Factors of modern economic and financial engineering: Cognitive activity and virtual reality

Subject. This article discusses the issues of economic and financial activities as engineering, its factors and cause-and-effect relationships. Objectives. The article aims to show economic activity and, as its special case, financial activity in the form of a systemic process of interaction between the data space, cognitive and technological spaces. Methods. For the study, I used interdisciplinary and systems approaches in the context of philosophy, law, psychology, and economics to build a universal cognitive model of economic activity using the example of a financial transaction. Results. On the basis of empirical data, the article describes the role of engineering, including financial engineering, in the system of social development, which determines its nonlinear dynamics. The article proposes a conceptual engineering approach to economic activity as a system process of interaction of three spaces, namely cognitive, technological, and data space. The article also presents an author-developed model, showing the position of a person and the role of cognitive activity as the basis of engineering using artificial intelligence, that is, the formation of a new virtual reality in the mind as a virtual construct with its subsequent materialization into a new reality. Conclusions and Relevance. The proposed approach has scientific and practical significance in terms of expanding the tools of scientific research to the interdisciplinary level. The proposed model of economic (financial) activity makes it possible to move on to modeling a variety of business processes using the IDEF0 methodology. The proposed approach to the systematic representation of activity will require the formation of a new way of economic thinking and opens up opportunities for the development of economic theories.