Abstract

Heidegger has provided a profound account of human existence in terms of the to-be-da. Even though Heidegger disregarded its brain machine basis (and even though brain scientists disregard Heidegger), the issue of the Dasein's machine basis is raised by the empirically extremely well confirmed “supervenience” of the Dasein on the brain. Since the Turing machine will not do as basis for the Dasein, as Dreyfus has shown, contemporary functionalism cannot resolve the issue. Instead an “existential functionalism,” which looks to some other kind of machine than the computer, is called for. A machine that continuously tunes filters on input and that detects any match between abstract properties of the input flux and filter specifications was considered. A match points to those tuning rules whose abstract conditions have been satisfied by input, and the rules thus selected are enabled to generate their own fulfillment through mechanisms that can presently be only speculated about. Such a machine cannot sustain direct perception but is “methodologically solipsistic.” At the most general level of description, the wet machine that provides a supervenience base for the Dasein is to be considered a “windowless monad.”