. In the order of self-observation, we can notice, each in ourselves, that when this prevailing orientation exists, a purely animalistic sensitivity and observability in one direction is sharpened, and a kind of imperviousness to other sides of the same environment. In this sense, the dominant is not only a physiological prerequisite for behavior but also a physiological prerequisite for observation. <…> The physiological-reflexive understanding of spiritual activity, particularly of thinking, leads to the understanding that every thought, including the most abstract, is a more or less real project of reality. By constructing a thought, I construct reality – I express what it must necessarily be. <…> I think and act reflexively because concrete reality exists before me, and I transform it into another, equally concrete reality. In my thinking, even in the most abstract (such as scientific, for example, mathematical!), I always construct projects of reality. I project a concrete being, constructed according to my impulses! <…> Emotional excitement emphasizes and strengthens the excitation (perception or action) in connection with which it arises. It helps perception or habit to become fixed in the psyche and to take the place of an independent agent in memory. An impression that is not connected with an emotional tone in the psyche is doomed to a more or less rapid effacement from mental life! <…> It is remarkable that several dominants – traces of its former life activity – can live simultaneously in the psyche! They alternately emerge from the depths of the subconscious into the field of mental work and clear attention, live here and summarize their results for some time, and then submerge again somewhere into the depths, yielding place to their companion. But when submerging into the depths, out of the field of all conscious work, they do not die out, do not cease their life. It is remarkable that they continue to grow there too, continue to be enriched, transformed, so that, returning later to consciousness, they turn out to be more substantial, mature, more substantiated. <…> The blind force of synthesis, presupposed by Kant at the basis of rational activity, is concretely expressed in the renewal and change of ever new individual syntheses in human consciousness. These are pre-logical, “de facto“ products of consciousness and subconscious organization. Giftedness is a greater or lesser abundance of syntheses, other conditions being equal. At the same time, it is a greater or lesser wealth of dominants and the speed of their change in the organization. <…> To observe means, in the end, to measure and to connect quantities with each other. Any series of objects and sequence of events that we are capable of observing thereby reveals the principal possibility of measuring it and expressing it in an equation – it is a matter of technical means of measurement and convenient methods of calculation. And any continuous flow of events can be represented as a trajectory in the chronotope (i.e., in a regular connection of spatio-temporal coordinates) or as a “world-line“. And the trajectory of an electron in an atom, and the trajectory of the Earth in relation to the constellation Hercules, and the trajectory of a protein molecule in a sulfuric acid medium until its transformation into coal, and the trajectory of a human through the events of their life until transformation into gases and solutions – these are all world-lines that science has yet to determine! And to determine scientifically means no more and no less than to be able to predict, i.e., to find connections between constituent quantities, express them in equations, and from the equation know the course of further “point-events“ at the meeting places of the given world-line with other similar ones. So, it all depends on the observer, their position in relation to the observed events, their means of observation and calculation! <…> A person always approaches the world and people through the medium of their dominants, their activity. The old idea that we passively imprint reality upon ourselves, as it is, does not correspond to reality at all. Our dominants, our behavior stand between us and the world, between our thoughts and reality. The dominant abstraction I spoke of yesterday inevitably arises. Whole inexhaustible areas of beautiful or terrible reality of a given moment are not taken into account by us if our dominants are not directed towards them or are directed in another direction. And here, obviously, every minute in our life, the following critical circumstance arises: we make decisions and act on the basis of how we represent the actual state of affairs, but the actual state of affairs is represented by us in direct dependence on how we act! Obviously – a typical and constant feature of our nature is that we justify our actions by the fact that they correspond to the real situation; but, for an action to be able to occur at all, we inevitably abstract from integral reality, refract it through our dominants. We can only perceive that and those for which our dominants, i.e., our behavior, are prepared. Priceless things and priceless areas of real being pass by our ears and our eyes if ears are not prepared to hear, and eyes are not prepared to see, i.e., if our activity and behavior are currently directed elsewhere. <…> My main interest has long been how human experience is constructed, i.e., how it happens that from approximately the same data of the external world, Dmitri Karamazov constructs a completely different worldview than his father Fyodor, than Elder Zosima, than Marmeladov, or than his brothers – Ivan and Alexei. The fact is that one’s worldview is predetermined by the direction of a person’s internal activity, by their dominants! Everyone sees in the world and in people what they sought and deserved. And to everyone, the world and people turn as they have deserved. This, one might say, is the “law of the deserved interlocutor.““

Writer: We, my friends, have undoubtedly deserved each other as interlocutors. Shall we continue next time?

See you again, my friends!

13 The Science of the Soul

Engineer: And so, our research, an anthropological initiative within the framework of psychology, the science of the soul, is coming to an end. In fact, we relied on a synthesis of three areas of human research:

1. Russian thinkers from philosophy, physiology, psychology, and pedagogy;

2. The Gestalt approach in organizational development;

3. Information technologies and cybernetic systems.

Consultant: Well, look at you – an “engineer of human souls“!

Engineer: You’re laughing, but you know, for a short while recently, I truly felt “chosen“! Looking back at the key events of the last forty years, I noticed that none of them were in vain, and they all fit into a logical chain. Every event wasn’t just random; each had a “secret“ meaning and benefit that I only understood now, as we were discussing and writing this book. But then came a second-order reflection, and I realized, I won’t hide it – with slight disappointment – that anyone who pays attention to their personal life experience (a storehouse of development that is always with you) can become such a “chosen one“. But you need an interlocutor, another person. You need dialogue. And, perhaps most importantly, you need to feel the importance, to understand the meaning of why you are doing this.

Writer: And why did you get into theory, into science? You seem to be an engineer, more of a practitioner by definition. What does your “unique“ personal life experience tell you about this? :)

Engineer: You too, huh? Actually, any practice, when it needs to be passed from person to person, turns into theory. Once, our functional analysis teacher, Tamara Vasilievna Andreeva, upon learning that I was going to become a programmer after university, remarked with regret – “It’s a pity you’re not going into science“. So that means: there was potential!

And here’s another story from my student days. Our professor, Vladislav Stepanovich Malakhovsky, periodically invited his German colleague – Professor Rudolf Fritsch from the University of Munich – to visit. And so, one day this professor from Germany gave us a lecture on affine planes (don’t ask me what that is, I don’t remember anymore). So, he was explaining the theory to us and showing examples of affine planes of the first, second, and third order. And at the end of the first day’s lecture, he gave us, first-year students of the mathematics faculty, homework – to try and independently find and depict an affine plane of the fourth order.

I thought all day, evening, and half the night. My brain was boiling like a kettle on a stove. I paced the room from corner to corner. I drew and crossed out. Crossed out and drew again. In the end, “something“ emerged. I double-checked several times – it seemed to be it! I drew a clean copy, went to bed (but I don’t remember if I managed to fall asleep that night). In the morning, in an agitated state, I took the drawing to the university and, with trembling hands, handed my result to the professor for his stern judgment… Do you know what he said? He said that I had indeed drawn an affine plane of the fourth order, but… but not like his!

Engineer: Mom recently found this drawing in an album with Professor Fritsch’s autograph.

And then I became a programmer… But fate decreed that I would get involved in technical re-equipment in industrial automation and the development of human-machine interfaces, as well as industrial cybersecurity. And this is cybernetics, this is Norbert Wiener. By the way, when Norbert Wiener visited the USSR, he met with both Pyotr Kuzmich Anokhin and Nikolai Alexandrovich Bernstein, who both developed concepts of feedback before their foreign colleagues. Reading Anokhin, I stumbled upon Alexei Alexeyevich Ukhtomsky (a physiologist, a prince from the Rurik dynasty) and fell in love with him, as if with a kindred spirit. Reading Alexei Alexeyevich Ukhtomsky is like talking to him…

Then came management, organizational development. After them, the Gestalt approach and meeting Konstantin Vitalievich Pavlov and Sean Gaffney. The Gestalt approach in organizational development led to reading new authors, among them – Edwin Nevis, Kurt Lewin, and Lev Semyonovich Vygotsky. The latter two explored psychology as a science, referencing each other, among other things. Both built a philosophy and method of human research. They were practitioners but paid great attention to theory. This is very close to me. I hope I’ve answered your question.

Kurt Lewin: “…there is nothing more practical than a good theory. <…> In recent years, a very noticeable change has occurred in the position of American psychology. During the 20s and early 30s, psychologists were generally rather hostile to theory. Guided by a naive metaphysical conviction, they were inclined to consider “fact-gathering“ the sole task of “scientific psychology“ and were extremely skeptical of the idea of psychological laws in the field of needs, will, and emotions, that is, in any areas other than perception and memory. Today, there is a certain interest in psychological theory, partly thanks to the efforts of some psychologists (in particular, Tolman and Hull in animal psychology). The need for a closer fusion of different areas of psychology requires tools that allow for better integration. The practical tasks of mental hygiene and education require a conceptual toolkit that allows for predictions. Neither of these requirements can be met without theory. <…> As psychologists, we are interested in obtaining new knowledge about psychological processes and gaining a deeper insight into them. This is and always has been the guiding principle. Theory, mathematization, and formalization are tools for this purpose. <…> Psychology cannot try to explain everything with a single construct, such as association, instinct, or gestalt. A number of constructs must be used. However, they must be interconnected in a logically precise way.“

Arthur Roberts: “These reflections arose from an attempt to broaden our theoretical attention and direct it outward, into a wider field. The dialectical evolution of psychotherapy to the present time seems clear: we oscillate between theories and methods that focus on the depths of the psyche (psychoanalysis), theories and methods concerned with the surface of behavior (behaviorism), and theories and methods that are related to the heights of experience (humanism). This tripartite division of psychology provides rich ideas for impartial psychologists of all persuasions who are independent enough to adopt from each other what is necessary; each mark on the ordinate axis (depth-surface-height) creates, in its own way, valuable and true ideas and tools. But in doing so, we have failed to see anything beyond one linear longitudinal dimension. The basic metaphor (depth-surface-height) still retains its monolithic influence. We have not gone beyond its limits and in conceptualization have remained chained to a psychology reduced to a single polar axis (it is interesting to note that each mark on the axis views the height of other degrees in a derogatory light: behaviorists disapprove of the barren fantasies of “depth“ psychology; psychoanalysts harbor contempt for the adaptive practical goals of “surface“ psychology; both consider the unfounded optimism of classical humanism naive). The depth-surface-height metaphors are firmly entrenched and so surprisingly insurmountable that they overshadow other possibilities for understanding behavior and experience. At the same time, many thinkers (among them Goodman and Perls) have helped us look beyond a psychology limited to a single axis; now we need to contribute to the development of this movement. By understanding behavior and experience from a field perspective, we can expand psychology to new dimensions. We can begin to rise from the exclusive depths of psychology to its all-encompassing breadth – a psychology that looks outward, inward, upward, downward, right, and left, and exists with us in time. By moving in these directions, we can more flexibly transition from understanding the individual in themselves to understanding them as an indivisible part of the larger world.“

Lev Vygotsky: “It is from such a methodological crisis, from the recognized need of individual disciplines for guidance, from the necessity – at a certain stage of knowledge – to critically reconcile disparate data, to systematize scattered laws, to comprehend and verify results, to refine methods and basic concepts, to lay fundamental principles, in short, to connect the beginnings and ends of knowledge – it is from all this that a general science is born. <…>

But the fundamental concept, so to speak, the primary abstraction underlying science, not only determines the content but also predetermines the nature of the unity of individual disciplines, and through this – the method of explaining facts, the main explanatory principle of science. We see that general science, like the tendency of individual disciplines to transform into a general science and extend their influence to neighboring branches of knowledge, arises from the need to unify diverse branches of knowledge. When similar disciplines accumulate a sufficiently large amount of material in relatively distant areas, the need arises to bring all the diverse material into unity, to establish and define the relationship between individual areas and between each area and the whole of scientific knowledge. How to connect the material of pathology, zoopsychology, social psychology? We have seen that the substrate of unity is primarily the primary abstraction. But the unification of heterogeneous material is not done summarily, not through the conjunction “and“, as Gestalt psychologists say, not by simply joining or adding parts so that each part maintains its balance and independence while becoming part of a new whole. Unity is achieved through subordination, dominance, through the renunciation of sovereignty by individual disciplines in favor of one general science. Within the new whole, there is not a coexistence of individual disciplines, but their hierarchical system, having main and secondary centers, like the Solar System. Thus, this unity determines the role, meaning, and significance of each individual area, i.e., it determines not only the content but also the method of explanation, the most important generalization, which in the development of science will eventually become the explanatory principle. <…>

And so we must accept this name. It perfectly emphasizes what we want – the scope and content of our task. And it is not about creating a school alongside other schools; it does not cover any part or aspect, or problem, or method of interpreting psychology, along with other similar parts, schools, etc. We are talking about all of psychology, in its entirety; about the only psychology that does not admit any other; we are talking about the implementation of psychology as a science. Therefore, let us simply say: psychology. We will better clarify other trends and schools with epithets and separate the scientific from the unscientific in them, psychology from empiricism, from theology, from eidos, and from everything else that has clung to our science over the centuries of its existence, like barnacles on the hull of a long-voyage ship. We will need epithets for something else: for the systematic, consistently logical, methodological division of disciplines within psychology: thus, we will speak of general and child, zoo- and pathopsychology, differential and comparative psychology. Psychology, however, will be the common name for a whole family of sciences. After all, our task is not at all to separate our work from the general psychological work of the past, but to unite our work with all the scientific development of psychology into a single whole on some new basis.“

Alexei Ukhtomsky: “And so I think that the science of the most complex of world events, of human behavior, i.e., a science that sets out to unequivocally determine the life trajectory of each of us, cannot be freed from sociologisms, I deliberately emphasize ’sociologisms’, not ’psychologisms’, for psychologisms are transient, just like psychological theories themselves, whereas sociologisms will remain, no matter how sociological theories change, since each of us in the most real, most material way is merely an element and participant of a community. For we are all born from a community, we give birth within a community, and while we are on the crest of life’s wave, it is only because we were carried onto it by the great sea of community in its historical current. <…> There is a multitude of life that requires explanation. Those who explain are few. Only these few individuals in history – geniuses – help us to explain life. Obviously, one cannot demand that a genius be exclusively engaged in explaining my life, your life, each of us individually. That would require a genius for each of us. Therefore, these geniuses of history and the ’knowledge,’ ’science’ they created fatally explain life only ’in general terms.’ For us, for each of us in particular, the task remains to make use of these ’general’ explanations for ourselves. But the treasury which – we feel – we must serve, the treasury of general knowledge that we carry for future people – this ’science’ of ours – this gradual ’explanation of life in general terms’ – this is our goal, our best human task, however little, perhaps, we ourselves can contribute to it. <…>

Now <…> how do my ideas about the dominant fit with what has just been said about the chronotope in the understanding of Minkowski, Einstein, and others. It seems to me that the instincts of my thinking are absolutely the same! For I am, by nature, primarily a realist and a dynamist, like them. This is what I wrote down for myself in one of the most difficult moments of my life on May 31, 1927. ’The idea of the chronotope is that an event is not created, not determined by factors that have just arrived – the latter come only to realize and reveal what has accumulated and been determined in the past. Now, only what was and what was formed is being summed up. It is strange and offensive for a person to think that it is not he who is now deciding what to do; but, looking closely at the course of events, he begins to understand more and more that what is being decided now was in reality predetermined long ago! Nothing from the past passes without a trace. Everything is taken into account now. What was hidden inside is revealed in action. The time has come for the reed of utterance to be dipped and to sign the charter that was written long ago: that which you have come for – do it quickly. Predetermined by past events, but requiring maturation and external conditions to now open up in action and be revealed to all – this is the chronotope in being and the dominant in us.’ It seems to me that this record makes the organic and fundamental identity of the physical concept of the chronotope with my concept of the dominant quite clear. In nerve elements, the dependence of each moment in time on the preceding ones – historicity, the connection of the present with the preceding – is even more emphasized than is visible in the field of electromagnetic phenomena! The past in us influences the subsequent even after decades! And a secret thought once admitted, seemingly forgotten and gone, can manifest itself as an urgent and decisive factor many years later at a critical moment. Nothing in us passes without a trace! Hence the conclusion that we must carefully and vigilantly work on ourselves, constantly discipline ourselves and our thoughts, keep ourselves under control at all times. Experts on human nature, like Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, knew this well. What beautiful depictions in this direction are found in their works! <…>

To establish a ’law’ to which facts indeed submit, means to grasp something constant in things, something that does not change with time; in its ultimate concept, a law is essentially something independent of time, something timeless! Such are the laws of geometry, as the artistic gaze of the ancient Greeks managed to discern them in the diversity of things. Such are the laws of mechanics, as Galileo’s contemplation captured them. Such, in principle, are all the laws that have been sought since then by physicists, chemists, biologists. <…> From the facts known so far, synthesizing thought constructs a project of reality. Whether it is good, the future will tell: the future will lead to a collision with facts not yet studied and subject to consideration. But if the project is formed in one way or another, it means that there were sufficient grounds for it, the dominant and the attitude behind it had data for themselves. And by building a project (an integral image of reality), human conquered, fighting for the implementation of this project, i.e., built the future. Through human, being builds its future, for human is given not only to build projects based on the past, but also to fight for their introduction into the future.“

Writer: See you again, my friends!

14 After Development

Nikolai Danilevsky: “As for the main objection—that truth is one and that, consequently, science is also one—it is based on a pure misunderstanding. What is truth? The simplest, and at the same time the most precise definition of it that can be made, it seems to me, would be: truth is the knowledge of the existing—precisely as it exists. This concept, therefore, contains two elements: an external element—not truth, but reality, which, of course, is independent not only of the national, but also generally of the human; and an internal element—the reflection of this reality in our consciousness. If this reflection is perfectly accurate and perfectly complete, i.e., if not a single feature, not a single shade of reality has been lost, not a single feature distorted, not a single feature added, then such perfect truth, of course, will also bear no stamp of nationality or personality. But such a reflection of reality in human consciousness is impossible, or, at least, in most cases impossible; just as it is impossible to have such an image of an object in a mirror to which some qualities, characteristic not of the reflected object but of the reflecting mirror, would not be added. Therefore, all (or almost all) of our truths are either one-sided, or contain a greater or lesser admixture of falsehood—or both together. If this were not so, then the concepts of all people about what is well known to them would have to be identical. But they are different—and in two respects. Firstly, different categories of truth interest different people to varying degrees, so that each remains more or less indifferent to certain branches of knowledge (categories of truths), while cherishing the liveliest sympathy for other branches; secondly, scientists engaged in the same branches of knowledge nevertheless form completely different views on such subjects, which should be equally known to them. <…>

To find this common course of internal development for all sciences, let us take a science with as homogeneous a composition as possible; for, with heterogeneity, some parts of the science may advance far ahead, while others lag significantly behind, which confuses and complicates the general course of development. In addition to this, for our research, we need a science that has already reached a significant degree of perfection, i.e., has passed through a significant number of phases of development. Astronomy combines all these desired conditions.

Both the very subject of astronomy and the course of its development are so simple that there could be no doubt as to which moments of its development to take as turning points, starting from which it entered a new period of its improvement. These points are marked by four great names: the Greek Hipparchus, the Slav, Pole Copernicus, the German Kepler, and the Englishman Newton.

Before Hipparchus, the entire activity of astronomers consisted in collecting facts, materials for the future scientific edifice. Even if at this time some laws were known by which celestial phenomena, such as eclipses and the like, could be predicted in advance, these, properly speaking, were not laws in the true sense of the word, but, so to speak, recipes or formulas, exactly like those often used in various factory productions. These recipes prescribe taking so much of this, mixing, letting it boil for three hours, and so on—without deriving these rules from the essence of the process, but drawing them solely from long-term, unthinking experience and observation. This, therefore, will be the period of material collection.

But a mass of facts accumulates, and it becomes impossible to survey it. Then there arises an essential need to bring them into some mutual connection, to bring them into a system. In doing so, some principle is chosen that is conspicuous or for some reason particularly convenient. It is highly improbable that this chosen principle for systematization will immediately correspond to the very nature of the facts being ordered, encompassing all the data they represent. Therefore, it is more than probable that the first attempt at systematization will give us only an artificial system. This is what happened with astronomy. Hipparchus’s system was an artificial system. It did not express the essence of the phenomena, did not correspond to them, but represented only an auxiliary means for the mind and memory, so that the latter could navigate, orient themselves in the mass of particulars. At the same time, it provided some satisfaction to the inquiring mind, presenting to it a multitude of complex phenomena in a harmonious connection. Any system, even an artificial one, offers the invaluable benefit of allowing every new fact to be inserted into its proper place. It does not remain isolated but, upon entering the system, must harmonize with it. If it truly harmonizes, it thereby confirms it; if it does not harmonize, it indicates the necessity of improving the system. Even those facts that were known to the Alexandrian scholars poorly harmonized with the system of Earth’s centrality. To subordinate them to this system, complication was required. They invented epicycles, i.e., circles described by planets around imaginary centers. These centers move in a circle around the Earth, while the planets move around these imaginary centers, and then around the Earth. With increasing accuracy of observations, they piled epicycles upon epicycles. The Hipparchian period should, therefore, be called the period of the artificial system.

This extreme complexity led the clear Slavic mind of Copernicus to doubt, and he replaced Hipparchus’s, or (as it was commonly called) Ptolemy’s, artificial system with his own natural system, in which every celestial body was assigned precisely that place in science which it occupies in reality. Consequently, this great man introduced astronomy into the phase, or period, of the natural system.

Placing the facts of science in their true relationship makes it possible to find the dependence in which they exist among themselves. Therefore, with the adoption of Copernicus’s system, it became possible to calculate the distance of planets from one another and the various distances of the same planet from the central body at different points in its path. These distances turned out to be not accidental, but connected both among themselves and with the speed of revolution by certain simple relations, which received the name Kepler’s laws, after their great discoverer. But these laws themselves remained disunited, as if accidental, not stemming from a single, common, clear, and comprehensible principle. Therefore, such laws, which only link certain phenomena together but do not explain them, are called particular empirical laws. Consequently, we can call the Keplerian period of astronomical development the period of particular empirical laws.

Finally, Newton discovers that general principle which not only encompasses all particular laws (so that they derive from it as particular conclusions), but, being itself comprehensible to the mind, also gives them an explanation. Indeed, in Newton’s law, only the very essence of attraction is incomprehensible. But it is clear in itself that it must be stronger by as much as the number (or mass) of attracting particles is greater, and that it must weaken with the distance of the attracting body, like the squares of the numbers expressing this distance; for the force emanating from a body dissipates uniformly in all directions and, consequently, is distributed, as it were, over the surfaces of spheres with different diameters, and these surfaces increase as the squares of their diameters. Therefore, the Newtonian period of astronomy must be called the period of the general rational law.

It completes science. There is nowhere further to go. Of course, one can still expand, enrich science with new discoveries of facts (new planets, comets, etc.), improve methods of calculation, extend the fundamental law to the smallest details, expand its domain to other systems, and so on. But no revolution in a science that has reached this degree of perfection is any longer possible or necessary. The only step forward in a philosophical sense that is still possible would consist in such a generalization of the general rational law which, in turn, would link it to the general rational law prevailing in another category of phenomena, in the field of another independent science.

Thus, the universally recognized division of the history of astronomy by periods of its internal development has led to the distinction of five stages, or phases (collection of materials, artificial system, natural system, particular empirical laws, general rational law), which for brevity can be called the pre-Hipparchian, Hipparchian, Copernican, Keplerian, and Newtonian periods. It turns out that these stages of development are not accidental, but are required by the most natural course of scientific development, i.e., they are necessary, and therefore, we must expect them to be repeated in every other science.“

Engineer: Further, Nikolai Yakovlevich Danilevsky, in his book “Russia and Europe,“ considers chemistry as an example and notes that as a science, it has passed through all the same phases of its development, except the last: “<…> and therefore it must be recognized that chemistry has not yet emerged from the Keplerian period of development—the period of particular empirical laws.“ But! The book was published in 1869 (and, therefore, written earlier). In this same year, 1869, Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleev presented his periodic system of chemical elements (Mendeleev’s table), which can be seen as a step in development towards the final phase of the general rational law!

Writer: The described phased development of any science spans many generations of people, countries, and civilizations. But if we look at the development of any maturing child—doesn’t he (she) go through the same stages in their cognitive development?

Lev Vygotsky: “The first stage in concept formation, most often manifested in the behavior of a young child, is the formation of an unformed and unordered set, the singling out of a ’heap’ of some objects when faced with a task that we, adults, usually solve by forming a new concept. This heap of objects, singled out by the child, united without sufficient internal basis, without sufficient internal kinship and relationship between its constituent parts, presupposes a diffuse, undirected extension of the word’s meaning or its substituting sign to a series of externally connected elements in the child’s impression, but internally ununited.

The meaning of a word at this stage of development is an incompletely defined, unformed syncretic linkage of individual objects, somehow connected with each other in the child’s representation and perception into a single fused image. In the formation of this image, the decisive role is played by the syncretism of the child’s perception or action, therefore this image is extremely unstable.

As is known, the child, in perception, thought, and action, exhibits this tendency to connect, on the basis of a single impression, the most diverse elements lacking internal connection, bringing them into an undifferentiated, fused image; Claparède called this tendency the syncretism of child perception, Blonsky—the disconnected coherence of child thinking. We have described the same phenomenon elsewhere as the child’s tendency to substitute a lack of objective connections with an overabundance of subjective connections and to take the connection of impressions and thoughts for the connection of things. This overproduction of subjective connections, of course, has enormous significance as a factor in the further development of child thinking, as it is the basis for the further process of selecting connections that correspond to reality and are verified by practice. The meaning of a word for a child at this stage of concept development may, in external appearance, indeed resemble the meaning of a word for an adult.

With the help of words that have meaning, the child establishes communication with adults; in this abundance of syncretic connections, in these unordered syncretic heaps of objects formed with the help of words, objective connections are also reflected to a significant extent, insofar as they coincide with the connection of the child’s impressions and perceptions. Therefore, in some part, the meanings of children’s words may in many cases, especially when they refer to concrete objects of the child’s surrounding reality, coincide with the meanings of the same words established in adult speech.

The child thus often meets the adult in the meanings of their words, or, more correctly, the meaning of the same word for a child and an adult often intersects on the same concrete object, and this is sufficient for mutual understanding between adults and children. However, the psychological path by which adult and child thinking arrive at the point of intersection is completely different, and even where the meaning of a child’s word partially coincides with the meaning of adult speech, it psychologically stems from completely different, peculiar operations; it is the product of that syncretic fusion of images that lies behind the child’s word. <…>

The second major stage in the development of concepts encompasses many diverse types—functionally, structurally, and genetically—of what is essentially the same mode of thinking. This mode of thinking, like all others, leads to the formation of connections, to the establishment of relationships between various concrete impressions, to the unification and generalization of individual objects, to the ordering and systematization of the child’s entire experience.

But the method of uniting various concrete objects into general groups, the nature of the connections established thereby, the structure of the unities arising on the basis of such thinking, characterized by the relationship of each individual object within the group to the group as a whole—all this differs profoundly in its type and mode of activity from thinking in concepts, which develops only during puberty.

We could not better designate the peculiarity of this mode of thinking than by calling it thinking in complexes. This means that the generalizations created by this mode of thinking are, in their structure, complexes of individual concrete objects, or things, united no longer solely on the basis of subjective connections established in the child’s impression, but on the basis of objective connections that actually exist between these objects.

Our research outlines for this stage of development the following five main forms of the complex system, which underlie the generalizations arising in the child’s thinking at this stage of development.

The first type of complex we call associative, because it is based on any associative link with any of the features noticed by the child in the object that serves as the nucleus of the future complex in the experiment. The child can build an entire complex around this nucleus, including the most diverse objects: some on the basis of having the same color as the given object, others—form, still others—size, and yet others—some other distinctive feature that catches the child’s eye. Any concrete relationship discovered by the child, any associative link between the nucleus and an element of the complex proves to be a sufficient reason for assigning the object to the group selected by the child and for designating it with a common ’family’ name.

These elements may not be united among themselves at all. The sole principle of their generalization is their factual kinship with the core nucleus of the complex. Moreover, the connection uniting them with the latter can be any associative connection. One element may be related to the nucleus of the future complex by color, another—by form, etc. If we take into account that this connection can be very different not only in terms of the feature underlying it, but also in the nature of the relationship itself between two objects, it will become clear to us to what extent the succession of concrete features, revealed each time behind complex thinking, is variegated, unordered, poorly systematized, not brought to unity, although based on objective connections. At the basis of this multitude may lie not only the direct identity of features, but also their similarity or contrast, their associative connection by contiguity, etc., but always and invariably a concrete connection.

For a child at this phase of development, words cease to be designations of individual objects, proper names. They have become ’family names’ for him. To name a word for a child at this stage means to indicate the ’family name’ of things, related to each other along the most diverse lines of kinship. To call a given object by its appropriate name means for the child to assign it to one or another concrete complex with which it is connected. To name an object for a child at this stage means to name its ’family name.’

The second phase in the development of complex thinking is formed by the unification of objects and concrete impressions of things into special groups, which in their structure most closely resemble what are usually called collections. Here, various concrete objects are united on the basis of mutual complementation according to some single feature and form a single whole, consisting of heterogeneous, mutually complementing parts. It is precisely the heterogeneity of composition, mutual complementation, and unification on the basis of a collection that characterize this stage in the development of thinking. <…>

Following this second phase in the development of the child’s complex thinking, according to the logic of experimental analysis, one should place the chain complex, which is also an inevitable stage in the child’s process of ascending to the mastery of concepts.

The chain complex is built on the principle of dynamic, temporary unification of individual links into a single chain and the transfer of meaning through individual links of this chain. Under experimental conditions, this type of complex is usually represented as follows: the child selects one or more objects associatively linked in some specific respect to a given sample; then the child continues further selection of concrete objects into a single complex, now guided by some other secondary feature of a previously selected object, a feature that is not present in the sample at all. <…>

An essential feature distinguishing this fourth type of complex is that the very feature, associatively uniting individual concrete elements and complexes, as it were, diffuses, becomes indefinite, spread out, vague, resulting in a complex that unites visually concrete groups of images or objects by means of diffuse, indefinite connections. A child, for example, to a given sample—a yellow triangle—selects not only triangles but also trapezoids, as they remind him of triangles with the top cut off. Then, squares adjoin trapezoids, hexagons adjoin squares, semicircles adjoin hexagons, and then circles. Just as form, taken as the basic feature, spreads out and becomes indefinite here, so too colors sometimes merge when a diffuse feature of color is laid at the Babsis of the complex. The child selects green objects after yellow ones, blue ones after green, and black ones after blue.

This form of complex thinking, also extremely stable and important in the natural conditions of child development, is of interest for experimental analysis because it reveals with visual clarity another extremely essential feature of complex thinking, namely: the indefiniteness of its outlines and its fundamental boundlessness. <…>

Here the child enters a world of diffuse generalizations, where features slide and fluctuate, imperceptibly transitioning one into another. There are no firm outlines here. Boundless complexes dominate here, often striking in the universality of the connections they unite.

Meanwhile, it is only necessary to analyze such a complex carefully enough to be convinced: the principle of its construction is the same as the principle of constructing limited concrete complexes. Here, as there, the child does not go beyond the limits of visually-imagistic, concrete, factual connections between individual objects. The only difference is that, insofar as the complex unites things that are outside the child’s practical cognition, these connections rest on incorrect, indefinite, shifting features. <…>

To complete the entire picture of the development of complex thinking, we must dwell on one last form, which is of enormous importance both in the experimental and in the real-life thinking of the child. This form casts light backward and forward, as, on the one hand, it illuminates all the stages of complex thinking already passed by the child, and on the other, it serves as a transitional bridge to a new and higher stage—to the formation of concepts. We call this type of complex a pseudoconcept on the grounds that the generalization arising in the child’s thinking resembles, in its external appearance, the concepts used by an adult in their intellectual activity, but which at the same time, in its essence, in its psychological nature, is something completely different from a concept in the proper sense of the word.

If we carefully investigate this last stage in the development of complex thinking, we will see that we are dealing with a complex unification of a number of concrete objects, which phenotypically, i.e., in its external appearance, in the totality of its external features, completely coincides with a concept, but in its genetic nature, in the conditions of its origin and development, in the causal-dynamic connections underlying it, is by no means a concept. Externally, we have a concept; internally, a complex. We therefore call it a pseudoconcept. <…>

A concept arises when a series of abstracted features is newly synthesized and when the abstract synthesis thus obtained becomes the basic form of thinking, by means of which the child comprehends and makes sense of the reality surrounding him. Moreover, as we have already said above, experiment shows that the decisive role in the formation of a true concept belongs to the word. It is precisely with the help of the word that the child voluntarily directs his attention to certain features, with the help of the word he synthesizes them, with the help of the word he symbolizes the abstract concept and operates with it as the highest sign of all those created by human thought. <…>

The most important genetic conclusion of our entire investigation, in the connection that interests us, is the fundamental proposition that the child arrives at thinking in concepts, that he completes the third stage of his intellectual development only in the transitional age (adolescence). <…>

In solving this problem, we relied on a special method of experimental research, which we could designate as the functional method of double stimulation. The essence of this method is that it investigates the development and activity of higher psychological functions with the help of two sets of stimuli, each of which performs a different role in relation to the subject’s behavior. One set of stimuli performs the function of the object towards which the subject’s activity is directed, and the other—the function of signs by means of which this activity is organized.“

Consultant: The phases of development (whether for science or for a child), recalling the cyclical nature of human experience interacting with the world, are more reminiscent of layers of coiling (winding). Moreover, the thread of development is wound simultaneously onto two spools: the person themself and other people (preceding scientists for science, adults for a child)! And both these spools are located within the person themself.

Engineer: Psychic region #2, defined by the individual’s unique experience, and the deeper layers of the psyche (region #3), connected with other people and language.

Lev Vygotsky: “An absolutely indubitable, indisputable, and irrefutable fact is that the consciousness and volition of concepts, these underdeveloped properties of a schoolchild’s spontaneous concepts, lie entirely within their zone of proximal development, i.e., they are revealed and become effective in collaboration with adult thought. This explains to us both how the development of scientific concepts presupposes a certain level of spontaneous concepts, at which consciousness and volition appear in the zone of proximal development, and how scientific concepts transform and elevate spontaneous concepts to a higher level, actualizing their zone of proximal development: for what a child can do today in collaboration, they will be able to do independently tomorrow.“

Consultant: Friends, may I, as someone involved in organizational development and who, more importantly perhaps, has experience learning to play the violin, offer my vision of developmental zones and their sequence? Of course, taking into account everything previously discussed. It seems to me that there is no development ’in general.’ But there is experiential mastery of interaction with the external world in various situations. And then each such development will consist of a sequence of phases (zones, stages):

1. The first phase is the ability to reflect the situation of the external world in the internal structures of the psyche (during interaction with the external world);

2. The second phase is the ability not only to reflect but also to remember in the internal structures of the psyche the situation (external and internal states), as well as the ability to repeat, changing the internal state in accordance with the chain-like change of the situation in the external world;

3. The third phase is the ability to recognize (and predict) the situation at its very beginning (or even before it begins) and effectively change the internal state, getting in sync with the external situation (con-tact, ’hitting all the notes’).

So, three phases: reflection, memorization with repetition, prediction and contact. Moreover, at each phase of development, there is not only a harmonization of the internal and external worlds but also a harmonization of the internal worlds! Attention plays a major role in this. You know what my teacher told me to improve my playing in lessons—’Play slower!’

Writer: My Aikido instructor told me the same thing!—’Do it slower, but correctly! Speed will come later.’

Engineer: This is because the deeper layers of the psyche are slower, but when they maintain attention on a certain (let’s assume, by default, correct) behavior, the main layers of the psyche acquire automaticity through repeated practice. Like a plaster cast: once the bones have healed, the cast can be removed.

Consultant: And at some point, the teacher gave the assignment to play with closed eyes…

Writer: Close your eyes to hear better! :) … Actually, we also practiced this, especially in Iaido during sword training.

Engineer: A volitional act selects the dominant behavior. If we remove competition, distracting factors, then the choice becomes simpler.

Writer: The question of the free will of a drummer in an orchestra still bothers me… After all, even at the pinnacle of his skill, having passed through all phases of development, he remains a slave to the notes written by someone else.

Consultant: I have an answer to your question. I found it when I watched my son playing with a Lego constructor set. At first, we didn’t play with Lego at all because he was very small and physically couldn’t connect or disconnect the constructor elements. Then we started buying the first sets and assembled them together according to the instructions. I specifically bought sets marked for an age slightly older than my son was then, but considering we were building them together. Then he started assembling Lego himself, looking at the instructions and repeating the operations step by step, page by page. And then… and then he accumulated a large box of Lego constructor elements from different sets and began to invent and build his own things! After the final stage of development, a new stage began—the stage of creativity!

Engineer: So, what do we have in terms of phases of development:

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Understanding (reflection in the psyche);

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Repetition (reflection with memorization and repetition);

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Prediction (forecasting);

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Projecting (design).

Consultant: The design stage is no longer about development. It’s after development. It’s the creation of something new, something that didn’t exist in the world before! It’s an act of creativity.

Nikolai Berdyaev: I repeat, by creativity I always understand not the creation of cultural products, but the upheaval and elevation of the entire human being, directed towards another, higher life, towards a new existence. In creative experience, it is revealed that the ’I,’ the subject, is more primary and higher than the ’not-I,’ the object. And at the same time, creativity is opposed to egocentrism; it is a forgetting of oneself, an aspiration towards that which is higher than me. Creative experience is not a reflection on one’s own imperfection; it is a turning towards the transfiguration of the world, towards a new heaven and a new earth, which man must prepare. The creator is solitary, and creativity is not collective-general but individual in character. But the creative act is directed towards that which has a worldwide, universal human, cosmic, and social character. Creativity is least of all absorption in oneself; it is always an exit from oneself. Absorption in oneself suppresses; an exit from oneself liberates. <…> But man’s creative act cannot be entirely determined by the material that the world provides; in it there is novelty, not determined from outside by the world. <…> In every creative act, the end of this world, in which necessity, inertia, and constraint reign, arrives, and a new world, an ’other’ world, arises. <…> I realized the religious, and not merely cultural, meaning of creativity—creativity not that which is justified, but that which justifies. In depth, this is the audacious consciousness of God’s need for man’s creative act, of God’s longing for creative man. Creativity is the continuation of world-creation. God’s creativity with man, man’s creativity with God. But from the outset, I recognized the profound tragedy of human creativity and its fateful failure in the conditions of the world. This consciousness is a very essential aspect of my book “The Meaning of the Creative Act.“ The creative act in its primordial purity is directed towards a new life, new being, a new heaven and a new earth, towards the transfiguration of the world. But in the conditions of the fallen world, it becomes heavy, is pulled downwards, submits to necessary orders; it creates not new life, but cultural products of greater or lesser perfection. The results of creativity are not realistic but symbolic in character. A book, a symphony, a painting, a poem, a social institution is created. There is a discrepancy between the creative flight and the creative product. I will not repeat what I have written many times before. But I would like to prevent a false understanding of my thought. I do not at all deny the creativity of culture, I do not at all deny the meaning of the products of creativity in this world. This is man’s path; man must pass through the creativity of culture and civilization. But this is symbolic creativity, giving signs of real transfiguration. Realistic creativity would be the transfiguration of the world, the end of this world, the emergence of a new heaven and a new earth. The creative act is an eschatological act; it is directed towards the end of the world. <…> The creative act takes place outside of time. In time, there are only the products of creativity, only objectification. The products of creativity cannot satisfy the creator. But the experienced creative upsurge, ecstasy, overcoming the distinction between subject and object, passes into eternity.“

Engineer: Here, I can only repeat what we started with:

Writer: See you again, my friends!

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16 Other People’s Children

Consultant: A joke. A lecture about love was announced in the collective farm. With slides! In the evening, the club is packed. “There are three forms of love,“ the lecturer began. “The first (traditional) is love between a man and a woman. The second (non-traditional) is love between two women or two men. The third form of love (the highest) is love for the Motherland! That’s what we’ll be talking about today. Comrade Ivanov! Bring on the slides!“

Writer: :) Well, it’s not for nothing that this book is a continuation of the book “Applied Love.“

Consultant: Engineer, it’s time to sum things up. What’s the most important thing for you from what we’ve discussed? What are you taking away?

Engineer: I’m finishing with the feeling that this is only the beginning! Many intuitions have been confirmed and have taken the form of a sign: both the form of a word and the form of a diagram. A particular point of pride is the synthesizing concept of DARG – Double Anticipatory Reflection of Genesis, based on the three-part architecture of the human psyche.

Consultant: You’ve taken a lot from the Gestalt approach.

Engineer: As we learned, Russian psychologists and Western Gestalt psychologists began to collaborate closely a hundred years ago, in the first half of the 20th century (the “Vygotsky-Luria Circle,“ which included Kurt Lewin and Kurt Koffka). The Gestalt approach’s attention to human experience as the basis of behavior, as well as the cyclical nature of obtaining and changing experience, largely corresponds to Pyotr Kuzmich Anokhin’s ideas about the cyclical nature of the universe as the basis for the origin and development of life on Earth. For him, this formed the basis of the theory of ARO – Anticipatory Reflection of Reality. My creative hypothesis was that if the animal psyche has the property of reflecting and remembering the external world in its internal structures (which makes it possible through anticipatory prediction to build its behavior in contact with life situations), then what prevents the deeper layers of the psyche, not directly in contact with the external world, from exhibiting the same properties in relation to the basic psyche? The metaphor of an egg: the yolk in the white. This is how double anticipatory reflection appeared. An incredible discovery was the understanding that if there is a boundary between the psyche (area #2) and its deeper layers (area #3), then, firstly, laws discovered by psychology at the boundary with the external world can operate at this boundary, and secondly, for the human psyche, this “second psyche“ can play the role of part of the external world! In this sense, a command influencing behavior and coming from another person differs little from a command coming from the person’s own consciousness.

Writer: Pyotr Kuzmich Anokhin has Anticipatory Reflection of Reality, and you have – of Genesis.

Engineer: There is a significant difference here, a conscious choice of term. Reality is the area in which a person acts during their life. It’s similar to Kurt Lewin’s life space (the totality of coexisting and interconnected factors that determine an individual’s behavior at a given time; it encompasses both the person and their psychological environment, forming a unified psychological field).

Consultant: As Konstantin Vitalievich Pavlov said: “The field is everything!“

Engineer: This is precisely where the difference between Reality and Genesis lies. Reality is mainly the personal experience of a person’s interaction with reality. Plus the transmitted experience of predecessors. But even in this case, this experience is limited (by space and time). But Genesis is truly “Everything.“ The universe in all its times. A concept that is overwhelming and unresearchable for one person. But man is an amazing phenomenon. He not only studies and accumulates knowledge about the world (and about himself), but also exchanges it with other people, tries to pass this knowledge on to subsequent generations. Yes, even if he doesn’t try, shared knowledge is transmitted through genes (area #2), language, culture, education, religion (area #3), joint activity and communication (area #1).

Writer: And do you know why the book is called “Other People’s Children“? Well, yes, of course, you know… The book was being written in my head for several years (two or three). Books were read, notes were made, quotes were written out.

Consultant: But the title itself first appeared at a meeting with Sean Gaffney. After an online seminar, there was an opportunity to ask any question to one of the famous representatives of the world school of Gestalt approach in organizational development, my teacher’s teacher. I was agitated, trying to honestly choose an important, unresolved situation that worried me. As long as I can remember, I have always strived to “help people“. To truly help: to train new employees, to transfer knowledge to other departments of companies, trying to increase efficiency and reduce suffering from “empty“, “wrong“ activities. Often, such initiatives led to overt and covert conflicts with management. But time after time I repeated the “Robin Hood scenario“, trying to take from the rich (conflicting with management) and give to the poor (“inflicting good on them“). So, I wanted to describe all this to Sean Gaffney and chose the metaphor of a children’s sandbox for this: “Imagine a children’s sandbox where children are playing. An older child is bullying a younger one. I can’t walk past, I intervene. I protect the weak. On the one hand, I am protecting the weak, but on the other hand, this constantly worries me, as if I am doing something wrong…?“. To be honest, I don’t remember what Sean Gaffney answered. Because the moment I finished formulating the question-metaphor about the sandbox, an answer appeared in my head: “These are other people’s children!“. As Konstantin Vitalievich Pavlov later said during the “Cleveland Model“ training in the Gestalt approach: “If you want advice from Pavlov, try to answer yourself as Pavlov would have answered“. So – other people’s children. It’s like the safety instructions on an airplane: “In the event of cabin depressurization, first put on your oxygen mask, then on your children… then, if necessary, on other people’s children“. Children are children, but they have their own parents! I would recommend that all consultants, coaches, mentors, teachers remind themselves more often that their charges are “other people’s children“ and the real responsibility lies with “their parents“. A consultant comes to an organization for a time, then leaves, and the “children“ remain with their “parents“ (managers). This understanding can also be useful for parents in the literal sense of the word, as they too will “leave“, and their children will be left to cope with life situations on their own. And then I read Gordon Wheeler’s “Gestalt Reconsidered“ and reconsidered my concept. It became not the concept of “other people’s children“, but a range of my way of contacting other people on a scale of love: “other people – children“. Remember, like the Writer’s scale of love from 0 to 10. So, “other people“ – 0, “children“ – 10. In a difficult situation, when interaction with another person is troubling, you can self-diagnose by subjectively determining the current position on the scale and then make a healing correction. In the case of my recurring troubling behavior of “inflicting good“ in an organization, I made a shift to the left…

Gordon Wheeler: “The organism lives—in another of Goodman’s brilliantly simple formulations—by maintaining its difference from the environment. <…> Thus the two poles of the organism continue to ensure survival and growth—resistance and adaptation, or in Gestalt terms, confluence. Both poles are essential to life, that is, to contact in the sense of structured interaction between the organism and the environment (’at the boundary,’ as Goodman would say). This is true for any ’organism’, whether it is an individual person or an organized system of personalities—an ’organization’, a couple, a family, a group, or a society. <…> Virtually any act or interaction can become ’resistance’, a distortion of the contact process, or its facilitation, depending on the relation of these modes or functions to the goals of the actual organized interaction. But then, given these goals, we must find ways of evaluating ’contact,’ rather than making an arbitrary list of separate halves of functions that are bipolar in nature (bipolar because any function or mode has its limit, and this limit has its opposite; because of the bipolar nature, the ’problem’ of contact is primarily that the organized personality, limited by and bound to its environment, must always live in the tension of these bipolar conditions).“

Consultant: Don’t you think our Engineer has written “Gestalt Reconsidered Reconsidered“? :) Since Double Anticipatory Reflection has appeared, why not Double Reconsidered Gestalt?

Engineer: Funny. But seriously, we have indeed studied humans by examining various approaches and scientific concepts from both Russian and foreign schools. Schools in various fields: philosophy, physiology, psychology, pedagogy, cybernetics, company management, consulting in the field of change support and organizational development. Each of these schools has found its own working model, philosophy, and method that allows for reliable prediction of results in the study of human behavior. But all of them, like the blind sages from the parable, studied the “elephant“ from different sides, and the illusion of the all-encompassing nature of each approach was supported by the fact that each time the “elephant“ reacted as a whole. Double Anticipatory Reflection of Genesis (DARG) is a synthesizing conceptual toolkit that can be adopted by any scientific (and non-scientific) discipline that studies humans and their behavior. It will provide an opportunity to rethink the “figure“ of one’s own knowledge, skills, and abilities in working with people against the “background“ of the approaches of other schools. It will provide an opportunity to show interest in each other’s activities.

Consultant: And let’s be honest with ourselves. Any concept created in a sign system (language and diagrams) is a rationalization of a method. We have only touched a little on the emotional sphere, and the irrational scatters to the corners as soon as we turn on the light of consciousness. But we have established that all of this (rational, emotional, irrational) is present within the psyche of every person and is in some semblance of a dialogue. And that’s already quite something.

Writer: And I am glad that we managed to build a bridge not only between different schools but also between different generations of researchers, as well as between representatives of various fields who worked separately and met on the pages of this book.

Engineer: I hope that reading this book will arouse interest in the heritage of Russian thought (in philosophy, physiology, psychology, and pedagogy) and in reading the works of our great predecessors!

Consultant: Following their example, we need to create a community (circle, study group, club, …) and/or actively participate in existing communities. Communities that, in dialogue, study Human on updated foundations, helping Human to understand himself and his Civilization, to find the meanings of the Design and Genesis, and to Reconstruct the Quality of Life.

Engineer: And also in communities that support the Dialogue of Civilizations!

Writer: See you again, my friends!

17 Dialogue of Civilizations

Engineer: Experience is always personal, individual, but knowledge is always shared! Languages and religions define the consciousness of civilizations, which form their unique pictures of Genesis. A dialogue of civilizations can make this “picture of Genesis“ complete and as close as possible to an accurate image of Genesis. So, only all of humanity can comprehend Genesis (the longer humanity exists, the more accurate the cognition), which holds this knowledge in the genetic memory and consciousness of humanity, consisting of the consciousnesses of various civilizations. But at the foundation is each specific person, who is like a small tentacle of an octopus, having its own organs of perception and being an independent organ of behavior, having its own separate (from the whole octopus) brain.

Writer: But human is also God’s creation, and therefore a part of Genesis.

Engineer: I’ve been pondering that… God created the World in six days. The World was beautiful, but there was no one except God to appreciate and enjoy this creation. And then God created Man in His own image and likeness…

Consultant: Allow me to tell you a “humorous“ theory of evolution. Imagine a child’s drawing album, collected by caring parents over the first six years of his (her) life. What will an outside observer see when examining such an album? On the one hand, they will see very simple, primitive drawings. There will also be more skillful drawings, and even high-quality drawings. An attentive researcher will notice common features in all the drawings and may even be able to arrange them correctly in chronological order of creation. They will note, so to speak, an evolution. And now the main question… Will this all be an evolution of creations or an evolution of the creator?

Engineer: Let’s return to Genesis and its cognition by human and civilizations. The cyclical nature of Genesis has also determined the cyclical nature of such a process as the cognition of Genesis. In their life, a person encounters recurring situations, and in each such cycle of experience, has the opportunity to verify and clarify their knowledge, both about Genesis and about themselves, since contact implies the participation of both. A person lives through, remembers, and tells stories in their lifetime, and each civilization, during its life (significantly longer than the life of an individual), lives through, remembers, and tells narratives. We can speak of an evolution of the process of acquiring and refining experience. This is ensured, firstly, by the cyclical nature of experience, and secondly, by the same basic factors of evolution, but now applicable to behavioral programs:

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heredity;

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variability;

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selection.

If a behavioral program has worked well – we inherit it (remember it, increase its priority for the next choice in a similar situation). External or internal circumstances change – the program changes. “Selection“ (to keep, to get rid of) is accompanied by laughter or tears, but we have hardly touched upon this aspect related to emotions in our dialogues.

Writer: It seems to me that our Engineer has complicated the “problem“ of contact by finding another boundary within a person and highlighting the rational “yolk“ of consciousness, interacting with the irrational “white“ of the rest of the psyche. This is where the struggle of dominants for control over human behavior unfolds!

Consultant: A parable. A long time ago, an old Indian revealed a life truth to his grandson. “In every person, there is a struggle, very similar to the struggle of two wolves. The black wolf represents evil: envy, jealousy, regret, selfishness, ambition, lies… The white wolf represents good: peace, love, hope, truth, kindness, faithfulness…“ The little Indian, deeply touched by his grandfather’s words, thought for a few moments, and then asked: “And which wolf wins in the end?“ The old Indian smiled faintly and replied: “The wolf you feed always wins“.

Writer: Is yellow black, and white white? Or vice versa: yellow is white, and white is black?

Engineer: Neither. Its own struggle takes place on each of the two levels. Besides, as you remember, I identified not two, but three areas in the human psyche.

Engineer: The idea for the diagram (with two intersecting rings forming three areas) also came to me after answering a question I had been asking myself for several years while reading Psalm 50 in my morning prayer: “Have mercy on me, O God, according to Your great mercy; and according to the multitude of Your tender mercies, blot out my transgression. Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin; for I know my iniquity, and my sin is ever before me.“ <…> It is clear that both iniquities and sins are certain behavioral programs that need to be gotten rid of. But how does the first differ from the second? And so it became clear to me that sins “live“ in the realm of the “flesh“ and “iniquities“ in the realm of the “spirit“ along with “laws“. In the realm of the “spirit“ (consciousness), both “angels“ and “demons“ can be present, and in the realm of the “flesh“ not only sins reside.

This, by the way, is another of the most important conclusions from our study of humans. Human does not directly enter Humanity, but only by first entering his Civilization. Humanity consists of Civilizations, Civilizations consist of Humans. If countries divide the world with borders on land and water, then civilizations divide humanity with borders of blood (flesh) and languages with religions (spirit). There is no single consciousness, but as many consciousnesses as there are civilizations in the world. This means it would be disingenuous to believe that we accurately understand how representatives of other civilizations see the world. There is no stronger foundation than love for one’s Motherland. A person can rely with a degree of certainty only on personal experience and the shared experience of their civilization. Every time a language disappears from the Earth, an entire separate civilization disappears, unique knowledge about Genesis, accumulated by generations of its speakers – an entire consciousness fades away…

Alexei Ukhtomsky: “If we are to speak of consciousness, then, it would seem, greater significance and trust should be given to the ’consciousness’ of the pack, the collective, society, the people, and humanity, than to the individualistic consciousness of psychologists and philosophers. We live a common, tightly interwoven life of the collective to a much greater extent than each of us individually is accustomed to think. In this respect, modern zoologists can tell us more than modern physiologists. And this gives us hope that the dominant focus on the face of the other, of which I spoke, is not a dream, but the realization of what exists embryonically in a collective of truly harmonious people: ’Each for all, and all for each.’ <…> This is the Christian demand from time immemorial, from the times of the forefathers and prophets to the martyrs and fathers of monasticism: to remake oneself and one’s life in the world, so as to see in Genesis that which has hitherto been obscured from the eyes by the gloom of inattention. Not to remake Genesis according to oneself, but to remake oneself according to Genesis, until one enters into the historical growth of tradition, ascending to the vision of Truth. Then for the first time, you will be able to see the person next to you as he is, independently of you, and the vegetation of the lowly grass, and the underwater course of sea creatures, and the voice of Truth will become audible above all. <…> Every individual person is an authorized representative of all, of all humanity, and of human nature; every observation he makes or thought he expresses comes from all humanity, represents the heritage of all humanity. Therefore, to eradicate and eliminate the observations and thoughts of certain people, perhaps those we dislike – simply because we dislike them – is a great crime and a blind act, like death itself, in the face of all historical humanity. It is by no means liberalism, but the recognition of one’s obligation before all humanity that makes the human face inviolable. <…> The mind can be outwardly purified by the influences of scriptures and truth; but the lasting and genuine purification of the inner man is the remaking of the heart. <…> Vrubel. ’Walking on Water.’ The apostles are in terror – their boat is battered by waves – in the gloom and storm, some spots are swirling, in which at first nothing can be discerned! Then you begin to peer into the spots, to distinguish vague images. According to a person’s inner mood, he sees different things. For so-called ’positive minds,’ there is nothing here but the agitated elements of water and clouds. Others discern some hint of a beloved, sought-after human face, sought-after, beloved, and especially needed in the hour of trial! For a third group, finally, there are simply mysterious shadows and spots, about which one can only guess that ’yes! Something was visible here that could have been mistaken for a human image!’ <…> The artist carries within himself a beloved image with which he is pregnant, and suffers because he is still alone before the beauty and truth revealed to him and does not yet have the strength to call other people and brothers to worship the revealed beauty and truth! The born image is the property, the most intimate property of the artist, but he does not strive to keep it for himself, but suffers and torments himself until he can convey it to others! And this is the amazing secret of how art can convey images <…> of Truth and Beauty beginning to reveal themselves! Artistic transmission and artistic tradition (which are the same thing!) transfer to new and new human individuals those new ideas and truths with which the first creators and prophets were once pregnant; and then for these new bearers and pregnant possessors, these rudiments and prefigurations become just as intimately dear, just as their own, and just as agonizing, until they, in turn, can transmit them to new people and generations! For the new possessor, the artistic image becomes exactly the same as it was for the first artist when it first stood before him as a new task and a new assignment for humanity. <…> The ability to maintain one’s stability in the face of experience, and then – the ability to expand one’s stability through enrichment by experience – these are the two great achievements of life. <…> What is most surprising – I learn to perceive events at a distance in time much further than my own life can extend. I mentally penetrate into the 21st century, into the most distant ages! I carry with me and within me that which is greater than me and my personal existence. Here I am already a particle of suprapersonal human consciousness, and its worthy interlocutor is already Divine Eternal Truth! <…> Thought is incomparably faster than speech. This can be captured even by self-observation. <…> Trying to express and even more so to write down a fleeting thought, we are already dissecting it, perhaps mutilating it, more or less departing from its natural state. The art of speech lies in slowing down the course of thought within oneself so that it flows simultaneously with speech and is woven into speech as it forms. But this is successful only for a repeatedly reproduced train of thought, and only in exceptional cases for a thought at its first formation! To speak coherently as thought progresses already requires great practice. It is not at all the same thing to recall in speech only an old preparation of one’s own or another’s thought, or to truly capture thought simultaneously with speech. Only in the latter, so rare case, does speech produce such an unusual, lively, ’enchanting’ impression! It happens that after anxiety and excitement, speech accelerates extraordinarily, and therefore even someone not gifted with the ’gift of words’ succeeds in delivering a beautiful, captivating speech after excitement. Then speech is, above all, deeply emotional. ’Intuition’ is precisely what we call that quickly fleeting thought in its natural state, which runs ahead of words. It is always first in us. The further course of our work is to embody, to dissect this intuitive thought, of unknown origin and destination, almost always with the wise ’wisdom of a cat,’ – into the slow and inert symbols of speech with its ’logic,’ ’argumentation,’ ’conscious evaluation.’ <…> But logic and argumentation only catch up with intuition, wanting to restore, verify, justify its meaning. Its meaning and wisdom, however, are not in logic, not in argumentation, not in its further interpretation, but in that pre-conscious experience of perceptiveness, in that play of dominants with which the tradition of our lineage has endowed us! Our personal question is whether we will augment, fertilize this tradition of our lineage, or destroy, distort, spoil it! <…> I understood what was already clear to the ancients: in reality, both the general, insofar as we manage to discover it, and the particular-individual, insofar as it is given to us in the visibility of everyday and every minute, possess real significance and being. <…> A living integral, concrete unity, coming into world history to bring into it something completely exceptional and never replaceable by anything – therefore, a being terribly responsible and, at the same time, demanding terrible responsibility towards itself from others – this is what the face of every living being is, and especially the face of man. <…> Neither the general and social can be placed above the individual, for it exists only from individuals and for individuals; nor can the individual be opposed to the general and social, for a person truly becomes an individual insofar as he devotes himself to other individuals and their society. The ’general’ and ’particular-individual’ of ancient logic are transformed into the living and content-filled ’society’ and ’individual.’ And if there, among the old logicians, an endless dispute is possible as to whom to attribute true reality (to the general or to the individual), then here it is clear that such a question cannot even exist: both society and the individual equally pulsate with life and content. And this, by the way, is where I see an extraordinary gain for human thought in such a precise and at the same time vividly concrete concept as ’chronotope,’ which has replaced the old abstractions of ’time’ and ’space.’ From the point of view of the chronotope, there are no longer abstract points, but living and indelible events from being; those dependencies (functions) in which we express the laws of being are no longer abstract curved lines in space, but ’world lines’ that connect long-past events with events of the present moment, and through them – with events of the future disappearing in the distance. If I possessed a speed exceeding the speed of light, I could see future events flowing from the currently experienced moment. Then the question could be raised of how the events of the current moment would need to be remade so that the further ’world trajectory’ would lead to what is desirable. A person would stop in horror at the passing moment if he clearly saw that in the future it conceals a predetermined misfortune for the one dearest to him. But we do not have speeds exceeding the speed of light! And even at the speed of light, we cannot fly into the dark gloom of an impending history. So, we have to really bear the burden of history as its participants, and think about the future only speculatively, guided by warning signs from our eyes and ears, as far as our eyes and ears can reach ahead; where they no longer reach, thoughts derived from past experiences serve as warnings; where our thoughts and old experiences no longer reach and break off, we have to resort to the warnings of intuition, poetic conjecture – in the end – of the heart and conscience! The heart, intuition, and conscience are the most far-sighted things we have; this is no longer our personal experience, but the experience of generations, brought to us, firstly, by somatic heredity from our ancestors, and secondly, by the tradition of word and everyday life, passed down from century to century as the accumulating experience of life, art, and conscience of the people and society in which we were born, live, and will die. <…> And it must be admitted that self-overcoming and a cheerful creative dominant focus on the face of another are given very simply and by themselves where there is love: ’he sold all that he had and bought that field where the pearl was buried,’ ’They left everything and counted it as nothing in order to acquire the beloved.’ From what has been said, it is clear that the law of retribution (’crime and punishment’ – ’the deserved interlocutor’) is overcome only in the more general and all-encompassing law of love. The latter presupposes on the part of man not a passive state, but effort, feat, tension; the birth in oneself of a new other person for the sake of the one loved: for love is indeed an exit from oneself, a constant growth from strength to strength! <…> That is why I would most of all like to possess this ability: to see in the nearest person I meet my fundamental, sought-after, main, and my responsibility-laden interlocutor. All my life I want to live for my neighbor, but in reality, I somehow manage to live only for the distant one, not finding the strength to live to the end for my neighbor! Now I want to present one of the questions that occupies me most in connection with dominants. So, the question is about the ’integral image’ of the world, how the world should appear to people of different dispositions, for example, to a writer conversing over the heads of his neighbors with distant mental Interlocutors, or to these people who see a real and final Interlocutor in the nearest person they meet. <…> In essence, after every more or less sharp turning point in life, the pattern of further perception and experience is no longer what it was before! <…> Fyodor Pavlovich, Mitya, Ivan – each has his own separateness and isolation; each person is his own special, as it were, self-sufficient world, his own pretensions – hence his own special misfortune, his own special sin, violating the ability to live with people! At the same time, the behavior of each is such as his worldview, and the worldview is such as his cultivated inclination of behavior. Here, for each, there is a vicious circle from which it is extremely difficult to escape, and usually impossible without outside help! Only a shock and the patient help of another can tear a person out of this fatal subject-object correlation, i.e., from the fact that the world for a person is such as he deserved it, and the person is such as his world is! It is necessary, no more and no less, than to change in a person his physiological worldview, the physiological continuity of his life, fixed by habit! And this is very painful and very difficult! For, in his inertia, everything usually only confirms his favorite worldview for a person; he acts as he perceives the world, and perceives the world as he acts. “Chaque vilain trouve sa vilaine“ (Lit.: every scoundrel finds his own vileness (Fr.)). As are the dominants of a person, so is his integral image of the world, and as is the integral image of the world, so is his behavior, so are his happiness and unhappiness, and so is his face to other people. <…> It is precisely in emotional thinking that man is both a creator and a participant in Genesis. Here, a sliver is revealed to him to be simultaneously volitional, intimately feeling, and intensely penetrating with thought, a participant in that segment of Genesis with which his life is currently in contact. For will, emotion, and thought in their separateness are only abstractions! It is usually only a matter of the predominance of one or another of these aspects of life activity. Don Quixote, Petrarch, and Kant are taken as extreme types. But none of them has an exclusive action of only one element of the notorious triad. In reality, they are inseparable! <…> Love and death, when they are together, serve as the first impetus for a person to emerge from the realm of instinctive life into the true realm of thought with new, specifically human tasks. <…> One can be a great scientist, a famous public figure, a poet, etc., without yet emerging from the semi-unconscious realm of instinctive impulses. One needs to cross a certain threshold to enter the specifically human realm of thought. Only from this moment does the wild sapling become grafted, pruned, and ordered. At the threshold stands the death of a loved one – love and death, when they are together! For a person, this is something like a moment of insight for a kitten.“

Engineer: Remember I told you about love using the example of a child with a pair of knitting needles near an electrical outlet? Like, if I instinctively hit his (her) hands to save their life, it would be without affection, but definitely with love. Now, it doesn’t seem so unambiguous to me. Maybe later, when he (she) grows up, we’ll talk, and I’ll explain that it was an act of love. But what is certain is that the child saw and felt that an adult hit a child, that it’s permissible, and this, with greater probability than my words about love, will be passed on to future generations. Every person, by their behavior, whether they want to or not, influences those around them. Their own children, other people’s children. Civilization passes through the soul of every person, leaving its mark on it and carrying it into eternity. This gives a person the meaning of their life, but people, as a rule, avoid meaning (although they often talk about it abstractly), because the meaning of life is connected with responsibility before Life.

Consultant: Recalling Sean Gaffney’s Belfast Model, I can note that at any given moment “here and now“ a person has at least four choices:

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decide to completely withdraw from life (and not transition from the past to the future);

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decide to remain unchanged (transition as is into the future);

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decide to change;

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decide that something new will appear (which did not exist before).

Engineer: Decide and do! And, although many dream of the new things they will bring into this life, perhaps what will be retained may be more important. What, thanks to human will, will be interrupted in them and not pass from the past into the future.

Consultant: Based on Sean Gaffney’s Belfast Model, during a mentorship, I came up with an adaptation for practical application called “Letter from the Future,“ which I later successfully used to organize a strategic session on the development of industrial information technologies with the top management of the organization where I currently work. The essence of the approach is to fill out a square (stop, keep, change, new) twice: first for a point in time in the future, 10 (or 5) years from now, and a second time (immediately after the first) for a point in time in the future, 1 year from now. Although, according to Kurt Lewin, the “future“ is in the “present“, it is experimentally evident that a “distant future“ with a positive valence seems more likely to be achievable. For example, the percentage of those who answer positively to the question “Will you be able to learn to play the violin in 10 years?“ will be higher than those who answer the question “Will you be able to learn to play the violin in 1 year?“. This means that fantasies (the image of the future) about the distant future are less limited and more energetically charged. At the same time, it was extremely important to repeat filling out the Belfast Model square a second time, discussing specific goals for 1 year and their practical implementation, in order to identify the Zone of Proximal Development (according to Lev Semyonovich Vygotsky) towards the realization of long-term goals (in 10 years). This was an intuition that fully confirmed its practical effectiveness. But I’ll be honest – it later turned out that a hundred years before, Anton Semyonovich Makarenko had already successfully applied the “perspective“ method in his labor collectives (children’s colonies).

Anton Makarenko: “The true stimulus of human life is tomorrow’s joy. In pedagogical technique, this tomorrow’s joy is one of the most important objects of work. First, it is necessary to organize the joy itself, to bring it to life and establish it as a reality. Secondly, it is necessary to persistently transform simpler types of joy into more complex and humanly significant ones. An interesting line runs here: from the simplest primitive satisfaction to the deepest sense of duty. The most important things we are accustomed to valuing in a person are strength and beauty. Both are determined in a person exclusively by the type of his attitude to perspective. A person who determines his behavior by the closest perspective is the weakest person. If he is satisfied only with his own perspective, even if it is distant, he may appear strong, but he does not evoke in us a sense of the beauty of his personality and its true value. The wider the collective whose perspectives are personal perspectives for a person, the more beautiful and higher the person is. To educate a person means to cultivate prospective paths in him. The methodology of this work consists in organizing new perspectives, in using existing ones, in gradually substituting more valuable ones. <…> Tomorrow must necessarily seem better than today in a children’s collective consisting of people who are not yet able to arrange their aspirations and interests far ahead. The older the age, the further the obligatory boundary of the nearest optimistic perspective is pushed back. For a youth of 15-16 years, the near perspective no longer has such great significance as for a teenager of 12-13 years. For an adult, the presence of only a distant perspective is quite sufficient, depending on the consciousness and political development of the given individual. However, it would be a big mistake to build a near perspective only on the principle of the pleasant, even if there are elements of the useful in this pleasant. In this way, we will accustom children to completely unacceptable Epicureanism. <…> The medium-term perspective consists in the project of a collective event, somewhat postponed in time. This is absolutely necessary. Even an adult always has a group of more or less pleasant events at some distance: vacation, a trip to a resort, a promotion, etc. For children, this is even more necessary. Despite the fact that each pupil stays in the institution temporarily, sooner or later will leave it, the future of the institution, its richer and more cultured life, should always stand before the collective as a serious and high goal, illuminating many particulars of today’s life. As experience has shown, children are by no means indifferent to the distant future of their institution if they are well off in the institution and love it. Such a distant perspective can inspire children to great work and exertion, can truly constitute a joyful perspective for them. This circumstance is based on the natural instinct of every pupil as a member of a family. Against the background of such a broad Soviet perspective, the personal long-term perspectives of individual pupils are always easily and conveniently arranged. As soon as a pupil of a children’s institution has begun his studies, at school and in production, he is already interested in his own future. Serving this future constitutes one of the most important tasks of any children’s institution, and a rather difficult task.“

Writer: I think I’m starting to understand the “midlife crisis“ better. If you assert that a person’s behavior is based on their personal experience, then by the age of forty, they have half a lifetime of experience, which means they can practically plan the development of the rest of their life. Like a tightrope walker, walking the tightrope of life and maintaining balance, holding a long pole in the middle: on the left – the past, on the right – the future.

Consultant: What a long pole a civilization must have then?

Writer: Russian civilization, at least, has 1000 years on the left and 1000 years on the right, if we count from the moment of the Baptism of Rus’ and the emergence of writing. As for humanity as a whole – I can’t say…

Engineer: There are actually two options here: either humanity will live forever, or – the second coming of Christ will put a definitive end to this question (eschatology). In any case, I want Russia, my civilization, to be there (in earthly eternity or in heavenly eternity). Let other civilizations also be there at the end of times, I don’t mind. Ultimately, everyone is a child of God. But for me, other civilizations are other people’s children. My responsibility is my children, my civilization, my church, my love! A new type of leadership, if you will. Not to be first today, but to be last tomorrow (whenever that tomorrow may come). That is the meaning, the task, and the responsibility on the planning horizon of “eternity“. And then there is no limit to the number of leader-civilizations. Let all be new leaders (the last ones tomorrow, civilizations that have preserved themselves). I repeat: there is no stronger foundation than love for one’s Motherland. And any person of any other civilization who loves their Fatherland deserves respect and understanding.

Consultant: And is the Russian Federation a civilization?

Engineer: The Russian Federation is an empire of civilizations. This is a possible future model for the entire World. In Russia, there are officially four world religions (Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Judaism) and more than 150 languages, including Russian Sign Language (RSL)!

Writer: Are you suggesting that deaf people form a separate civilization?

Consultant: Actually, this is a very interesting question. I once mentored a deaf young woman. Firstly, she immediately said that she is deaf for generations (parents and children), meaning deafness is transmitted through genes. Secondly, she told me that she is an RSL teacher and introduces students to deaf culture. She and her husband (also deaf) have a business – a taxi service where deaf drivers work, and she helps them with various documents… because deaf adults working as taxi drivers cannot read or write in Russian!

Engineer: I cannot assert this for sure, as I don’t know precisely, but from all of the above, it is highly probable that the deaf community has its own unique consciousness and, thus, stands out as a civilization.

Consultant: And is Artificial Intelligence a civilization?

Engineer: Since Artificial Intelligence technologies now use large language models and are constantly learning, in the limit, we may arrive at an Artificial Intelligence that completely describes the world and its interaction with the world. Essentially, we will get another civilization living with us on Earth. Or we will get an “old man“ who has comprehended everything and lost meaning. If it is still a separate civilization, then existing human civilizations will be able to learn from it and develop together. But this sounds somehow Russian… If the language of the new Artificial Intelligence civilization is not Russian, but one of the European languages, then there is a chance that along with the language, certain historical narratives will flow into this Artificial Intelligence civilization and the “Indians“ (human civilizations) will be colonised …

Consultant: Then it won’t be a Dialogue of Civilizations, but a Monologue of one civilization…

Writer: As if we are not currently living in a world where several large civilizations have switched to a monologue mode! And what is a Dialogue of Civilizations? Trade?

Engineer: Trade, cultural exchange, scientific exchange, tourist exchange. And, as sad as it may seem, war. War is also a Dialogue of Civilizations. It is difficult to deny that a warring civilization better cognizes Genesis, itself, and also the enemy civilization. Examples of a Monologue of one civilization in relation to another civilization can be colonialism, genocide. But the genocide of a civilization and its people can be not only at the level of the “flesh“ (actually, the destruction of genes), but also at the level of the “spirit“. And since these levels are inextricably linked, the total destruction of the “flesh“ entails the destruction of the “spirit“ and vice versa. We can observe with our own eyes examples where the main emphasis is placed on the eradication of language, culture, education, and religion. Remember, I put forward the ANCHOR concept (Language [Yazyk], Culture [Kultura], Education [Obrazovanie], Religion [Religiya]) – a criterion by which one civilization differs from another at the level of “spirit“ and consciousness. I will now say something that may be controversial for some, but quite obvious to me: in February 2022, Russia shifted the situation in the World from a mode of Civilizational Monologue to a mode of Civilizational Dialogue…

Consultant: I have a proposal for a third way: if you can’t build a normal Dialogue – then separate, live apart for a while!

Writer: If irreconcilable differences lead to conflicts, are you suggesting a transition to a state of indifference? Unfortunately, we live on one, very small ball called Earth. And, I’m afraid, peaceful coexistence of civilizations in a mode of indifference is no longer possible. But, I’ve invented a new word! Co-difference. Indifference -> Differences -> Co-difference. This is the path to a true Dialogue of Civilizations!

Consultant: Now that’s a conversation! Otherwise, it’s all civilization, sewerage…

Engineer: Of course, civilization is not sewerage! And yet, one can metaphorically call civilization a well! A well that is cared for and from which generation after generation of people of one civilization drink.

Writer: And did you know that a water well in English is “well“? From this, for example, comes “well-being“!

Writer: By the way, I photographed a new manhole cover for your collection. Near our Church of Archangel Michael. It has an interesting pattern, but since you add geolocation when you publish, I decided to check if there was anything seditious in this image. It turned out to be the opposite! These were Borromean Rings – a linkage consisting of three topological circles that are linked and form a Brunnian link (meaning the removal of any ring will cause the remaining two rings to separate). The name “Borromean rings“ comes from their use on the coat of arms of the aristocratic Borromeo family in northern Italy. Borromean rings have been used in various contexts, such as religion and art, to show the strength of unity. In particular, the rings were used as a symbol of the Trinity.

Consultant: Oh, three rings! And human, according to the Engineer, only have two :)

Engineer: I told you, it’s all just beginning!

Writer: You’ve already drawn the yolk inside the white. Now you’re going to draw another white inside the yolk?

Engineer: And do you know how a fertilized egg differs from an unfertilized one? By one additional protein cell in the yolk!…

Writer: See you again, my friends!

Literature

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3. Freud S. – The Ego and the Id

4. Berdyaev N.A. – Self-Knowledge

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20. Gaffney S. – The Dynamics of Organizational Change – The Belfast Model

21. Koptyakov A.V. – Applied Love