Consciousness, smysl and untranslatability
Philosophy Journal 2023 DOI: 10.21146/2072-0726-2023-16-2-18-25 (opens in new tab)
Study at a glance
AI-extracted from the abstract| Characteristics | Theoretical or philosophical paper Peer reviewed |
|---|---|
| Key points | Argues that consciousness should be treated as a fundamental philosophical problem rather than an object, and that the history of European philosophy is defined by competing solutions to it. Contends that Russian terms such as "osoznanie" and the verb formed from "Smysl" name a meaningful, existential activity of mind that English cannot adequately render, and that recognizing this activity could change the perspective on creating a "strong" AI. |
Abstract
An unbiased metaphysics of consciousness allows us to put forward a thesis that consciousness is not an object, but a fundamental problem of modern philosophy and different solutions of this problem define the history of European philosophy. For Descartes, consciousness is Cogito, the personalization of substance by the mind acting in a variety of cogital, conscious acts. Kant, for whom substance is a mode of thinking the unity of experience, Cogito is not a thing (Res), but a transcendental condition for the formation of notions in the process of categorical synthesis. The resurgent phenomenology and analytical philosophy of consciousness in the 21st century aim at studying consciousness, respectively, in the transcendental-theoretical and pragmatic-naturalistic settings. Continuing the Kantian line of thinking, one can see the processuality of consciousness as data acquisition process, but the verb formed from a noun “consciousness” (for this processuality) is difficult to adequately translate into English. To achieve completeness in identifying the problem area of the philosophy of consciousness, it is necessary to take into account one more type of conscious activity referred to as “osoznanie” in Russian (“awareness”, “coming into consciousness about something”). The Russian verb formed from the noun Smysl cannot be adequately translated into English as the main language of the analytical philosophy of consciousness and this term can mean the opposite of data acquisition process and can refer us to the idea of Integrity (A.V. Smirnov). Once the most important, meaningful and existential activity of the mind is identified as the denotation of this term, the problem of Smysl acquires the potential of changing the perspective on the possibility of creating a “strong” AI.