Knowledge and understanding of natural processes in which human life takes place is a prerequisite for successful practical activity. Unlike animals, humans, in the process of labor, comprehend reality, purposefully accumulating and passing on acquired knowledge to others. "As long as people do not know the forces of nature, they blindly submit to them; but once they know them, then the forces of nature submit to humans," noted G. V. Plekhanov.
However, cognition is not a uniform and straightforward process; its path is complex and winding. Even science is not immune to errors and misconceptions, and this is even more true for pre-scientific knowledge, which often contains inaccuracies, distortions, and conjectures.
Nevertheless, there are no grounds to regard pre-scientific knowledge with disdain. After all, it has accumulated centuries of experience of the people, and it has helped people become human through the process of understanding and mastering the forces of nature and self-awareness. From this perspective, the origins of the positive pre-scientific knowledge of the Kyrgyz people are of great interest. The foundation of this knowledge consists not of superstitions and prejudices, nor of misconceptions and religious interpretations, but primarily of fairly accurate empirical representations of the properties and phenomena of the surrounding world. The pre-scientific knowledge of a particular people is integrated into their everyday activities, forming an inseparable part of their practical skills and abilities, which have been passed down from generation to generation. The integration into activity, which hindered pre-scientific knowledge from freeing itself from inaccuracies and incompleteness and conditioned its relatively low level, had a positive significance on one hand, but on the other, it impeded its development. It is known that only the isolation of knowledge into an independent sphere, the ability to compare it with other types of knowledge, is a necessary condition for its systematization and the emergence of science. Nevertheless, in the pre-scientific knowledge of the Kyrgyz, one can find the seeds of correct, objectively true representations about the main natural processes and phenomena and their interconnections.
A characteristic feature of the pre-scientific representations of the Kyrgyz about nature is their undifferentiated, holistic nature, which, in a certain sense, corresponds to the perception of reality by humans, which can only be viewed as consisting of various parts and fragments, objects of study of different scientific disciplines, as a result of abstract scientific activity. In this work, the pre-scientific representations of the Kyrgyz about physical, geological, astronomical, and other phenomena will be considered separately, although at that time, of course, there were no special teachings about them.
Pre-scientific knowledge primarily deserves attention because it shows the significance of, albeit initially unconscious, naively materialistic representations about nature for successful labor activity. It was the needs of practice and labor that allowed for the collection and preservation of all the wealth of reliable knowledge about nature, which objectively opposed idealistic, religious interpretations of it. And this is where the enduring significance of pre-scientific knowledge as an integral part of the labor activity of the people lies.
"Knowledge is a terrible force of humanity," wrote A. V. Lunacharsky, "which it opposes to nature. The more objective the knowledge is, the fewer factual voids it contains, the more accurately it corresponds to reality, the easier it is to conquer the elements and dominate them, armed with it."
The naively materialistic representations of the Kyrgyz, to a certain extent, opposed the idealistic worldview imposed by Islam since the 14th century. In this regard, they can also be viewed as part of the ideological baggage that, along with other reasons, contributed to the relatively weak spread of religious fanaticism among this people.
The culture of the Kyrgyz has undergone a long and complex path of development. Its uniqueness, expressed in a unique folklore-epic complex, especially in music, clothing, utensils, customs, etc., does not exclude a certain influence from other cultures. In fact, in all areas of culture of any people, one can identify more or less clearly expressed traces of the influence of other cultures. After all, interaction is one of the natural and necessary conditions for the existence and evolution of the cultures of all peoples. Nevertheless, within each culture, there exists a peculiar framework that ensures its individuality and uniqueness, allowing it to maintain its integrity in the process of interaction with other cultures. In this core, any influence, if it occurred, is transformed to such an extent that it becomes an organic part of the culture that has absorbed it. The property of universality is most prominently manifested in scientific knowledge. As K. Marx pointed out, "...universal labor is any scientific labor, any discovery, any invention. It is conditioned partly by the cooperation of contemporaries, partly by the use of the labor of predecessors."
The life experience, knowledge, and philosophy of long-standing nomads — the Scythians, Huns, and others — were mastered by the Kyrgyz and further developed. This fact has been noted by the well-known Hungarian Turkologist István Mandoki Konur. Of Kipchak origin, he has visited Kyrgyz ails more than once.
One of the most interesting research tasks is to identify the sources of the pre-scientific representations of the Kyrgyz, the roots of which often lead back centuries and to peoples that are geographically quite distant from them.
The first step on this path is the accumulation of information about the people's representations, the traditional layers of culture. It is extremely important to understand that the peripheral parts of culture not only comparatively easily undergo transformation but can often completely disappear. Thus, in connection with the spread of modern education and scientific knowledge among the Kyrgyz people, the need for pre-scientific knowledge has diminished, and at present, it has survived only in oral traditions, records, and in the form of remnants. Nevertheless, the study of these representations remains relevant, as it allows, on one hand, to reveal the holistic nature of the culture of the people, and on the other, to obtain valuable material about the development of folk knowledge, about the ways of transmission, accumulation, and functioning of knowledge in human society in general.
Academician E. P. Pavlovsky pointed out the "necessity and timeliness of using folklore materials to find in them any more or less definite data that can and should be interpreted without stretching as a reflection of a real understanding of nature, even if in small and limited applications. And from these materials, like milestones, one can with a considerable degree of probability gain insight into the roots of the development of unwritten science."
It would be an oversimplification to explain the attention to the history of the formation of the spiritual culture of the people solely as a tribute to tradition. In the context of the current intensification of ideological struggle, a correct understanding of the true origins of ideological heritage and of genuine cultural values allows for a reasoned refutation of the conjectures about the allegedly idealistic, religious foundations of the worldview of the peoples of Central Asia.
Recently, many studies have appeared dedicated to the people's representations as part of the spiritual culture of the Kyrgyz, in which, however, the Kyrgyz representations about natural phenomena are not specifically examined.
Physical quantities as elements of the cognitive activity of the Kyrgyz
Measurement systems and counting among the Kyrgyz
