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Despite recent advances, the origin and utility of consciousness remains under debate. Using an evolutionary perspective on the origin of consciousness, this review elaborates on the promising theoretical background suggested in the temporospatial theory of consciousness, which outlines world-brain alignment as a critical predisposition for controlling behavior and adaptation. Such a system can be evolutionarily effective only if it can provide instant cohesion between the subsystems, which is possible only if it performs an intrinsic activity modified in light of the incoming stimulation. One can assume that the world-brain interaction results in a particular interference pattern predetermined by connectome complexity. This is what organisms experience as their exclusive subjective state, allowing the anticipation of regularities in the environment. Thus, an anticipative system can emerge only in a regular environment, which guides natural selection by reinforcing corresponding reactions and decreasing the system entropy. Subsequent evolution requires complicated, layered structures and can be traced from simple organisms to human consciousness and society. This allows us to consider the mode of entropy as a subject of natural evolution rather than an individual entity.

Experiencing, awareness, and being conscious of the subjective experience are familiar to everyone and invariably bear the stamp of subjectivity. This makes the concept of consciousness one of the most problematic in modern science; insofar as there is no satisfactory definition of human consciousness that has been developed yet. This article reviews the most popular approaches to the definition of consciousness in modern philosophy and cognitive sciences. Our study continues the tradition of the Russian activity-based approach in studying consciousness, thus the greatest attention is paid to studies that consider con­sciousness in the context of interaction with the world and the culture. The au­thors consider the latest data of anthropology and neuroscience in order to find the features that distinguish human consciousness from the other forms of sub­jective reality, which are present in the other species. Based on the provided analysis, the authors propose to define human consciousness as a characteristic ability of a human to control their actions at the level of intentions, which should be mastered during the life. Therefore, it becomes possible to distinguish particular features of the human consciousness from other forms of subjective reality and to show the logic of the evolutionary development of subjective re­ality. This result can become a foundation for further research on how to iden­tify most common subjective states of human with the corresponding activity of the neural system.

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This article investigates the concept of identity: the research objective is to consider the principles that can be used to unite various approaches to describing the emergence and transformation of human identity. The research method is a comparative analysis of significant theories of Western philosophy in terms of the achievements of modern interdisciplinary research. Within Western philosophy, most concepts of identity can be classified as belonging to individual- centric or socio-centric research models. Therefore, such a distinction serves as the starting point to discuss the emergence and transformation of the concept of identity. The provided analysis reveals two facts. First, the investigation starts either from individual human experience or from social communication structures, this choice determining further research as individual-centric or sociocentric. Second, it is ultimately impossible to reduce an individual experience or social effect to their opposition: both individual and social beings determine the emergence and functioning of human identity. Hence, human identity should be considered as a result of interaction between individual and social beings. Within contemporary epistemology, the activity realism approach provides a theoretical foundation for explaining identity as an outcome of human active cognition and the transformation of the environment. Thus, this article provides a theoretical foundation for the empirically confirmed fact that human identity is determined by all influential factors present in the lifeworld. Any theory that neglects any efficient causes for the formation of identity in concrete circumstances of time, space, and culture inevitably fails. The practical value of this article is to create a theoretical foundation for empirical research on natural or artificial transformations of human identity in specific circumstances of cross-cultural communication and competition.