Knowledge, machines, and the consistency of Reinhardt's strong mechanistic thesis (Q1591373)

William Reinhardt developed a modal theory of arithmetic called EA (Epistemic Arithmetic) in order to establish an axiomatic setting to carry out his analysis on the philosophical ramifications of Gödel's incompleteness theorems. He showed in this context that one cannot expect a formalization of ``I am a Turing machine, and I know which one'' to be consistent with EA, and conjectured instead the consistency of its weaker version called SMT (Strong Mechanistic Thesis) which is a formalization of ``I know I am a Turing machine''. The main result of this paper, dedicated to his memory, is the affirmative answer to the conjecture. The author first shows how the intuitive notions of a knowing entity and a knowing machine are formalized in the language of EA, and then proves that EA and EA+SMT are indeed knowing machines by the method of ``stratification'' and ``collapsing'' of knowledge. The paper refers also to some closely related topics such as a general theory of knowledge, the theory of knowledge by means of Kripke semantics, and a relationship to Kleene's slash modified with modality by Shapiro.