The Importance of Kant’s Philosophy of Mind for Contemporary Research in Artificial Intelligence
RUDN Journal of Philosophy July 16, 2025 Anatoly G. Pushkarsky
The artificial intelligence program originally relied on a positivistic, anti-psychological paradigm that modeled thinking with logical machines, but faced technical and conceptual difficulties. Despite successes in deep learning neural networks since the 2000s, connectionism has proven ineffective for representing high-level knowledge and precise symbolic processing—higher cognitive abilities. Some AI specialists and cognitive philosophers have turned to Kant's philosophy of consciousness, which describes a transcendental macroarchitecture of an intellectual system with active cognitive activity. This architecture is derived not from empirical studies but from a priori conditions for the possibility of consciousness, aiming to reveal a structure isomorphic to any rational subject. The study examines what Kant's philosophy offers AI and cognitive science.