Lecture at the Immanuel Kant Baltic Federal University, faculty of philosophy (Chernyshevskogo, 56). 
19/10/2012, 11:40 am

Kant's Architecture of Mind
Marco Bettoni (Basel)

ABSTRACT

This lecture (which is based on an article published in 1991 in the proceedings of the Int. Kant Kongress 1990) attempts to develop a functional structure of our cognitive system particularly oriented to the processing of abstract concepts. For this it uses a cybernetic approach and applies a speicfic method called "method of substitution" to a fundamental part of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, particularly his "Analytic of Concepts". The result is a system model at two levels of refinement; a broad architecture of mind distinguishes 2 main functional units (Vorstellungskraft and Vernunft) and a more refined architecture distinguishes 2 units, "Sinnlichkeit" and "Verstand", that compose the unit "Vorstellungskraft". Based on this architecture a sketch of the dynamics of the system exemplifies operational sequences as the run of a particular course through a network of the system. The paper concludes with some remarks regarding implications of the model for knowledge representation in Artificial Intelligence: we should look at knowledge as a dynamic structure made of operations and exactly these operations are what "represents" knowledge in the human brain.

12.10.2012 / MB