description: We owe to Gotthard Günther the proof that classical metaphysics, that was based on a combination of monovalent ontology (being is, not being is not) and bivalent logic (what is true is not false, what is false is not true; tertium non datur) leads to the absolute inability to describe in an ontologically adequate manner cultural phenomena such as tools, signs, artworks, machines, laws, customs, books, and all other artifices. The reason for this is that the fundamental differentiation of soul and thing, spirit and matter, subject and object, freedom and mechanism cannot cope with entities of this sort: they are by their very constitution hybrids with a spiritual and material "component", and any effort to say what they are "authentically" in the framework of a bivalent logic and a monovalent ontology leads inevitably to hopeless reduction and shortening (...) This only changed when cybernetics, as the theory and practice of intelligent machines, and modern biology, as the study of system-environment-units forced these questions to be posed anew, this time, from the perspective of systems- and organism-theory. Here, the concept of objective spirit turns into the principle of information. This steps between thoughts and things as a third value, between the pole of reflection and the pole of the thing, between spirit and matter. Intelligent machines - like all artifices that are culturally created - eventually also compel thought to recognize on a broader front the fact of the matter that here, quite obviously, "spirit" or reflection or thought is infused into matter and remains there ready to be re-found and further cultivated. Machines and artifices are thus real-existing negations of the conditions before the imprinting of the in-formation into the medium. They are in this sense memories or reflections turned objective. In order to conceive of this, one needs an ontology that is at least bivalent as well as a trivalent logic, which is to say a cognitive toolkit capable of articulating that there are real-existing affirmed negations and negated affirmations, that there are nothings in a state of being, and beings in a state of nothingness. In the end, the statement, "there is information," says nothing else (Peter Sloterdijk)
title: Das Bewusstsein der Maschinen
titlecomplete: Das Bewusstsein der Maschinen
ratings_count: 2