LENIN, MACH AND THE PROBLEM OF KNOWLEDGE

Chumakov

The materialistic understanding of the process of cognition, which was the basis for almost seventy years of development of Soviet philosophy, recently again became the subject of criticism in the article “Philosophy of Science: V.I. Lenin and Mach "[1]. It puts forward the concept of the subjective idealists J. Berkeley, D. Hume, E. Mach, R. Avenarius and other philosophers who hold the same theoretical position at the beginning of the 20th century. Why is the author of the article trying to revive subjective idealism? Partially the answer to this question can be found in the discussion of the "round table" of the journal "Questions of Philosophy", devoted to information, in particular its social problems [2].

B.I. Pruzhinin, who considered “the knowledge society or cognitive capitalism and its socio-economic consequences of the development of“ knowledge-intensive ”industries," noted that under the conditions of private ownership, both the production of knowledge and knowledge itself “are included in commodity exchange,” that is, it is an object purchase and sale [2, p.109]. "At the same time, it loses the properties with which they associate hope for future prosperity ..." - this is how aphoristically the scientist speaks of the inability of capitalism to be a hope for a better future for all mankind, and Russia in particular. And further: 

“The transformation of knowledge into a commodity changes the structure of the community that produces information about the world. Values ​​and motives of a different kind are put forward, quite amenable to manipulation ... arise ... technically well-provided possibilities for manipulating a person with the help of information technologies ”[2, p. 110-111]. 

For example, manipulations in the Russian media are associated with the zombification of the population with the idea that everything is fine with us, and the country's development trends are quite favorable. All methods are used, hiding the real state of affairs, ensuring broad access to the media for people who are hypocritically concerned about the fate of Russia.

However, it is not only the average person on the street is exposed to "deceiving information" [2, p. 110],  it is often thrown into the philosophical community. How else to evaluate the article by A.L. Nikiforov [1], in which he tries to delimit the views of the natural scientist E. Mach from subjective idealism, to give a scientific tint to his methodology and psychology of cognition, and at the same time, in our opinion, to belittle the importance of V.I. Lenin in the development of philosophy? Thus, the author writes that Lenin  thought that "the views of E. Mach seemed to be a kind of idealism and agnosticism, compatible with religion, distracting the working masses from the class struggle." However, in our opinion, Mach's views could not "seem" to be idealistic, they were idealistic. Lenin, in his book Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, conducted a thorough analysis of the works of E. Mach. The book contains many quotations from the works of Mach, showing the idealistic nature of his views on the knowledge of man. Here are some of them.

From the book "Analysis of Sensations" - "Sensations are not" symbols of things. " Rather, a "thing" is a mental symbol for a complex of sensations ... Not things (bodies), but colors, sounds ... (what we usually call sensations) are the real elements of the world. " “For us, matter is not the first given. Such primary data are rather the elements (which are called sensations) ”[3, p.39; 4, p. 68-69]. 

From the book "Cognition and Delusion" - ""While there is no difficulty in constructing any physical element from sensations, i.e. mental elements - it is impossible to imagine any mental experience constructed from physical elements, i.e. from masses and movements" [3, p.40].

From the book "Analysis of Sensations" - "It is not the bodies that cause sensations, but the complexes of elements (complexes of sensations) form the bodies" [3, p.52]. 

In this connection, Lenin notes in the book: “Mach. .. quite clearly contrasts his philosophy with the point of view of the opposing theory, according to which sensations are the "symbols" of things, that is,  philosophical materialism ”[3, p.34]. However, it was not only Lenin who pointed to Mach's subjective idealism. Thus, Mach about the Englishman K. Pearson in his book "Mechanics" directly says that "I agree with his epistemological views on all essential points." But he, as Lenin writes, was “to such an extent ... careless that he simply declared both his own and Mach’s views to be“ idealistic ”” [3, p. 46]. 

So the views of Mach, Avenarius and their predecessors Berkeley and Hume could not “seem,” but were in fact subjectively idealistic.

A.L. Nikiforov claims that in his criticism Lenin gave "not so much a philosophical as a political assessment of Mach's views." But are the problems related to the solution of the fundamental question of philosophy political? Aren't they the main links in the development of the theory of knowledge? 

Until recently, there was an opinion in the philosophical community that works that did not touch upon the fundamental question of philosophy to one degree or another could not be considered philosophical.. However, in order to defend materialism, it is not necessary to raise new objections to idealism, it is only necessary to give the floor to Lenin, who, in his time, left no stone unturned on Mach's subjective idealism. Thus, his ideological questions “Should we go from things to sensation and thought? Or from thought and feeling to things? " [3, p.35] for Nikiforov are extremely idle. For him, "the question of where to start building a philosophical system has nothing to do with the choice of an idealistic or materialistic position." 

Lenin, however, answering his own questions, clearly separates them: 

“Engels adheres to the first, that is, the materialist line. The second, that is, the idealist line, is maintained by Mach. No subterfuge, no sophistry will eliminate the obvious and indisputable fact that E. Mach's teaching about things as complexes of sensations is subjective idealism, a simple chewing of Berkeleianism. If bodies are "complexes of sensations," as Mach says, or "combinations of sensations," as Berkeley said, then it inevitably follows that the whole world is only my idea ”[3, p. 35]

In the further presentation of his work, A.L. Nikiforov does not at all mention the division of philosophy into materialism and idealism. The author gives the floor to Mach when he tries to equalize matter and consciousness by means of "elements":

 "Thus, the physical and the mental contain common elements, between them there is not at all the sharp opposition that is usually accepted." 

Further, failing to find the corresponding natural-science quotations from his client, since they could not have been by definition in a subjective idealist, Nikiforov notes:

 “However, Lenin, it seems, did not pay attention to the fact that Mach's“ elements ”are not only subjective experiences, but experiences, taken together with the external influence on the senses of the subject. "

And so throughout his article, to the presentation of Mach's thoughts, the author mixes the words "external influence" found in his work, at least up to 10 times, which fundamentally changes the meaning of what was written by a famous natural scientist! As a result of such editing, it turns out that "when Mach speaks of" warm, "" wet, "etc., he means some kind of external influence together with the mental experiences of this influence." As a result, when reading this article, without turning to Lenin or to Mach, it is difficult to avoid the thought that everything is correct, that we have an almost materialistic understanding of cognition - the external world "influences", consciousness "experiences".

Could Lenin, just because “Mach, from the point of view of Lenin, was a servant of the bourgeoisie, therefore, deserves the most severe condemnation,” as A.L. Nikiforov, give birth to more than three hundred-page book of merciless philosophical criticism? Doubt in this made me turn again to Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, to carefully written quotations from Mach, and then to read on the Internet “Cognition and Delusion”, as well as “Analysis of Sensations” [4] by Mach himself. Unfortunately, nowhere I had a chance to find phrases similar to "external influence", which could speak of his natural-scientific, materialistic position in epistemology. Mach knows Berkeley, Hume, Avenarius, but he does not mention the materialists Marx and Engels. E. Mach pays major attention to the concept of physical and mental "elements", their connection, in which the main importance is given to the mental "elements", as befits a subjective idealist.
In "Mechanics", for example, he uses the concept of "element" in this way: "All natural science (external world. - V.Ch.) can only depict the complexes of those" elements "that we usually call" sensations "" [3, p. 48]. Mach's philosophy is, so to speak, "fakes itself" as materialism. Lenin writes in this regard:

“Mach and Avenarius secretly smuggle in materialism by means of the word“ element ”connecting the physical and the mental, which supposedly relieves their theory of the“ one-sidedness ”of subjective idealism. In fact, the trick with the word "element" is the most pitiful sophism, for the materialist, reading Mach and Avenarius, will immediately pose the question: what is an "element"? " [3, p. 50]. Thus, the text of A.L. Nikiforov with the attribution of the phrase "external influence" to Mach, in our opinion, is a certain disguise of subjective idealism with materialism.

The author says about Mach that "as a scientist he was interested in the nature of humanity, especially in scientific knowledge," and at the end of the article he shows what “picture of scientific knowledge Mach paints for us.” In his presentation it is as follows:

“He (Mach. - V.Ch.) discovers that the things around him can be decomposed into constituent elements - form, color, smell, size. What are these elements? They, Mach says, are a fusion of external influence (physical) with sensation (mental) ​​arising in the subject under the influence of this influence. The world around us is, in fact, an image of its impact on us. It is impossible to separate the physical from the mental and speak of it as something existing outside and independently of us. " There are two false premises here at once. The first is the improbability of Mach's judgments about "external influences" and other "influences."

 Lenin wrote of such "quirks" that this "is a pathetic attempt to embellish Mach's subjective idealism in a materialist spirit." In reality, Mach does not go further than the connection indicated in the article: "the physical and the mental contain common elements," as well as the essence of idealism: "everything physical that I find." The second is in the fundamental contradiction between the idea of ​​"external influence" and the  position that "one cannot separate the physical from the mental and speak of it as something existing outside and independently of us." 

To this should be added one more phrase by A.L. Nikiforova: “The process of cognition consists in adapting our thoughts to facts.” This is an almost verbatim thought of E. Mach: “Science always arises in the process of adapting our thoughts to a certain area of ​​experience” [4, p. 70]. Is this stripped down materialism or underdeveloped idealism?

A scientific understanding of a process, in this case the process of cognition, must reveal all the objects involved in the procedural activity, find the source - the first stage of the process, indicate the sequence of operations and the result of the activity. None of this can be found in Mach's understanding of cognition. Using the word "element", he never revealed its essence, location, physical or biological content. According to Mach, the source of knowledge, sensations are the first link in the process, but they are also its final link. The introduction of "common physical and mental elements" does not clarify the process of cognition. To this should be added a certain inconsistency in the "identification of the picture of the world" as understood by Nikiforov. At the beginning of his article, he writes, that “you can start with solving the problems of cognition and identify the constructed picture of the world with reality itself (here it is idealism. - V.Ch.), existing independently of the cognizing subject” (and what is this - materialism? - V.Ch.). But already on the next page A.L. Nikiforov notes: "Mach, after all, also accepts the scientific picture of the world, but he does not identify it with reality, but sees in it precisely the creation of science." So to identify or not to identify? After all, the "creation of science" is precisely the process of cognizing the objective, real world. So to identify or not to identify? After all, the "creation of science" is precisely the process of cognizing the objective, real world. 

At the time of Lenin, the concept of materialistic knowledge was somewhat simplified: “matter, acting on our senses, produces sensations” [3, p.50]. Nikiforov says that with Lenin "there really is a chasm between the subject's mental experience and the external world." On the contrary, in Mach, “the subject looks at the world and for him the objects of the world are given only together with their sensory experiences. With such a view, there is no longer any chasm between the world and its mental experience; on the contrary, the world is what is given in experience and cognition ”[1, p.78]. And this is precisely idealism.

What does V.I. Lenin write about this? “As for any materialist, sensation is truly a direct connection of consciousness with the external world, it is the transformation of the energy of external stimulation into a fact of consciousness. The sophism of idealistic philosophy lies in the fact that sensation is taken not as a connection of consciousness with the external world, but as a partition, a wall separating consciousness from the external world - not as an image of an external phenomenon corresponding to sensation, but as “the only being” ”[3, p. 46]. "The transformation of the energy of external stimulation into a fact of consciousness" was an unusually laconic, unintentional brilliant analysis of the process of cognition. It can be divided into two relatively independent stages. First is the stage in which information about the external world is received by the human senses. The second is analytical-effective, in which there is a logical transformation of the information received, its awareness and the production of some actions that contribute to human life, as well as an understanding of the processes, phenomena and structure of the surrounding world, i.e. the emergence of new knowledge. 

For the first stage, incoming information is responsible, which, despite the difficulties, can be investigated.

The second stage  is determined by the physiological characteristics of the brain, which are currently difficult to comprehend and lend themselves only to some functional assumptions. To what extent is the essence of the information process, which is an integral element of cognition, known? Judging by the already mentioned “round table” of the “Question of Philosophy”, information remains a phenomenon that has not yet been fully studied and represents a certain scientific problem [2].

The participants in the aforementioned roundtable associate the “availability” of information with diversity, difference or heterogeneity. “There was no point in talking about information outside of movement,” says A.D. Ursul, noting that “in the process of movement, the difference is the objective basis for the use of the informational approach, which focuses not on changing material-energy characteristics, but on the dynamics of diversity”. “Where there is evolution, there is information,” continues D.I. Dubrovsky. However, such an  understanding of information sources leads, in some cases, to insoluble contradictions, for example, the recent discovery by astrophysicists of "dark" energy and "dark" mass. A.D. Ursul, revealing their features, says that "in this largest fragment of the Universe there is no movement, change, difference, heterogeneity", which means “in the cosmic vacuum (dark energy. - V.Ch.), perhaps there is no information or it is contained there in a minimal amount”, and this despite the fact that “the cosmic vacuum affects all other fragments of the Universe, forcing it to expand "[2, p. 90-91]. This can only indicate that the idea of ​​the source of information associated with change and evolution is only a part of knowledge about it.

The categorical statement of K.K. Colin, that “attempts to give a general definition of information seem to me unpromising” [2, p.87], nevertheless does not prohibit formulating a natural intuitive idea of ​​information. It manifests itself in the form of some kind of inter-material communication leading to actual or potential changes in the receiving environment. The message is a special case of the general concept - material impact. More general ideas about information are associated with the impact on homogeneous material objects through communication channels. This makes clear the property of dark energy, which, having an anti-gravitational effect, pushes galaxies apart, showing an information-physical effect on the ordinary matter of the Universe.

Understanding the nature of information leads us to the moment of the birth of the observable Universe, to the Big Bang. Material objects constantly inform the surrounding space about their state through the influence of physical fields: gravity, electromagnetic waves, cosmic rays, as well as through mechanical, weather, temperature and other influences. Homogeneous natural objects, perceiving this physical information, begin to change their behavior, in turn, influencing the source of information. Mutual influences of material objects through the communication field are transformed into their interaction. All further development of matter took place within the framework of physical interactions that determined its evolution. Field and contact interactions caused changes in the state of objects, which indicates the informational nature of these relationships. The ontological nature of interactions is at the same time an epistemological process that regulates the mutual behavior and state of material objects, manifesting an integral property of the evolution of material systems. Physical force interaction is of current importance, since it leads to an immediate reaction of objects in accordance with the current physical laws. The language of communication is the size of the physical fields of interaction. After the termination of the physical connection, the altered state of objects is preserved, and the objects behave according to the last magnitude of interaction, showing the property of memorization.

Billions of years of development of inert matter led to the emergence of the first single-celled living organisms. The evolution of living matter followed the path of creating a ramified nervous system, consisting of highly sensitive organs that determine the effects and changes in the external, surrounding world; logical-analyzing organ - the brain, which controls these changes and controls the motor muscles to perform the body's response to changes in the environment. Information has become an integral part of the cognitive process, connecting the external world with living organisms, allowing them to safely exist and move in space.

Sensitive organs of animals, working in one of the communication fields (acoustic, light, mechanical, and a number of others), made it possible to move from a system of interaction in inert matter to a more secretive, one-sidedly influencing information system that works only to receive information about the situation in the surrounding world. However, this one-sidedness hindered the further development of living matter. "In the interests" of survival, in order to establish the relationship between the animal world, mutations that have occurred in the body and natural selection have created an organ for extracting sound vibrations associated with the respiratory organs - the vocal apparatus. The animal information apparatus became two-way, working both for receiving and transmitting messages. However, due to its primitive design, their vocal apparatus could only transmit a limited range of sounds: a whistle, clicking, stitching sounds, growling and other sounds that convey a limited amount of information. Only one of the latest hominid mutations, which led to the emergence of a vocal apparatus capable of producing articulate sounds, made it possible to ensure effective information interaction with their own kind. The development of articulate speech in the process of communication led to the development of consciousness and the formation of Homo sapiens.

Known for its negativity, N. Wiener's definition: “information is information, not matter or energy” is insufficient for a complete understanding of the category of information. It seems that the physical meaning of information can be defined as a process in which the property of the communication field, due to the properties of the generating matter, affects the addressee. A person with his senses transforms the modulation of the communication field into internal neuropsychic information, which determines the semantic state of the neurodynamic structures of the brain, deciphering the content of information. If necessary, consciousness reproduces through the vocal apparatus the response sound information, producing speech coding of acoustic vibrations of the communication field - the air environment, which can be called a property of these vibrations. Moving on to the consideration of information in inert matter, we will find that there information is also a property of matter. Material fields, being communication channels for transmitting information, its carrier, contain the information itself in the size and configuration of the material field, in its modulation, manifesting itself in the form of its properties. In view of this, information can be presented as a semantic, meaningful property of the communication field of interacting matter, which makes its manifestation similar both in the field of objective physical reality and in the field of consciousness activity. manifesting itself in the form of its properties. 

The similarity of communication processes in self-organized and natural systems allows us to talk about the universality of the concept of information, covering both living and non-living matter. The presence of physical laws of interaction in inert matter, leading to the creation of new structures and, as a result, providing evolutionary changes in matter, are analogs of syntactic, semantic and pragmatic properties inherent in the functional concept of information. The division into attributive and functional information [2, p.85] is associated with insufficient understanding of the nature of information and is not of fundamental importance. There are some peculiarities, but the meaning of the encoded message by the physical carrier of previously unknown content and its adequate decoding by the recipient are the same in both cases.

In the development of information processes in inert and living matter, a number of dialectical stages took place: from energetic interaction in inert matter to the impact of information from the surrounding life on the first living organisms, up to humans, and a return to information interaction at a higher stage of life development with the emergence of human society ... From a single ontologically - epistemological nature of the existence of inert matter to its gradual division into being and cognition in Homo sapiens.

It seems that the physical meaning of information, due to the properties of the matter that generates it, is the property of the communication field to cause the interaction (impact) of material systems. Information is an integral process of combining ontological and epistemological properties of the material world, leading to specific axiological consequences in its evolution.

Understanding the process of cognition, it seems, is based on the use of informational communication processes that exist in nature and society. Moreover, the analysis of the phenomenon of information shows that in relation to living matter, and a person in particular, the information process is a direct analogue of the cognition process, bringing living matter into action on the basis of the information received. In any case, the source of information, the source of external influences are the properties of matter. Information records various properties of the material world: color, contours of objects, smell, frequency and intensity of sound vibrations, temperature, pressure, gravity, etc. signs. A person becomes an analyzer of incoming information, developing one or another logically conscious actual or potential action, closing the process of cognition. Schematically, the materialistic process of cognition can be represented in the form of a sequence: matter, property of matter, information as a coded property of matter transmitted by modulation of the communication channel, human sense organs, in which external information is transformed into internal neuropsychic information that produces a particular sensation of a person used by thinking for further transformation, memorization and action. Some features of the perception of the external world can separate information and cognition. Information, as it were, presupposes the passive contemplation of a person, inherent in everyday life, while cognition provides for his active intrusion into the surrounding nature, its scientific research.

Lenin casually mentions this when he gives another rebuff to Machism, set forth in the Analysis of Sensations, which “is the most incoherent confusion of opposing philosophical points of view” [3, p. 49]. He writes: “It (natural science - V.Ch.) explains different sensations of one color or another by different lengths of light waves existing outside the human retina, outside of a person and independently of him. This is materialism ”[3, p.50]. Why not an allegorical understanding of the informational process of cognition, where the wavelength of the light reflected from it indicates the color of the observed object! For Lenin, “between the mental experiences of the subject and the external world”, information acts by connecting them. And with Mach, the process of cognition he outlined is really impossible due to the absence of "common elements" connecting the physical and mental, due to the "breaking of the connection",

"Materialism and empirio-criticism", in our opinion, demonstratively using specific examples showed the erroneousness of idealistic views, and the modern information approach to solving the problems of epistemology testifies to the reliability of Lenin's analysis of the process of cognition. It is a pity that some distinguished representatives of modern Russian philosophy question the scientific character of dialectical materialism, forcing them to defend it again.

* The opinion of the editorial board of the journal regarding the article may not coincide with the opinion of the author.

List of references

1. Nikiforov A.L. Philosophy of Science: V.I. Lenin and E. Mach // Problems of Philosophy. 2010. No. 1.P. 76.

2. Informational approach in an interdisciplinary perspective: materials of the round table // Problems of Philosophy. 2010. No. 2.P. 84.

3. Lenin V.I. Materialism and empirio-criticism // Poln. collection op. T. 18.M .: Politizdat, 1975.

4. Mach E. Analysis of sensations and the relationship of the physical to the mental. Moscow: Publishing House "Territory of the Future", 2005.

Источник: https://leninism.su/books/4295-lenin-makh-i-problema-poznaniya.html