Turing’s Legacy Today: between Inheritance Appropriation and Resource for the Future

The article describes the particular style of Turing's articles, distinct from all others by two features: he maintains an imaginary dialogue with his reader and at same time identifies himself with the object he describes in the various domains he deals with, mathematics, logic, philosophy or biology. This particular style is complemented by the description of Turing's three-phase intellectual development which is described chronologically: being a machine; being a woman/man/machine; being a biological form. One becomes aware that the notion of the mechanical or of computation should not at all be considered as the ultimate ontological universal model to be applied to reality in an undifferentiated way: this would be inheritance appropriation. On the contrary, because computation is a consequence of the inner limitations of formal systems, it is by definition an interface that grasps only what pertains to the formal and discrete order in phenomena. It is therefore the relationship between determinism and unpredictability which becomes central. Consequences of this relationship are drawn from the point of view of today’s natural as well as social sciences, in particular in the use of “big data”.