THE ROLE OF CONSCIOUSNESS IN HUMAN COGNITIVE ACTIVITY

Setting up the problemConsciousness is the most important heritage of human beings. Would anybody want to live forever, if this long life had been elapsed in the unconscious state? Nevertheless we know neither what consciousness is, nor how it has appeared and what consciousness does. Philosophers admit that "nowadays members of the sciences, traditionally related to consciousness research, consider it to be one of the most complex problems, far from being solved" (Mamchur, 2008, p.31). No one knows how to approach the problem of "qualia", the problem of subjective experience. It always tormented psychologists. At the close of the past century D. Chalmers (1996) declared it to be the most complicated problem in psychology. Many repeat this Chalmers' statement nowadays. Not having any other ideas some consider consciousness to be the quality essential to any matter. Nonetheless they realize that nobody knows, how to discover this quality, because it's impossible to define what exactly this quality is (Velmans, 2007). M.K. Mamardashvili fairly said (Mamardashvili, 1996, p. 215), "consciousness is something, that as human beings we know everything about, but we know nothing about it as scientists". During the last decades the power of cognitive unconscious is demonstrated in a huge amount of beautiful experiments. Everybody agrees: unconscious processes have considerably larger resources and the more powerful computing ability, than consciousness (Bargh, and Morsella, 2008) The unconscious decision about realization of some action often appears earlier than the conscious intention to act (Libet, 2003; 2006). A person unconsciously perceives, stores and processes much more information, than consciously; s/he unconsciously finds the regularities in the environment far quicker; s/he can regulate the power and accuracy of his/hers actions much better without the conscious control. We are not aware of the causes of our own thoughts. (In Balzac's words, "thoughts come to our head without asking us about it"). These nonconscious processes govern the majority of our social behavior - from perception and interpretation of the social world to interpersonal interactions and goal pursuits (Bargh, and Williams, 2006). Why are we aware of our cognitions, if they appear and develop unconsciously? We can single out several types of answers. The first one: awareness is useful (contributes to survival, to adequate reflection of reality and so on). It is the way they often write in handbooks: they say consciousness saves us from the informational overload by means of reducing the information flows and cutting off the unnecessary information; it stores the information selectively; it plans the behavior, giving the great resources for flexible reactions to the changing demands of life. All such descriptions just give us an illusion of understanding. To cut off the unnecessary information you firstly need to receive it, process it, and only then cut it off. How does it reduce the information load? The suggestion that a human is able to make a conscious decision about the information to be realized, contradicts any logic: how can we consciously be unaware of something? Thus, gaining information should take place at the unconscious level at first. Conscious planning on the basis of the limited information cannot be better than the planning on the basis of the whole received one. The suggestion that consciousness with its rather limited informational capacity lets us react in a more flexible way than unconscious looks strange as well. On the whole this answer leads to the deadlock, because all activity ascribed to consciousness is accomplished unconsciously at first. And what's more, this answer doesn't explain why the result of all this unconscious work should be realized.The attempts to ascribe some intelligible sense to the work of consciousness occur, but do not seem persuasive. Here is one of the most interesting hypotheses. …