Alexander Borisovich Khomyakov

Alexander Borisovich Khomyakov
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Born	(1968-03-30) March 30, 1968 Ivanovo, Ivanovo Oblast, Soviet Union
Occupation	Philosopher
Website	www.akhomiakov.com

Alexander Borisovich Khomyakov (born March 30, 1968, in Ivanovo, USSR) is a Russian philosopher, member of the Russian Philosophical Society, and the author of the concepts of **interactive constructivism** and the **two-act theory of consciousness**. He actively promotes constructivism as a paradigm of scientific knowledge in his public lectures.

Biography

Khomyakov was born in Ivanovo, where he completed secondary school. In 1985, he enrolled at the Faculty of Physics of Saint Petersburg State University (SPbU). After completing military service, he entered the Faculty of Philosophy at SPbU in 1999 but did not graduate, choosing instead to pursue independent philosophical study.

In 2011, he left salaried employment to focus on cognitive and neuropsychology under the guidance of V. Karpinskaya (SPbU) and N. Shemyakina (Institute of the Human Brain, Russian Academy of Sciences). In 2012, he founded “Smart-search,” a startup in computational linguistics, which ceased operations in 2016.

In 2021, Khomyakov conducted a master class on the philosophy of artificial intelligence at the Research and Educational Laboratory of Transcendental Philosophy, School of Philosophy and Cultural Studies, National Research University Higher School of Economics (HSE).

Currently, he serves as Innovation Director at a commercial company, where he implements AI-based solutions. He regularly speaks at academic and industry conferences and delivers online lectures on constructivism and the philosophy of consciousness. He views large language models as tools of “experimental epistemology” that enable the study of human intelligence.

Core Concepts and Hypotheses

Interactive Constructivism

Khomyakov developed the concept of **interactive constructivism** as a new epistemological paradigm addressing a fundamental question: how do internal mental constructs align with external reality? The core arguments are presented in his book Prolegomena to All Knowledge (2025).

Interactive constructivism rejects the possibility of “objective” knowledge grounded solely in the reification of mental representations of the world. According to Khomyakov, the primary function of intelligence is *distinction-making*, and the mechanism of distinction is the *multiple predicate*. For example, the predicate “to have a color” implicitly includes all known color variants, enabling recognition of an object’s color and detection of its change. What distinguishes conscious human intelligence is its capacity to generate new distinguishing predicates, thereby aligning internal models with reality.

Within this framework, no experiment can prove the objectivity of a theory, as the same empirical data admit multiple interpretations under different conceptual schemes.

Two-Act Theory of Consciousness

First formulated in the article “Light in the Brain” (2012) and further developed in the monograph On the Nature of Consciousness and the Mind-Body Problem (2020), this hypothesis posits that consciousness arises as the recognition of one’s own actions *after* they have been performed—a capacity made possible by the formation of a linguistic self-model.

The hypothesis is encapsulated in the formula: “I know that I see (do).” This reflects a reflexive structure involving two “I”s: the observing and the observed. The agency of the conscious subject is explained by the ability to construct behavior based on an internal model that accounts for the opportunities and constraints of the current situation.

Khomyakov argues that consciousness is a product of intelligence yet distinct from it. It is neither reducible to perception nor to thought but constitutes a separate process that emerged through the internalization of reflexive speech and the recognition of one’s own actions. His concise definition of consciousness is: **“Consciousness is the embedding of a self-model into a model of a situation (the world).”**

Theory of Intelligence

Outlined in his 2024 publications, this theory includes the following key tenets:

• Thought is fundamentally based on analogies formed through predicates.
• Cognitive schemas are built from frequent predicate co-occurrences and used for object recognition and sequential reasoning.
• These schemas give rise to models of situations, objects, and theories tailored to the subject’s goals.
• Khomyakov proposes the “triangle of knowledge” hypothesis—a dynamic progression from perceptual models to abstract ones via object-mediated representations.

Critique of Traditional Approaches

Khomyakov critiques several entrenched notions in contemporary philosophy. He argues that the concepts of “truth” and “information processing” are obsolete and unnecessary in the emerging epistemological paradigm. He reinterprets the mind-body problem not as a causal link between substances but as the irreducibility of distinct mental models—namely, the model of the body and the model of awareness—comparable to how sound and image are irreducible to one another.

Bibliography

Books

• Khomyakov, A. B. On the Nature of Consciousness and the Mind-Body Problem. Moscow: Flinta, 2020. 256 pp. ISBN 978-5-9765-4465-9. [5]
• Khomyakov, A. B. Prolegomena to All Knowledge. Moscow: Flinta, 2025. ISBN 978-5-9765-5801-4. [6]

Selected Articles

• Khomyakov, A. B. “Light in the Brain.” Philosophy and Culture, no. 7 (2012): 78–85. [7]
• Khomyakov, A. B. “Why Transformers Don’t Think Like Humans?” Philosophical Problems of Information Technologies and Cyberspace, no. 2 (2024): 78–92. [8]
• Khomyakov, A. B. “Analogy as the Basic Function of Thought.” Philosophical Problems of Information Technologies and Cyberspace, no. 2 (2024): 23–37. [9]
• Khomyakov, A. B., and P. Chizhik. “A New Method for Finding Analogues as a Means to Study Language, Thought, and Build Artificial Intelligence Systems.” Philosophical Problems of Information Technologies and Cyberspace, no. 1 (2024): 65–79. [10]
• Khomyakov, A. B. “Robots and Communism.” Invest-Foresight, 2018. [11]
• Khomyakov, A. B. “Types of Meaning.” In Proceedings of the International Conference “Linguistic Forum 2020: Language and Artificial Intelligence”, 45–47. Moscow: Institute of Linguistics, RAS, 2020. [12]

Selected Public Talks

• “Consciousness in Artificial Intelligence.” Seminar on Philosophy of Mathematics, Lomonosov Moscow State University, 2024. [13]
• “ChatGPT: Just Technology or a Humanistic Challenge?” Public lecture, School of Philosophy and Cultural Studies, HSE, 2023. [14]
• “Constructivism in the Cognitive Paradigm.” Talk at the Institute of Philosophy, Russian Academy of Sciences, 2023. [15]
• “The Genesis of Consciousness Through the Formation of Reflexive Speech.” Conference on Analytic Philosophy, Tomsk State University, 2021. [16]
• “Mathematics in the Paradigm of Constructivism.” Seminar on Philosophy of Mathematics, Moscow State University, 2021. [17]
• “Types of Meaning.” Conference “Language and Artificial Intelligence,” Institute of Linguistics, RAS, 2020. [18]
• “On the Origin of Consciousness in the Process of Language Formation.” Cognitive Research Seminar, Saint Petersburg State University, 2013. [19]
• “What Prevents AI Adoption in Companies?” Conference “Intelligent Enterprise 2025,” Open Systems. [20]

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