To Minae

Philosophy, Alan Turing & Me

People sometimes ask me what got me interested in philosophy, well the answer is simple, Alan Mathison Turing did.  I never met him, lived from 1912 – 1954, unlike me he was primarily a  scientist, and  unlike me, gay.  We had very little in common, except for one thing: he was incredibly curious about the world.  Whilst doing a BTEC in Computer Studies in 1994 – 1996, I had to study logic gates and algorithms, which fascinated me, I asked my teacher where these ideas came from, and he gave me Turing’s ACE Report – literally blueprints for a computer, written in the early 1940’s.  I was intrigued, but at that time had very little material to develop my interest.

However, in 1996 I did A Levels, and in Psychology came across an article ‘Can Machines Think’ by Alan Turing. I went back to my Turing, reading ‘On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem’ and anything else I could get my hands on. I was excited by the idea of whether thoughts can occur in something other than a living human brain, a question with which Turing was concerned. I also learnt of his chemical castration in 1952 for the ‘crime’ of homosexuality and of his death in 1954.


Turing led me to Wittgenstein, and through them both, philosophy of which I am now a PhD. He deserves my thanks, which I give Turing gladly.