Alan Turing's Homosexuality Matters

Alan Turing’s Homosexuality Matters

         Perhaps it will no longer exist one day – the loneliness of being homosexual in the eras and places where you may not identify that part of yourself without being seen as criminal or insane, and be in danger of death for being homosexual.

Some others too know the pain of such a state, a state of psychological torment that no one, surely, would seek.  But if you have suffered such a loneliness, you are marked forever by the special experience of having been trapped in an internal labyrinth with no hope of escape.

I can see how when the genius Alan Turing wandered in his self-contained labyrinth, it triggered the creation of a private, original language, for no common use of language could yield what his intelligence, in desperation, craved – to find the universal key (there being no help from any private parties or authorities) for escaping such a personal labyrinth.

Others in such a state survive by creating separate worlds more imaginary, less mathematical.  Perhaps many people have one secret aspect of language that the disciple Paul described as being not for sermons or interpersonal communication, but for solitary conversation with God (or, as I would say, with the Plenum, or “the Other”)

An artificial intelligence – that is, created by singular artifice, not by communal thought and knowledge – would seem an intelligence forever lonely if one applies feeling to it.  Any such concept or creation of “artificial intelligence” would contain nothing human except, as I choose to imagine it, they would all house the ghost of the spirit of Alan Turing, in the same way that we each may have a favorite fictional character, flat on the page, but alive in the mind and the heart.

– James McColley Eilers, 22 February 2015