. The problem of mental modelling and creation of thinking devices is one of the most significant and at the same time, the least studied in modern science. The main difficulties in solving it are associated with insufficient elaboration of the relationship between the mental and the biological, primarily from the conceptual apparatus and a unified methodological base. The article discusses the issues of the definition of alive, the emergence of the psyche, the concept of pan-interiorism, existing models of consciousness and their criticism from the position of non-disjunctive logic and proposes a new semiotic model based on a cultural substrate. The work is an attempt at an interdisciplinary synthesis of views on the above problems of the largest scientists of the XX and XXI centuries: V.I. Vernadsky, S.L. Rubinshtein, A.V. Brushlinsky, M.M. Bakhtin, Yu.M. Lot- man and others. The possibility of building artificial intelligence based on cultural substrate is substantiated, as it is proposed to use semiotic systems, whose properties in many respects resemble the properties of a living organism: they possess the mechanism of autopoiesis, follow the Redi principle, are organized in the form of cholarchy, and exist only in a communicative environment.