What can Philosophy say, in principle, about Computers?

Abstract

Computers are the unexpected outcome of mathematical investigations from the first half of the 20th century. From mathematics to physics, and even to biology, there are many scientific disciplines in charge of their development nowadays; however, the same cannot be said about philosophy. My purpose is to understand whether philosophy would have something relevant to say about computers, even though it does not play any relevant role in this new endeavor. I consider that in order to answer this question, philosophical inquiry must discuss, in the first place, the work of Alan Turing. He created the concept of computer in a 1936-1937 paper, “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem”, and he also reflected upon the extreme implications of this concept on later texts, as in a 1947 lecture on the Automatic Computing Engine (ACE), where he expressed some interesting possibilities for understanding how computers and philosophy relate to each other. I intend to show therewith that his work offers some important insights for answering the decisive philosophical question on this subject: What can philosophy say, in principle, about computers?