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Peter Weibel
THE SYMBOL-PROCESSING ABILITY OF MAN AND MACHINES
THE EMANCIPATION OF TOOLS
The Church-Turing thesis of 1937 implies grosso modo the following: (Everything that is can be formalized.) Everything that can be formalized can also be calculated. And what can be calculated can also be mechanized. Each formalism can be applied to a machine since every formal system is defined by its mechanism. In this concatenation of formalism, mechanism and machine, the incalculability and the undecidability of formalism are also transferred to the machine, as the development from Goedel to Turing shows. This produces the limits of formalization, calculation and speakability. If man can be defined as a symbol-processing, thinking being, then he is thus machine-like. "Man, equipped with paper, pencil and eraser and subject to strict discipline is actually a universal machine. Man combined with written instructions is called a "paper machine ", Turing wrote in his "'Intelligent Machinery". Man as "paper machine corresponds to the "paper machine" as man. Thus there are non-organized, ledming, self-modifying, automatic,self-reproducing machines. This idea of an "electron brain" marks the final point of a long line of imitations where each part or natural human organ is replaced or imitated by a machine. S. Freud referred to this creature whose voice is amplified by a microphone and whose scope is extended beyond the natural (auditory and visual) boundaries by means of telephone as well as by telescope, microscope and TV camera and whose nervous networks are well simulated by electronic circuitry as its"culture and its discontents" (1930) and as "prosthesis God". The idea that machines could think, i.e., process symbols and give them meaning on their own, which untill then had been regarded as, a privilege of man or reality, has become more tangible than ever before. Turing's universal calculator based on the binary symbols, 0 and1, that are represented by non-current and current incircuits, which in turn are based on George Boole's algebra, can actually be likened to a living organism, if independent symbol processing is geared to the notion of a living organism. Autonomous symbols are really asensation in the history of civilization. It is no longer man who paints animals or machines on walls. Now the explosion of the arts, which is at the same time an explosion of signs has led to machines drawing signs by themselves. Tools no longer serve to fullfill man's will and to give signs material, real form. Rather, tools themselves set signs and the realm of signs sets reality. Symbol-processing machines, such as the computer, have made signs autonomous agents. Machines create new autonomous models of the world and of tools. Media art shows us this new phase of the autonomous, symbol-processing machine. The explosion of the arts is followed by the explosion of signs - with the help of machines. The toolculture has entered a new phase, namely that of the intrinsic world of the world of machines.
Tools did not evolve from language and language not from tools. Rather, language and tools have a common source: human ability of symbolization. Language and technology have developed on this common ground. In this sense tooltechnology, in particular those tools that autonomously process symbols like intelligent machines, is the key to human evolution. Tool culture has always been symbol culture, without symbols there is no storage possibility, without a storage or memory there is no experience. Writing is the first memory, the computer presently the last one. Writing can be used to bridge spatial and temporal distances. Decorporealized, dematerialized information can be moved about in space and time. This was the first revolution in communication. The invention of the bookprint was the second revolution in communication. Masscommunication was now possible. The separation of messenger and message, body and symbols, the symbolization of messages by means of electromagnetic fields, ushered in 1833 with telegraphy, formed the technical basis for the third telematic revolution in communication: the electronic digital processing of information. Machine communication had become possible.
In the electromagnetic age (J.C Maxwell, 1873) signs travel freely and autonomously at electronic speed. The signs of the third communication revolution are liberated from man and live a life of their own thanks to sign-machines. Tools have become emancipated and have begun to live a life of their own as well as symbol-processing machines. The rise of symbol-processing machines means the end of the (last) privilege and monopoly of man.
excerpt from a text with the same title published in "First Europeans", Berlin 1993.