Review

Derived from the ontological question of Lebenswelt, existentialism has been a wave of intellectual reflection which surpassed the barrier of an identifiable philosophical position, and thus, a cultural symbol of post-war Europe. That’s why Oana’s unique idea of a “Existential Robot” drew my attention. After pointing out the inextricable link between existentialism and phenomenology’s focus on intentionality, she then turned to self-consciousness, or more precisely, the “being for itself (pour-soi)”, a key terminology of Sartrean philosophy, by introducing the distinguishes between reflective (inner-directed) and non-reflective (outer-directed) consciousness. The main purpose of this blog, however, was to pursue a mechanism for machines to achieve self-consciousness, with two examples by Ken Feingold featuring self-questioning/inner-reflecting humanoid bots.

I personally like Oana’s post for its deep reflection of self-existence, as well as for existentialism managed to break free from the one-dimensional value standard (inherited from the reductivism of Plato-Kantian tradition), to finally reach a state of poetic, inclusive vision of the world. However, the path to existentialism that shown in this blog is a rather tough one to be realised, considering the fact that a self-conscious AI is still too far from us. Also, the entry point of understanding existentialism shows further possibilities. (One of) the most definitive quote(s) of existentialism is Sartre’s “L'existence précède l'essence”, which was also put forward by his contemporaries like Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger to demonstrate the pre-reflective, pre-subjective and pre-personal connections between human and the world of objective. This is to say, human is projected to the world before reflection emerges, therefore fundamentally negated monism and determinism. To make it short, the world is free and open to human! Unfortunately, it would then appear that the example of robots making dialogues is either slightly out of topic (i.e. can questioning one’s own existence be regard as existentialistic, or just self-exploring/self-conscious?) or ironic (for being directly opposite the idea of existentialism since the machine is just outputting the pre-programmed/determined sentences).

Possible Hypotheses

(complete rework required)

• Autonomy: Since one simply exists before any property of definition, the free of action / autonomy would become a most outstanding characteristic of human. (note)

• Absurdity (?): The true nature of existentialism makes it the counterpart of nihilism, so things might become easier when the theme is switched to “meaninglessness”, but somehow it doesn’t seem to be the point…

• Weapon against nihilism