Consciousness in Cognitive Science

The development of cognitive science in the 21st century started not only to encompass the functioning of cognitive mechanisms, but also to include the study of human relationships with the surrounding reality. This has produced new approaches to the problem of consciousness, such as embodied cognition, enactivism. At the present stage of the development of cognitive science, which is designated as connectionist, consciousness is studied in the context of the neural network approach to brain modeling. The essence of the problem is whether consciousness can be understood through the study of cognitive mechanisms, such as perception, attention, memory, or whether consciousness is a specific phenomenon with its own neural substrate. One of the branches of modern cognitive science-cognitive neuroscience-develops concepts explaining the connection of the neural correlates of consciousness with its phenomenal properties. Cognitive science uses a reductionist methodology regardless of the basis (informational, biological or neural network interactions) of consciousness. Modern trends in the development of research in cognitive science, which express a new view on the nature of cognitive processes, are represented by the concept of embodied cognition, in which mind and body are inseparably connected, and enactivism. Within the enactivist approach, consciousness is embodied, and it emerges in the course of evolution, which can be understood as a cognitive activity accomplished through action into the environment. Cognitive processes are explained by such research programs as evolutionary epistemology. The latter confirms the fact that life is moving along the way of improving knowledge towards a more refined, well-ordered organization, and knowledge is regarded as the most important adaptive mechanism of evolution. Higher levels of information processing affect lower ones in this complex hierarchically organized recursive cognitive process. This is important for understanding the role of consciousness as an organizing and transformative element of the cognitive process. Cognitive science seeks and finds confirmation of the functioning of consciousness, cognition, and language in natural sciences. However, demonstrating the complexity of these processes, it only starts to take into account and to reveal issues that involve deeper dimensions: sources of creativity, paradox, mental and spiritual life of the human soul.

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