Kantian motives in modern neuroscience

Abstract

The article considers the reasons according to which the development of cognitive research and, first of all, neuroscience is taking place in the context of reinterpreted from the stand­point of modern science I. Kant’s ideas on apriorism. We claim that significant sums of money are being spent to provide these studies in both civil and military areas, for their re­sults directly affect the prospects for creating artificial intelligence, the analysis of big data, and important progress in the treatment of various mental and psychological pathologies. It is emphasized that nowadays special attention is paid to I. Kant’s heuristically rich idea re­lated to the activity of consciousness and the subject of cognition, which is contained in his teaching on apriorism. This idea has ontogenetic foundation. Attention is drawn to the fact that when modeling the neural processes that are involved in the mechanisms of predicting the behavior of a subject, concepts formalized in T. Bayes’ theorem are used, which allows the neuroscience to expand the “Kantian” brain model with a Bayesian one. We assume that the concept of biocultural constructivism, which connects the processes of mutual influence of brain activity, culture and society, suggests that representatives of different civilizations have different cognitive strategies (analytical and holistic thinking systems) that correlate with the density of certain genes within their limits and thus, gene-cultural interaction sys­tems emerge. It puts forward the question of the boundaries of the de-anthropologization of human knowledge.