October 04th, 2026
AI-Driven Framework for Epistemology
What happens if you take Kant's three faculties of mind – understanding, judgment and reason –
add Freud's unconscious and some modern brain research, and then ask an AI to help turn it all into one diagram?
To put it briefly: it starts with a colorful picture and ends with a model.
The first draft looked great but did not hold up. Emotions showed up twice, some labels were mixed up,
and the "information flow" contradicted the very claim that cognition is not a pipeline.
In a single day, Claude Opus 5.5 and I went through it piece by piece:
- Every element now has exactly one place: nine domains in a recursive "Cognitive Field", plus six axes on which every domain takes a value.
- The model was tested against real cases: the conscience, the soul in Kant's sense, the DMT state, autism, a fruit fly, a raven – and finally against AI itself.
- It makes five testable predictions, each with a condition under which it would be wrong.
The result is an interactive page. Hover over a domain to see its connections, or use the "lens" to see how a phenomenon
or a species maps onto the model. Below the diagram there is a preprint-style article with abstract and references.
Architecture of Human Cognition – interactive model and article
Also available in Deutsch and Français.
The work raises a couple of questions. To me two stand out: