In this lecture, Maxim Miroshnichenko presents his ongoing work on the Soviet discourse of reflexivity and methodology to rethink what it means to speak, think, and act meaningfully. 

Particularly, he concentrates on the contribution of the Moscow Methodological Circle (MMC), a collective of the post-Stalin era unorthodox Marxist thinkers who developed a reflexive, systems-based approach to cognition and activity. Thinkers like Georgy Shchedrovitsky, Merab Mamardashvili, David Zilberman, and Vladimir Lefebvre emphasized collective, reflexive and participatory activity embedded in sociotechnical totalities. This view contests the distinction between the “natural” and the “artificial.” Everything that is absorbed by human activity is revealed to be artificial, including the human themself. The human is a structure embedded in and constituted by sociotechnically mediated activity. As will be shown, this challenges the very concept of “artificiality,” including that of artificial intelligence. 

Using the MMC’s framework, Miroshnichenko addresses the so-called “symbol grounding problem” in large language models: what kind of action creates meaning? Based on MMC’s dialectics of form and content and the ascent from the abstract to the concrete, he shows that what LLMs lack is a reflexive, transformative activity irreducible to pure textuality of formal token prediction.

Miroshnichenko holds a PhD in philosophy (2019). Since 2024, he has a fellowship from the Bauhaus University Weimar for scholars who have fled Ukraine and the Russian Federation. His interests revolve around cybernetics/systems theory, enactive cognition, and Soviet philosophy of science. Currently, he works on a project dedicated to the intersections of Marxism and cybernetics in the Soviet logico-methodological thought as a contribution to the discussions on cognitivism, AI, and posthumanism.