Much talk has been tossed around of AI, artificial intelligence, the human robot, the ultimate tech creation.

Movies, books, music, pick-up lines have all enchanted this question in hopes of entertainment, advancement, revelation. I look at it as a disciple of Heidegger. Can a synthetic AI creation be a being, a Dasein? Does the possibility exist in which an artificial human could be human in the way that we are? Dasein is his term for our beingness, the being of human beings. What are the attributes of Dasein and can an artificial person satisfy these requirements so as to qualify as a Dasein, a true being, like biological people? Is a robot of the most sophisticated construction human in the Heideggerian sense?

The proving ground for Dasein is nothing less than the world itself, more specifically, coping with this world, or being-in-the-world. Don’t be dismayed by the hyphens here, as they are only an old philosopher’s trick to avoid restrictions of language and woo other Daseins and the occasional sheep. A Dasein sees the world and attempts to operate in it, to make it intelligible. Obviously we can program a computer to recognize a chair. See it as an object outside itself, separate from its purposeful physical corporeal body. We can also program the chair’s usage. A chair is something to sit on, to paint, to throw through a window. It becomes more complicated when we try to have it recognize other chairs. The bean bag chair has caused many a human Dasein trouble, let alone a Cyber-Dasein. This again, however, can be accounted for with foresight and good programming. What of the Soho boutique that, a week after I create my Frankenstein machine, comes out with a new chair that looks like a beached whale? Problems yes, but not impossible to overcome. The concession I want to make to all the future-is-god-code-riding-ubermenchs out there is that you can program a tin man to learn, and therefore figure out a chair, an éclair, or a polar bear.

Sure, both I and AI can figure it is a chair, AI probably much quicker, but it is this how we figure it out, how we cope with the chair, this world, that is the essential aspect of our Dasein. A computer will go through a table of questions to see if this thing satisfies the definition of chair. We have no table of quandaries in our mind we figure it out through holistic context made up of relevant time and space. Heidegger thought that, since it would be impossible to program all the variables of context, a computer would never be able to cope with the world. I am allowing that belief to be challenged by the fact that computers may be able to cope with the world based on technological advances (damn that Big Blue), but their style of coping is still different from that which Heidegger understood and spoke of in his definition of Dasein. This is what makes our being distinct, this specific style of coping. It is a style consisting of unknowns and knowns, of past and future, of stumbling not gliding. A man walks into a music store and starts to play with electronic keyboards and tech equipment. This man begins to make sound. He does not know how to play these instruments correctly. He creates music. He leaves the store. He still does not know how those bastions of electrons work or the correct way in which they should be played. My postulation is that a machine would always cope with knowledge gained, it would never leave the music shop having learned to play music without having learned how to work the instruments. It is our combination of Heidegger’s big words, disclosed (shit you can “see”) and undisclosed (shit you can’t “see”) that characterize our way of coping, our being. Confusing gibberish it is, but in many ways it is confusing gibberish that dominates what we are and therefore is a major part of what it means to be a Dasein.

Let me give one last simple closing example about walking into a room. AI and myself will never enter the room and experience our surroundings the same. My experience would be that of coping, while the computer would be that of analysis through tables among tables of separate singular data. This distinction of true coping with the environment in the Heideggerian sense sets us apart from the machine as a being-in-the-world, a Dasein. This is his murky point. Heidegger addressed the question in length, much length, and then conceded that he had explored only part one of the discussion, never having written part two. Renown for giving lectures that seemed like blind entrapment in a foggy room filled with a thousand burning cigarettes, I here have taken his words and speculated that robots will never smoke.

Do you think that someday we’ll be able to create a machine, that for all intents and purposes, is human? Discuss Here

Copyright © 1999 Charles Hageman Frey All Rights Reserved

Charles Hageman Frey is a student of philosophy and science living in Washington, D.C.  Check out some of his recommended links by philosophers who have taken a look at the question of technology and the advancement of society. Media determinism in Cyberspace

Everything Nietzsche: http://infonectar.com/nietzsche/aphorismnoframe.html

Books about Heidegger and Technology: http://www.webcom.com/paf/hb/hbtech.html

Questions concerning music technology from Heidegger to Feenberg: http://cadre.sjsu.edu/switch/sound/articles/discipio_intro.html