Consciousness, smysl and untranslatability

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.