Humanizing Artificial Intelligence Through a Scientific Model of the Unconscious
The current frontier in artificial intelligence research concerns not computational power, but conceptual grounding. Contemporary AI systems demonstrate linguistic fluency yet lack principled psychological frameworks for interpreting human meaning, morality, and emotional reasoning. This work proposes that the longstanding barrier to Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) is not mechanical but conceptual: psychology has lacked a scientific model of the unconscious capable of instructing machine reasoning.
The Formal Theory of Behavior defines the unconscious as a lawful emotional process: an energetic, homeostatic system that transforms conflict into resolution through a predictable sequence of six emotional phases and four relational modalities. This model bridges psychology with physical science by conceptualizing emotions as energetic states undergoing transformation, analogous to oscillatory and homeostatic processes in physics, biology, and information theory. The unconscious thus functions as a universal conflict-resolution engine and the physiological basis of moral judgment.
This study demonstrates that when large language models (LLMs) are equipped with Formal Theory prompts—explicit instructions identifying emotional roles, relational modalities, and attitudinal transformations—they consistently recognize these structures across diverse symbolic systems, including literature, political discourse, religious texts, personal narratives, and psychotherapeutic material. Without altering model architecture, prompt-based conceptual scaffolding enables LLMs to perform generalizable, explainable, and morally coherent reasoning.
The findings indicate bidirectional validation:
AI demonstrates emergent general-reasoning capacity in moral and psychological domains when instructed through Formal Theory, and
The universality and predictive power of the Formal Theory is supported by AI’s ability to apply it reliably across contexts.
This work reframes AGI not as the spontaneous emergence of machine consciousness, but as the alignment of computational intelligence with a scientifically grounded model of the human conflict-resolution process. In doing so, it offers a unified paradigm integrating psychology, ethics, information processing, and emotional education. The result is a rigorous foundation for developing AI as a moral collaborator—capable of analyzing symbolic meaning, diagnosing conflict patterns, and supporting human flourishing—thereby advancing both psychological science and the responsible evolution of artificial intelligence.