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KIP - Some philosophical remarks

The Knowbotic Interface Project [KIP] of the Institute for New Media [INM], as realized as the prototype BW1 and also with regard to the possible improvements in the future, can have a severe impact on sociological and economic structures as well as on the selfunderstanding of human beings.

Seen from an optimistic point of view, one can assume that in the long run the technology of the knowbotic-Interface [KInt] can probably be of some help to attack the already existing problem of a daily increasing amount of information in our world which to handle is meanwhile not only impossible for individuals but also for large institutions. And a KInt can be expected to do this in a `human-like' and `human-friendly' way.

Letting aside the question of the expected `ethics of the knowbots', - (e.g.: Will they obey the three robot-rules of ASIMOV? Who will be able to control knowbots?), - there will eventually arise the question of humans, confronted with this technology, what will any longer be the substantial difference between a `human' system and an `artificial' system?

The usual strategy to answer this question by citing the `rationality' of humans their `special emotions', their ability to communicate with `symbols', especially with complex symbol-systems like `languages', that they are `conscious about themselves' etc. will not work any longer. Very soon the TURING-Test will be passed by artificial systems like the knowbots of a KInt. It will not suffice, to compare humans with artificial systems based only on a comparison of the overt behavior.

Furthermore it will also not be sufficient in order to improve the understanding of the question `What is a human being like?' it will not be sufficient to analyse the body of people, their physiologigal structure, the architecture of the nervous system. The psycho-physical gap can not be bridged by physiological data alone. Also if one assumes that the consciousness of people is a function of the physiological structures one cannot deduce the consciousness from the physiological structures, because the same physiological structure allows numerous different functions to be `running' `on' these physiological structures. A physiological structure defines at best only certain `classes' of functions which are `compatible' with these structures.

Moreover what we need is not `some' empirical theory explaining the physiological structure and `some' socalled `psychological' functions, but we need a theory which explains, how selfconsciousness arises and how, under the conditions of the selfconsciousness, theories of any kind |including empirical ones| can `emerge'.

Any theories, including the empirical theories, are |until now| products of humans who are `generating' these theories under the conditions of their consciousness. Empirical phenomena are only a subset of the phenomena a man is able to handle consciously and empirical theories are subsets of possible theories restricted to the subset of empirical phenomena. Thus, the postulated theory concerning the question, how a theory can emerge under the conditions of a consciousness, can not be an empirical theory in the narrow sense, but it can be a theory and a very `hard one'. We call such a theory a Philosophical Theory of the Selfconsciousness [PTS].

As long as we cannot formulate a PTS we will not be able to compare on a rational basis our own structure with that of a knowbot, i.e. we will not `really know' whether we are different compared with the functions of an artificial machine or not.

Already at the root of such a PTS we have the thesis, that a complete PTS will never be possible. This is a consequence of the famous GÖDEL-result applied to a PTS. A PTS will be by assumption necessarily a formal theory and this theory will at least be so strong as a first-order theory. And GÖDEL tells us, that such theories are either `complete' and then `inconsistent' or they are `consistent' but then `not complete'.

The technology of the KInt will surely be only one small sector in the future world confronting humans with `manipulated' `virtual' reality, which induces the problem of an overall `Ästhetisierung' of the whole environment. In such a situation the above result of the impossibility of a complete PTS can be interpreted as a kind of condemnation of us not being able to come to a final knowledge what man `really' is: a machine or something different from a machine?

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