«PORTRAIT» OF THE PSYCHE ON THE BACKGROUND OF THE PHYSICAL WORLD: SUBJECTIVE ASSESSMENT AND FREEDOM OF CHOICE ARE DRIVERS OF THE INFORMATION PROCESS IN THE BRAIN

Abstract

Behaviorist psychology, following analytical philosophy, which was formed on the unquestioning belief in the ability of classical physical determinism to explain even the nature of mental phenomena, sometimes declared the mental to be an artifact of the physical activity of the brain, sometimes reduced it to the physical as such. Sometimes psychologists and philosophers simply stated the fundamentally incomprehensible nature of the mental – like the Kantian «thing in itself». But psychology, since it became aware of itself, has not forgotten to investigate, describe and interpret mental phenomena and processes. However, even in our times, enlightened by respectable theories, the «spirit» of secrecy and incomprehensibility of the ontological foundations of the mental is still present in psychology. And this clearly does not contribute to raising the status of psychology as a well-conceptually formed science, despite the undeniable ontological scale of the object of its research – the psyche.
 So, here, in order to discover these ontological foundations of the psychic, we have considered the psychic against the background of two fundamental factors. One of them is the physical world surrounding living beings (including humans), to which the psychic should adapt them. The second is the properties of neural networks of the brain (also, by the way, physically functioning), the activity of which is directly related to the realization of the mental itself. This enables us not only to determine the issue of the ontological nature of the mental, i.e., the way and specificity of its existence and functioning, but also to identify the main mechanism of the procedurality of the mental during information processing. The quintessence of this mechanism is that it occurs thanks to two key aspects of the mental information process in the brain. This is, first of all, the ability of living beings with a sufficiently highly organized brain to subjectively assess the biological (and later in evolution and social) value of objects and phenomena in their physical environment. And secondly, it is the subjective selection of information stored in the brain for the purpose of integration of accumulated experience, which is functionally related to the ability to subjectively evaluate. This mechanism allows such living beings to respond to probable, new external stimuli with their behavioral novelty (creative activity). Therefore, mental proceduralism should become unthinkable without taking into account the factors of subjective evaluation and freedom of choice. And freedom of choice is, first of all, a mental aspect of processing information, and as a result, and precisely because it is a valuable phenomenon, it is also a social value – whether in the form of freedom of religion, or political freedoms, or freedom of speech , or something else like this.