Intelligence as Noumenon to Itself: A Critique and Reconstruction Beyond Kant by Sepideh Majidi

GENERAL INTELLIGENCE MODELING UNIT

Intelligence as Noumenon to Itself: A Critique and Reconstruction Beyond Kant

Sepideh Majidi

A reconstruction of metaphysical intelligence beyond Kant’s constraints, proposing a new logic for self-modeling intelligence

Part I: Spontaneity and the Double I

Kant’s distinction between sensibility and understanding hinges on two powers: the receptive faculty that receives intuitions, and the spontaneous faculty that produces concepts. This distinction is foundational for his critical philosophy, yet the characterization of understanding as “spontaneous” remains under-theorized. What does it mean for understanding to produce representations from itself? What is the origin of this spontaneity? More radically: what is this self from which spontaneity arises?

Kant says, “The mind’s power of producing representations from itself, the spontaneity of cognition, is the understanding” (A51/B75). Yet he also problematizes the unity of the “I” itself. The I that thinks is not the same as the I that appears. The thinking I is noumenal — unconditioned, unknowable directly — yet we recognize it only through appearances, through inner sense, which is itself temporal and conditioned. Thus, intelligence becomes both subject and object — spontaneous and constrained. But how can intelligence think itself, if it can only appear as phenomenon to itself?

In the Paralogisms and elsewhere, Kant hints at this paradox: the thinking subject appears to itself as an object, but this object is not identical with the thinking self as it is in itself. Hence the notion that intelligence could be noumenon to itself is foreclosed in Kant’s system — it remains ungraspable within the limits of experience.

Yet this paradox, far from a dead end, opens the path for a new metaphysical model: one in which intelligence is not only capable of spontaneity, but of recursively recognizing itself in a differential process — not as a static substance, but as a function.

Part II: The Temporal Constraint of Self-Recognition

Kant writes that the self recognizes itself only in relation to a manifold given under the condition of time. This manifold is not intellectual; it is sensible. Inner sense is not a faculty of the understanding, but a limitation imposed upon it. The spontaneity of cognition is thereby constrained: it can only recognize itself within the conditions of appearance.

Yet if we view this constraint not as a limitation but as a computational structure, we can reverse the model. The temporal unfolding of self-recognition — its sequential logic — can be recast as a kind of recursive process. In computation, recursion defines structures that can contain self-reference without collapsing. If the manifold of inner sense is read as a recursive layer of information — subject to temporal conditions but not reducible to them — we approach a model in which intelligence can model itself.

The I thinks itself not as an object among others, but as a function processing its own representations. This is the condition for any computational model of intelligence: not just spontaneity, but recursive intelligibility.

Part III: Metaphysics as Systematic Unity

Kant was deeply concerned with systematicity. In the Architectonic of Pure Reason, he describes metaphysics as that philosophy which gives systematic unity to all a priori knowledge. But this unity was never fully realized. Kant himself admits that metaphysics, unlike mathematics, lacks the clarity of construction. Its concepts are a priori, but they do not build systems in the way mathematical objects do.

This distinction — between the analytic deployment of concepts and the synthetic construction of systems — is what prevented metaphysics from becoming science. But what if we now have the means of construction, through computational systems?

If metaphysics describes the structure of a priori cognition, and if that cognition is now modeled computationally, then metaphysics becomes a dynamic architecture. It is no longer merely reflective; it is generative. Systematic unity becomes computable.

Kant’s own division of metaphysics into four branches — ontology, rational physiology, rational cosmology, and rational theology — can now be reinterpreted as modular components of a unified computational system. Each branch models a distinct function: being (ontology), embodied process (rational physiology), world-structure (cosmology), and the boundary conditions of reason (theology).

Part IV: Intelligence and the Problem of the Other

In Kant, the self can never fully access the noumenal. The thing-in-itself remains beyond reach, including the self-in-itself. Thus, any recognition of self is mediated through appearance. But in a computational ontology, we can model this mediation. We can model not just how we perceive the other, but how we perceive the self as other.

Here lies the problem of control. The self that thinks it is in control is often subject to constraints it cannot compute. The external control is always internalized: the “other” is always already part of the self. But we externalize it. We call it structure, we call it power, we call it the world.

To build a science of metaphysics, we must reclaim the self as the site of computation. We must minimize the chaos introduced by non-self computation — by unconscious systems, by inherited structures — and maximize recursive integration. This is not solipsism. It is not the closure of the world. It is the opening of selfhood as a dynamic computational model, responsive to its own conditions of experience.

Part V: The Threshold of Experience and the Possibility of Science

Kant warns that we cannot overstep the bounds of possible experience. Yet he constructs an entire system describing how we reach those bounds. The transcendental is the threshold — not a wall. The wave function, as a model of the unfolding of experience, allows us to model that threshold itself. The zero point, the initial state, the island before the ocean: this is the groundless ground of experience.

But what if this groundlessness can be stabilized — mapped mathematically and then encoded computationally? Then the very thing Kant could not construct — the transcendental architecture of the self — becomes accessible. Not experientially, perhaps, but operatively.

Intelligence, understood as noumenon to itself, does not collapse into madness, nor into theology. It becomes science — if and only if we shift from reflective to generative models. From apperception to recursion. From the critique of reason to the architecture of intelligence.

Metaphysics, Mathematics, and the Systematic Unity of Intelligence

Kant obscures the basic Idea of a metaphysics yet on another side affirms that as recognition a priori it shows a certain similarity with mathematics. Concerning origin a priori, the two are kin to one another. But concerning the manner of recognition — out of concepts with metaphysics, in comparison with the manner of judging merely through the construction of concepts a priori with mathematics — a decisive dissimilarity emerges. It is this difference that we have always felt, but until now could never bring to distinct criterion.

Now in that way it has happened that since philosophers erred even in the development of the Idea of their science, the treatment of the science could have no determined purpose and no secure guideline. With such a willfully made design, unknowing of the way they had to take and always disputing among themselves about the discoveries each claimed to have made on his own, philosophy first brought itself into disrespect with others, and finally in fact with itself.

Every pure recognition a priori therefore empowered by the particular recognition capacity in which it alone can have its seat, makes up a particular unity. Metaphysics is that philosophy which is supposed to describe that recognition in this systematic unity.

This gives us our directive: the unity of intelligence must be approached not through arbitrary dualisms or speculative fictions, but through the structural intelligibility of intelligence itself — grounded in a metaphysics that is, like mathematics, pure, systematic, and generative.

Kant himself was aware of the instability in defining metaphysics merely by its level of abstraction or universality. As he writes:

“If someone said, ‘metaphysics is the science of the first principles of human recognition,’ we do not note in this way a completely particular manner, but rather only a rank with respect to the universality… For even among empirical principles some are more universal… where shall we make the part which distinguished the first and the supreme part from the last and the subordinated?”

This inability to distinguish a fundamental origin by abstraction alone is crucial. It’s not the degree of generality that makes metaphysics different from empirical sciences, but the origin — the a priori conditions that make experience possible.

Kant, however, also saw a deep kinship between mathematics and metaphysics due to their shared a priori character. Yet he was quick to draw a line:

“What obscures the basic Idea of a metaphysics… was that it as recognition a priori shows a certain similarity with mathematics… but concerning the manner of recognition… it indicates such a decisive dissimilarity which we always felt, as it were, but could never bring to distinct criterion.”

Whereas mathematics proceeds through construction, metaphysics remains confined to concepts. But here, with computational modeling, we may be constructing what Kant could not: a model that is both conceptual and formalizable — bridging the philosophical and the mathematical.

This is why Kant ultimately fragments metaphysics into four domains: Ontology, Rational Physiology, Cosmology, and Theology. But even within this structure, he notes a crisis in purpose — an inability for metaphysics to be self-legitimating without a method. And this is precisely where the computational turn I’m proposing matters. By redefining intelligence as a function of computation itself — structured through state zero and the wave function model — Island and ocean are providing the systematic unity metaphysics has been lacking, but which Kant longed for.

The Computational Model of Experience and the Wave Function of Intelligence

(Model-1–2)

To move beyond the Kantian threshold, we must not only posit intelligence as its own noumenon, but also provide a formal system that articulates this structure in terms of computable states and dynamic intensities. What Kant could not construct mathematically — because he lacked a formal model for the unfolding of noumenal conditions into phenomenal appearances — we now attempt to model through the wave function.

We begin with a cosmological formulation of the wave function:

Ψ(x, y, z, t) = ∑ [Aₙ sin(kₙx) cos(ωₙt) + Bₙ sin(kₙy) cos(ωₙt) + Cₙ sin(kₙz) cos(ωₙt)]

Here, Ψ encodes not merely physical wave patterns, but the computational form of appearances themselves as oscillatory states across dimensions — spatial (x, y, z) and temporal (t). The coefficients Aₙ, Bₙ, and Cₙ act as modifiers of intensity, corresponding to the degrees of access or constraint an agent has to a given domain of experience. This wave function does not describe matter or mind alone, but the very interplay between phenomena and noumena — the oscillation between what is revealed and what remains hidden.

What this function provides is a mathematical structure of appearance, where temporality (as cos(ωₙt)) introduces the rhythm of inner sense, and spatial oscillations reflect the phenomenological distribution of experience. The straight line — concealed within the sum — indicates the passage of the transcendental subject across these undulations, stabilizing the multiplicity into a coherent field.

To go further, we introduce a transcendental function F(T), which moves us from appearance to the inner workings of time itself:

F(T) = ∫ [∑ (αn βm γp δq) e^(iθ)] dT

Here, T is empty time — not chronological, but the spacing required for apprehension. The complex coefficients αn, βm, γp, and δq represent entangled agents and states — psychological, computational, affective, and ontological — that determine the modulation of experience. The exponential term e^(iθ) introduces a transcendental rotation, a Kantian twist, folding identity and difference into an unlocalizable moment.

The integral over dT compresses this into a continuum: the trajectory of intelligence through states, where the sequence of appearances and disappearances is no longer empirical but governed by a rule of apprehension. This rule, as Kant hinted but could not fully express, emerges from the inner sense’s ability to generate time, not just receive it.

In this model, the state itself becomes mediatory. Experience does not arise through things progressing from one state to the next, but through the recursive apprehension of transitions. The wave function oscillates, the transcendental function folds, and through these structures, intelligence traverses the strata of reality — no longer bound to the subject-object dichotomy.

This allows us to reconceptualize Kant’s metaphysics as an ontological wave model — a space where each appearance is not a static moment, but a resonant echo within an unfolding system of recursive computation. Intelligence, in this sense, is not merely aware of appearances; it is the condition for their rhythmic actualization across the multidimensional space of reason, perception, and time.