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ФИЛОСОФСКИЕ НАУКИ
INFLUENCE OF VIRTUAL REALITY ON THE SPIRITUALITY OF INFORMATION SOCIETY
DOI: 10.31618/ESU.2413-9335.2020.2.71.587 Pirnazarov Nurnazar Rahsid uli
Master Karakalpak state University, Nukus city
ABSTRACT
In this article, we will examine a new understanding of spirituality in the modern information society and the impact of globalization. And also, the socio-philosophical understanding of the nature of spirituality, which is considered as a system of stable ties between man and society, as a way of organizing and existing a value principle in the content of universal human being. Acting as a universal social value and an indispensable element of socio-cultural life, spirituality is analyzed in the context of social transformations taking place in the global community. Its religious and secular interpretations, methodology and effectiveness in the cognition of two types of society are studied: consumption and creation in modern globalization.
АННОТАЦИЯ
В этой статье мы рассмотрим новое понимание духовности в современном информационном обществе и влияние глобализации. А также, социально-философское понимание природы духовности, которая рассматривается как система устойчивых связей человека и общества, как способ организации и существования ценностного начала в содержании общечеловеческого бытия. Выполняя роль универсальной общественной ценности и непременного элемента социокультурной жизни, духовность анализируется в контексте социальных трансформаций, происходящих в глобальном сообществе. Исследуются его религиозное и светское толкования, методология и эффективность в познании двух типов общества: потребления и созидания в условиях современной глобализации.
Key words: spirituality, culture, reality, existence, spiritual existence of man, virtue, consciousness, human dimension, virtual reality, social, secular religious, worldview, consumer society, creation society, globalization.
Ключевые слова: духовность, культура, реальность, бытие, духовное бытие человека, добродетель, сознание, человекоразмерность, виртуальная реальность, социальное, светское, религиозное, православное мировоззрение, общество потребления, общество созидания, глобализация.
Science and public practice of the modern information society again and again show that the mechanisms of interaction of material and spiritual processes, objective and subjective reality continue to become more complicated . This gives rise to a wide variety of approaches to the concepts of material and spiritual, offering different theoretical principles for understanding the current stage of social development. A number of domestic researchers are trying, in particular, to give a new interpretation of the concepts of material and ideal.
In the publications of the journal Philosophy and Society, it was noted not so long ago that one of the common options for such a rethinking is an attempt to replace the concept of objective reality with a less meaningful one - the concept of being[1,32] . In some cases, these two concepts are completely identified. "Being," a definition is given in the course of lectures on philosophy, "is a philosophical category for designating an objective reality that exists outside and independently of a person's consciousness and mastering which a person becomes a personality" [2,296] .
Attempts are being made to define matter simply as matter. Modern Orthodox thinkers urge "to help separate the spiritual truth from the chaff of the material", considering the spiritual and material from ethical, evaluative positions - both good and bad. A similar approach is found in scientific philosophy. So, in the textbook it is noted: "You can have, for example, a VCR and watch only porn movies, but this is hardly
connected with spiritual needs ..."[3,85] According to the author's logic, it turns out that the needs that we regard negatively should be classified as material, since spiritual needs are necessarily something "very good", positively assessed.
The greatest difficulties in describing the interaction of the material and the ideal in the era of the information society are generated by the analysis of information and virtual reality. So, V. M. Lukin notes: "In the transition to information civilization, a radical change in the main resource of production occurs. This resource is information. But information is not a material, but an ideal resource" [4,] . "Informational work is almost no longer determined by matter, especially material-sign matter"[5,8-9] . "Not material reasons, but informational ideal activity becomes decisive" [6,10] . The authors of the monograph "History of Informatics and the Philosophy of Information Reality" adhere to a similar point of view, referring to the main features of information as a phenomenon primarily " immateriality" [7,85] . They consider virtual reality a new kind of informational reality, which has a number of properties of "objective ideal being" and "subjective ideal being"[8,181] . We can completely agree with the conclusion of the authors of the collective work: "... virtual reality does not have its own essence, even at least relatively independent of other forms of being. Its existence is the result of the interaction and complementarity of material and ideal forms of being "[9,181] . It is this interaction that requires a more detailed philosophical analysis. The
idea of the non-materiality of information gives rise, from our point of view, to deep contradictions. At present, as in the time of V.I. Lenin, no third fundamental reality has been found besides matter and consciousness. If we assume that the information is intangible, it would have to be argued that ideal, spiritual processes take place not only in the human brain, but also on any diskette or flash drive that we use to record information. The memory of a computer system deals with material information processes that can be perceived by a person and only in his brain are truly transformed into an ideal product - knowledge.
From our point of view, the unsuccessful interpretation of information as a spiritual phenomenon and inaccurate presentation of the concept of matter are associated not only with well-known socio-political reasons - the refusal of modern Russia from the traditional Marxist dialectical-materialistic worldview and an attempt to replace it with other concepts. Deeper, more objective reasons are connected with the formation of the information society, in which the interaction between the material and the spiritual is qualitatively complicated. In modern philosophy, a crisis actually develops in the understanding of matter and its interaction with consciousness, in many respects resembling the crisis that was described by V. I. Lenin in "Materialism and Empirio-Criticism". The crisis of the concept of philosophical materialism at the beginning of the 20th century, mainly overcome by substantiating the concept of matter as an objective reality, arose as a result of the well-known crisis in physics and the sociopolitical processes of that era. The current crisis in the understanding of matter is caused, firstly, by the formation of a post-industrial (informational) society and, secondly, not so much by scientific discoveries, studies of nature, but by technical inventions that, based on these studies, revolutionized the processing of information (computers, computer networks, programs, etc.).
Overcoming the modern crisis requires clarification of the concepts of material and ideal, comparing them with phenomena new to scientific knowledge in which the interaction of matter and consciousness takes on the most complex forms, such as information, virtual reality, and a computer program.
The currently widespread concept of the non-materiality of information logically entails the recognition of its ideality, spirituality, belonging only to consciousness, and not to natural forms of matter in which consciousness is known to be absent. However, some grounds for convergence of information, virtual reality, on the one hand, and subjective reality, on the other, certainly exist. In this regard, we consider in more detail a computer program as a special type of reality.
The functions of the program are such that it really partially replaces the ideal mental image in the processes of management and control, models it at the material (more precisely, physical) level. The software product is becoming a fundamentally new type of artificial material objects, ensuring the functioning of a specific mechanism of interaction between the material
and the ideal. An ideal image exists only on the material substrate of the human brain. Transferring some control and management functions to technology, a person constructs a material object, which is a simplified, purely material analogue of the subject and his ideal product - thought. Such an analogue of thought - a computer program - begins to fulfill some functions of an ideal mental image, but differs from it in the main thing: it is purely material, and in modern computers it generally does not go beyond the physical form of matter.
How deep is the similarity between a computer program and a mental image?
The main features of the mental image are, as you know, ideality and subjectivity. The software product, modeling these features of spiritual social phenomena at the level of the physical form of matter, acquires similarities with the world of mental images. We propose to generalize this similarity in terms of pseudo-ideality and pseudo- subjectivity .
Pseudo-ideality . The content of the ideal image is not the properties of the material substrate of thought (brain), but the properties of an external object. The program is also created to reflect the properties of external objects and control the impact on them. But it remains a purely physical phenomenon - in contrast to the ideal image, which is the way the characteristics of any objects exist in isolation from their own natural substrate on the basis of a special, universal material substrate of the human brain[10,193] . In computer technology, with the help of which virtual reality is created, a certain universal substrate is also used - the information carrier. Any information obtained by a person can be recorded on this substrate. However, its (this substrate) universality is not absolute, as is the universality of man and his brain. The universality of the information carrier is specified and ensured by the universal cognitive activity of man and his material transformative activity, derived from them. The programmer endows the software product with some external features of the ideal form of reflection that are not found in other material objects. The program expresses the content of other material substrates and methods of human activity, carries information about them, and in an accessible and convenient form for sensory perception. This reflection occurs "with a loss of quality", since it remains a physical manifestation of an artificially constructed physical system (computer plus program). It is qualitatively simpler than the ideal image with which it is in relation to homomorphic correspondence. This is a simplified physical model of the ideal, a reflection on the physical level of human thinking, that is, a " pseudo-ideal " phenomenon.
Pseudo-subjectivity . The subjectivity of thought consists in its secrecy from outside observation, existence only for a thinking subject, inexpressibility to other subjects. If ideal formations in form (but not in content) are fully subjective, then a computer program has some external features of the subjective. It is inaccessible to sensory perception without the use of special electronic equipment. Its internal content is usually hidden and unobservable to everyone except programmers who own special codes. The subjectivity
of the ideal image is a consequence of the fundamental impossibility of transferring the internal state of the brain substrate to other substrates. The pseudo-subjectivity of the software product is a consequence of technical difficulties in deciphering its internal structure by an outside observer. Some of these technical difficulties are caused by the laws of physics, the other part is created using these laws artificially and purposefully.
A computer program is a qualitatively new type of material objects created by man in the framework of the "second nature" ( technosphere , noosphere) at the post-industrial stage of social development. In terms of its functions and external manifestations, the program stands closer to human thinking than all other components of the technical production system. Other parts of the technical system must be coordinated mainly with the physical, even mechanical capabilities of a person, and a computer program - already with the capabilities of his psyche. The program extends the path from the ideal image to its materialization in the process of labor, as at the dawn of human history a mechanical tool lengthened the path from a person to an object of labor. Now, when creating a product of labor, the ideal image materializes in it not directly and directly, but through an additional link - a computer program as
a thought - like , pseudo - ideal , pseudo - subjective m aterial image (construct). Only thanks to the program, a new class of ideal constructs becomes possible that will create whole spheres and areas of work. These are space exploration and nuclear energy, new information management and transmission systems, the Internet economy, home-based technology of highly qualified information specialists, etc.
Thus, virtual informational reality is a combination of special material processes that are more precise, finer, more detailed than any other material processes known now, they model spiritual phenomena due to their pseudo-
ideality and pseudo- subjectivity . Virtual reality was created by man as an artificial modification of objective reality, a material mediator, which made it possible to improve the effect of consciousness on matter. The ideal, in the figurative expression of K. Marx, is material, transplanted into a human head and transformed in it[11,21] . The virtual, also figuratively expressed, is ideal, embodied in special material structures that allow the use of more advanced technologies for materializing the ideal through new forms of labor that arise in the information society (information, scientific, universal). It can be assumed that the interaction of objective and subjective reality will develop along the path of complication due to the formation of mediating links that will more fully reflect the processes of one reality in the language of another. This is not only knowledge, but also the formation of new layers of material and spiritual reality as a result of labor activity.
The level of development of science at the beginning of the XX century allowed V. I. Lenin to formulate the only essential feature of matter - "to be an objective reality", that is, to exist before, outside and
independently of subjective reality, to exist on its own substrate, according to its own laws, not to depend on anything external, to be, as a Spinoza substance, the cause of itself. In Russian philosophical literature, an approach was substantiated, according to which all the numerous signs and properties of matter should most correctly be considered as a manifestation and disclosure of the content of the "property" "to be an objective reality", and not as independent, separate properties that supposedly complement the latter. All the characteristics of matter, taken beyond the concept of objective reality, "supplementing" it, excluded from its content, thereby fall into the sphere of subjective reality, since there is no more "third" reality in the world[12,31-35] . "The essence of the matter is that the material world confronts its integral and single essence only to consciousness as its universal and universal opposite and product. Therefore, any other paths to knowing this essence are illusory and ineffective. "[13,35] . Objective reality does not develop, of course, from "less objective" to "more objective" - any form of matter equally possesses this fundamental "property" (more precisely, essence). At the same time, objective reality does not remain unchanged - it goes through an endless sequence of the main stages of development, of which four are now known to us: physical, chemical, biological and social forms of matter. These forms of matter and the laws of their interaction have been studied quite extensively over the past two hundred years, both in the concrete scientific and philosophical aspects (the works of G.V. F. Hegel, F. Engels, Russian philosophers of the 20th century B. M. Kedrova , V.I. Svidersky , A.A. Butakov, V.V. Orlov, etc.). At the turn of the XX - XXI centuries. V. I. Lenin's prediction about the possibility of discovering new, "outlandish" forms of objective reality was confirmed. Among them were not only little-studied areas of the microworld, but also virtual reality. It was the creation by man of a new type of reality - virtual reality - that made the question of the development of forms of objective reality and the development of its relationship with subjective reality even more urgent.
Formulating the concept of matter, V.I. Lenin naturally had to emphasize its unity and the main essential feature - to be an objective reality. Matter always has this attribute, although it is revealed only when it is compared with consciousness. Modern science and social practice allow us to pose the problem of a more detailed description of the structure of objective reality in its development: what forms of objective reality exist and how is the relationship of each of these forms with subjective reality built? The study of this problem is not only a deepening of theoretical ideas about the connection of matter and consciousness, but also a prerequisite for understanding the complex mechanisms of interaction of the subjective factor and the objective laws of development of modern society.
The idea of the structure of objective reality is quite simply reconstructed based on the well-known fundamental concepts of modern science. In objective reality, first of all, we can distinguish natural reality, which includes the basic forms of matter in nature
(physical, chemical and biological) and social objective reality. Social objective reality is usually divided into society as such (people themselves, their material abilities, needs, relationships) and nature transformed by man (it is called the noosphere, technosphere , anthroposphere , "second nature"). It seems to us that several decades ago, as a result of the information revolution, nature transformed by man began to stratify into two different forms of objective reality. One of them can be conditionally called "subject", "classical" or "traditional" (the terminology in this case has not yet been formed), the other - virtual. The difference between objective and virtual reality remotely resembles the difference between material and spiritual. Object reality consists of things created by human labor, objects that satisfy human needs directly by their natural (or socially transformed) properties. Virtual reality is formed by computer programs, information with the properties of pseudo - ideality and pseudo - subjectivity . It is a source of communication signals.[14,55] , is created to materialize in a visual form ideal images and does not possess all the natural (for example, physical) properties of objects and processes that this reality reproduces (models). The physical objects and processes that form virtual reality were purposefully coordinated, linked to mental, spiritual processes and the capabilities of the human psyche. Therefore, in their structure and content, they are more similar to subjective reality than any other forms of objective reality existing in nature or created by man.
The development of objective reality consists not only in its phased complication, but in the ability to generate consciousness and a person (in a more categorical version they say - focus on a person). Therefore, in philosophy, attempts are made to describe the attitude to subjective reality, not only of objective reality as a whole, but also of its individual historically emerging forms. Let us try to briefly outline the main stages in the evolution of this relationship.
Objective reality as a whole is primary, exists before, outside and independently of subjective reality. This general formulation describes the necessary, but only the most abstract content of the concept of philosophical materialism. "Due to the infinity of the world, the content of its existence independent of consciousness cannot, obviously, ever be completely studied. Thus, the objectivity of the external world turns out to be an inexhaustible problem, and its solution must be filled with new substantial content with the discovery of each new way of independent existence, a new form of external reality "[15,20] . What new and specific does each of the known forms of objective reality bring to its mode of existence?
Natural reality is known to us by the basic forms of matter. They exist before consciousness and are capable of full-fledged independent development even before the appearance of subjective reality. Their connection with the latter is expressed in the creation of conditions for the emergence of consciousness. The two main philosophical concepts that describe this form
of communication are the theory of reflection and the anthropic principle. Reflection is a property of all matter, essentially related to sensation.[16,91] , -develops from simple to complex species and gradually forms material prerequisites for the emergence of the ideal. The anthropic principle reveals the deep kinship of two fundamental realities in another aspect. The whole history of nature can be considered as preparation (of course, not realized by anyone) for the generation of subjective reality, and for all the infinite time of its development, not a single event has occurred that makes the appearance of consciousness impossible. "The universe (and therefore the fundamental parameters on which it depends)," says B. Carter, who proposed the anthropic principle, "should be such that observers are allowed to exist in it at some stage of evolution "[ 17,373] .
It has already been noted above that social objective reality is usually understood as the unity of two fundamentally different areas. First, societies as such, that is, communities of people, "living human individuals" [ 18,19] , as expressed by K. Marx. Secondly, it is nature, transformed by man and transformed into the world of objects that satisfy his needs, the so-called "second nature". Society as such, living human individuals, is the only form of objective reality known to us that can generate subjective reality and continuously interact with it. There is no direct contact between objective and subjective reality outside society as such (if you do not take into account the simple forms of the psyche and ideal mental images in higher animals). The connection of the "second nature" with subjective reality is more complex and indirect. It is usually believed that in it there is an interaction of the object laws of natural reality in no way connected with consciousness and social laws that manifest themselves only with the participation of subjective reality, human consciousness (although these laws are not always fully recognized by a person).
Finally, virtual objective reality is most complexly connected with subjective. This connection, from our point of view, includes the following main points.
First, virtual reality is part of objective reality and, in this sense, is the opposite of subjective reality.
Secondly, virtual reality is constructed from material components (magnetic carriers, charged physical particles) in the course of conscious human activity. It is structured and filled with content defined by subjective reality.
Thirdly, virtual reality describes by material technical means only the content of objective natural and social reality, which had previously been transformed into the content of consciousness and expressed in ideal form by means of subjective reality.
Fourth, the connection of virtual reality with consciousness is also expressed in the fact that its objects acquire the properties of pseudo-ideality and pseudo- subjectivity, simulating subjective reality and receiving an external resemblance to it, more significant than any other forms of objective reality known now.
Fifth, the formation of virtual reality leads to the complication of subjective reality. The possibility of a
more complete materialization of ideal images using the technical means of virtual reality gives consciousness, figuratively speaking, broader support in the material world. The purposeful influence of consciousness on the material world, mediated through the material body of a person, becomes thinner and more perfect due to the opportunity to develop more complex target images, a tree of goals and faster, with more effective feedback materialize these goals.
Sixth, virtual reality causes significant, possibly revolutionary shifts in public consciousness, which have not yet been completed and cannot yet be finally evaluated. This is a qualitatively higher level of awareness and accessibility of information, changing the psychology of communication, creating new channels for the relationship between people. The development of these channels forms a modern personality type with new features of sensory perception and abstract thinking, which still needs to be studied by the methods of psychology, sociology, cultural studies and other sciences.
Thus, in the era of the information society, it becomes completely clear that the relation of objective and subjective reality, matter and consciousness is not limited to the simplified understanding of the relation of primary - secondary. Each historically emerged form of objective reality is associated with consciousness in its own way, specific to it. A philosophical analysis of modern society requires revealing the specifics of these ways of connecting material and spiritual - both in the case of virtual reality, and when considering the increasingly complicated relations of subjective and objective factors in economics, politics and culture.
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