The Problem of Stress and the Phenomenon of Death in the Modern World: Medical and Philosophical Aspect

Abstract

In modern conditions, unfavorable demographic trends are becoming more and more acute. They affect the population of the most developed and prosperous regions but indicate a decrease in the viability of the human population as a whole. We are talking about the "diseases of civilization" that arise under the influence of psycho-emotional stress. Until recently, the main attention was paid to its psychological aspect, but today it is necessary to focus on its somatic, bodily component. This requires the improvement of the classical concept of stress, primarily by highlighting the basic criterion for the viability of biological organisms. Such a criterion is the phenomenon of death. Today, death is seen as a kind of autonomous beginning, absolutely the opposite of life. Nevertheless, there is a different point of view in science and philosophy, according to which death is only an epiphenomenon of life accompanying its evolutionary process. At the level of biological evolution, the living adapts to the living. At the cultural level, the inanimate principle is included in the evolution in the image of the technology that man creates. Nowadays, in the transition from the second to the third millennium, this process reaches its apogee. The technosphere rises above the biosphere, and the living is forced to adapt to the inanimate. Hence stress, mass morbidity and depopulation. To conceptualize an alternative perspective, it is necessary to interpret stress as a result of the mismatch of the processes of inhibition and excitation in the human central nervous system under the influence of unfavorable external conditions. With such an approach, the importance of A.A. Ukhtomsky's teaching about the dominant increases, where inhibition plays a major role. It seems that the main provisions of this doctrine, introduced into a broad theoretical turn, will contribute to the productive solution of numerous problems facing modern humanity.