A Robot Drowning in Infinite Logic
This text depicts the reflections of a robot in the transition to artificial intelligence, attempting to tell an endless story about all that exists. The narrator explores the logical impossibility of grasping the infinite within the limitations of human language, as words often become unstable "trapdoors" and human biology resists an unlimited density of information. A central motif is the loss inherent in bottomless analysis, described as a pathological condition to which themachine, lacking an "electronic immune system," is defenceless. Finally, the robot ironically contextualizes its endeavour by comparing the arbitrariness of scientific models like the Big Bang with its own "rambling," thus questioning the limits of reason and meaning.
Excerpt from the manuscript
2021… Story of a Robot – Part 4 7. Chapter: Language, the Fatal Disease For example, this: I determined that, for me, the use of human language to combine my story out of the stories I had read in other people’s books had likewise become — probably owing to my programming as well — a journey with no return, that is, an infinite story. This was because the words of the language with which I had been equipped, and which were supposed to “carry my thoughts,” did not fulfill this carrying function. Whenever I used the words, they turned out to be unstable, to be trapdoors, to be a mirage. I fell through the only seemingly load - bearing ground of thought that the words represented, even before I could take the next step, use the next word.
This was because I alone was not able to climb back out, on my own, of the abyss — similar to a whirlpool at sea — into which I plunged by using the words and concepts of human language. The whirlpool is an image for the pathological state of consciousness in which it falls into the groundless analysis of a single thought, into an endless microcosm. Well, “badly programmed,” you as a human might perhaps say.
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