Volume 23, 2018
Metaphysics
Eduard I. Sorkin
Pages 147-152
Метафизичность сознания
Considering metaphysics as one of the ways of human thinking we have to take in account the very concept of thinking itself. We may describe the latter as a special and highest product of organized matter. Thus, the sufficient level of organization of the matter may provide a certain level of its self-knowledge. But there is still no convincing explanation, what is fundamentally different in organization of the nerve tissue of the brain, which perceives, for example, the color red petals of roses, from one hand, and the biological tissue of these petals, from another, and why one type of matter - the substance of the brain - can reflect the properties of the matter of another species - the color of roses. We may talk a good deal about functional specifics, information processes, thin quantum effects, etc. But as the 19th century Russian religious philosopher P. Yurkevich wrote: “If physiologist observes the changes, the processes in the sensory nerves [...] with the help of the most perfect microscope, anyway, in addition to the physical or chemical changes of the nerve cells, no feeling, no thought he would not see [...] The natural order of study refers us to a metaphysical thought [...] It’s not in the electrical current in the nerves that [...] but in something else, that there is in the whole content of the world.” Leibniz in “Reflections on Metaphysics” referred to the “perception of qualities such as color, warmth, which does not exist outside of us; every substance (man – E. S.) is as if the whole world and the mirror of God or the whole of the universe”. An attempt to correlate the phenomenon of thinking and consciousness with the whole of the positions of metaphysics helps to develop some kind of the holographic model, which gives the opportunity to link the well-known and rationally perceived scientific facts to ideas of supra-rational knowledge, as well as with the idea of Revelation.