Turing’s cyberworld

Abstract

Through a lengthy e-mail conversation in 1999, Rafael Capurro and I undertook the maieutics of a hermeneutic approach to a digital phenomenon that we dubbed digital ontology. The present paper employs this ontology to deepen discussion of the idea of the Universal Turing Machine, which serves as the ontological blueprint for the basic unit of today’s artificial cyberworld. Its way of working therefore also serves as a guide to investigating the spatiality and temporality of this artificial dimension to which humanity is today more than willingly exposed. In particular, an investigation of the Turing machine’s linear, logically causal ‘temporality’ shows up a contrast with the three-dimensional, ‘ecstatic’ temporality of the world shared by human beings. Properly speaking, a Turing machine is a contraption for copulating bit-strings timelessly; hence a digital ‘copulator’ Only by virtue of being nested in the existential world of human beings is the cyberworld in time.