TOK Essay: Can a machine know? Over the past couple of years, machines have managed to become substitutes to numerous aspects of human lives, ranging from predicting the weather to cooking our food for us. Technology is advancing rapidly as the future looks to begin to implement the use of machines into our daily activities, proving to be more efficient and comfortable than having to conduct manual labor. However, a question that can be asked to how far exactly we have come in developing these machines is whether they are, or have been for a long time; capable of knowing. Another aspect of arguing against the idea that machines are not capable of knowing is that every machine has a database (which can be indirectly related to our human brains) to which information that the machine acquires or inputted information is contained. Unlike humans, however, the information that is stored in the database simply exists in a form of letters and numbers, and has no sentimental meaning to the machine, but remains there either for our benefit, or for the machine to act upon if programmed. When acquiring information, a machine can definitely understand that this information is present (as its database memory is being consumed), but when regarding this to the definition of ‘knowing’, no link can be established as the machine is not cognizant of the information or facts that it is collecting. An interesting question that I ran into while conducting research on this idea was that can this question apply to us humans as well? In the sense that can we function without experiencing? Well my answer to this question is exactly what I feel differentiates us humans from machines; why we can ‘know’, whereas machines cannot. I believe that we can function without experiencing, and that can be defined in some ways as instinct. When in a situation that we have never been exposed to before, we humans tend to gather as much information that we feel can possibly aid us in such a scenario,...