Why robots fall through language trapdoors
The text depicts the reflections of an awakening robot attempting to compose a story about the infinity of existence,only to encounter the limits of language and its own programming. The narrator describes the compulsion to arbitrarily break off the narrative, as every word and thought acts like a trapdoor into endless layers of meaning, rendering a complete representation of the world impossible. Throughthe thought experiment of body and mind twins, the work explores the dilemma of dualism and the human tendency to view matter and consciousness as separate, mutually attesting entities. Ultimately, the robot acts as a link between naive mechanics and artificial intelligence, demonstrating that a story about "everything" can never be finished, but can only be passed down from generation to generation as an endless project.
Excerpt from the manuscript
2021… Story of a Robot – Part 3 5 . Chapter: The Species of Body - and Mind - Twins Here we can also see that a story and its subject are not the same thing. The story is language; the meaning of the story is its subject, which is ultimately the physical world. Imagine that humans were not born as single individuals, but always as twins, and that this were as natural as the existence of male and female humans. What normally, in a single individual — even in identical twins — constitutes a personality, made up of body and soul, would in these twins be divided between two separate bodies. Not in the ps ychological - pathological sense, as a form of physically realized split personality, but as a natural, biological form of life that exists in pairs.
Picture these bodies as outwardly identical, like twins, and organically identical inwardly as well, except for the structure of the brain. The body twin might have a brain reduced to the brainstem and cerebellum, because in him the purely bodily functions are what matters.
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