The Binary Code of Body and Spirit:

Computing Pioneer Alan Turing on

Mortality
The body provides something for the spirit to look
after and use.
By Maria Popova

The Binary Code of Body and Spirit: Computing Pioneer Alan Turing on Mortality

The void horrifies: so we are all immortal, Simone de Beauvoir scoffed at the
religious escapism of immortality in explaining why she is an atheist, adding: Faith
allows an evasion of those difficulties which the atheist confronts honestly. But there
exists a certain orientation of spirit that is both unreligious and lucid in contemplating
mortality. Einstein touched on it in his beautiful letter to the Queen of Belgium, in
which he wrote: There is, after all, something eternal that lies beyond the hand of fate
and of all human delusions. And yet he conceded that such an orientation toward
mortality is reserved for those who have been privileged to accomplish in full measure
their task in life.

To make sense of the untimely loss of a young and unrealized life is a wholly different
matter, one which haunted computing pioneer Alan Turing (June 23, 1912June 7,
1954).

Young Alan Turing

Turings decryption of Nazi communication code is estimated to have shortened WWII

by two to four years, consequently saving anywhere between 14 and 21 million lives.
But despite his wartime heroism, Turing was driven to suicide after being chemically
castrated by the U.K. government for being homosexual. More than half a century after
his disquieting death, Queen Elizabeth II issued royal pardon a formal posthumous
apology that somehow only amplifies the tragedy of Turings life and death.

Tragedy had been with Turing from a young age. At fifteen, while attending the
Sherborne School, he fell deeply in love with a classmate named Christopher Morcom.
For the awkward and ostracized young Alan, who was bullied so severely that a group
of boys once trapped him under the floorboards of a dorm dayroom and kept him there
until he nearly suffocated, Christopher was everything he was not dashing, polished,
well versed in both science and art, and aglow with winsome charisma. Alans love was
profound and pure and unrequited in the dimensions he most longed for, but Christopher
did take to him with great warmth and became his most beloved, in fact his only, friend.
They spent long nights discussing science and philosophy, trading astronomical acumen,
and speculating about the laws of physics.

Alan Turing (far left) with classmates at Waterloo Station on the way to the school
carriage at Charing Cross Station, early 1926 (Turing Digital Archive)

When Christopher died of bovine tuberculosis in 1930 a disease he had contracted

from infected milk, for which there was no common vaccine until after WWII Alan
fell to pieces. He was able to collect himself only through work, by burrowing so deep
into the underbelly of mathematics that he emerged almost on the other side, where
science and metaphysics meet. Sorrow had taken him on a crusade to make sense of
reality, of this senseless ruin, and he spared no modality of thought. Most of all, he
wanted to understand how he could remain so attached to someone who no longer
existed materially but who felt so overwhelmingly alive in his spirit.

All the while, young Turing remained in touch with Christophers mother, who had
taken a sympathetic liking to her sons awkward friend. After Christophers death, he
visited the Morcoms at their country home, Clock House, and corresponded with Mrs.
Morcom about the grief they shared, about the perplexity of how a nonentity for
Christopher had ceased to exist in physical terms could color each of their worlds so
completely.

Alan Turing and Christopher Morcom. Art by Keith Hegley from The Who, the What,
and the When, an illustrated celebration of the little-known inspirations behind
geniuses.

That sorrowful puzzlement is what Turing explored in a series of letters to Christophers

mother, originally included in his first serious biography and brought to new life in
astrophysicist Janna Levins exquisite novel A Mad Man Dreams of Turing Machines
(public library) a masterwork of fiction that swirls philosophical poetics around the
facts of Turings life.

Levin paints Turings struggle to conciliate the materialism of his scientific devotion
with his spiritual devotion to Christopher even after the material cessation of his
existence:

The future, present, and past of every material object is subject to the laws of physics.
The orbit of every celestial body, the fall of every drop of rain. His own body a
collection of molecules. His desire a cauldron of hormones whose chemistry has just
been scientifically documented. His brain a case of matter, blood, and bone.

But he feels direct experience of his own soul, his spirit. He cannot accept that as an
aggregate of flesh, a clump of matter, that his future, past, and present are already
determined by the laws of physics. He cannot crush out the intuition that he makes
choices, influences the world with his mind and spirit.

[]

Chris had shown him the reaction between solutions of iodates and sulfites. Holding the
mixture in a clear beaker near his face, he watched Alans response as the solution
turned a bold blue, tinting Christophers hair and deepening the hue of his eyes. To Alan
it seemed the other way around, as though Chriss beautiful eyes had stained the beaker
blue.

[]

He often tries to re-create the moment when Chriss spirit seeped out of the portals of
his eyes and infused the room, a stunning concentration of his soul trapped in the indigo
liquid in the beaker. He knows the simple form of the chemicals and the rules of their
combination, but he cant shake the force of the impression that Chris makes on him. He
cant limit the experience to the confines of ordinary matter.

That unshakable sense of spirit beyond matter is what 20-year-old Turing articulates in a
letter from April 20, 1933:

My dear Mrs. Morcom,

I was so pleased to be at the Clockhouse for Easter. I always like to think of it specially
in connection with Chris. It reminds us that Chris is in some way alive now. One is
perhaps too inclined to think only of him alive at some future time when we shall meet
him again; but it is really so much more helpful to think of him as just separated from us
for the present.

Turing visited Clock House again in July, for what would have been Christophers
twenty-second birthday. Seeking to reconcile the irrepressible spiritual aliveness felt in
grief with the undeniable definitiveness of physical death, as much for himself as for
Christophers mother, he wrote in another letter to her under the heading Nature of
Spirit:

It used to be supposed in Science that if everything was known about the Universe at
any particular moment then we can predict what it will be through all the future. This
idea was really due to the great success of astronomical prediction. More modern
science however has come to the conclusion that when we are dealing with atoms and
electrons we are quite unable to know the exact state of them; our instruments being
made of atoms and electrons themselves. The conception then of being able to know the
exact state of the universe then really must break down on the small scale. This means
then that the theory which held that as eclipses etc. are pre-destined so were all our
actions breaks down too. We have a will which is able to determine the action of the
atoms probably in a small portion of the brain, or possibly all over it.

[]

Then as regards the actual connection between spirit and body I consider that the body
by reason of being a living body can attract and hold on to a spirit whilst the body is
alive and awake and the two are firmly connected. When the body is asleep I cannot
guess what happens but when the body dies the mechanism of the body, holding the
spirit, is gone and the spirit finds a new body sooner or later perhaps immediately.

As regards the question of why we have bodies at all; why we do not or cannot live free
as spirits and communicate as such, we probably could do so but there would be nothing
whatever to do. The body provides something for the spirit to look after and use.

First page of Nature of Spirit, in Turings original handwriting (Turing Digital

Archive)

How Turings ideas evolved over the course of his life as he tussled with this paradox is
among the many profound and possibly unanswerable questions examined with
enormous intellectual elegance in A Mad Man Dreams of Turing Machines, another
thread of which explores how the mathematician Kurt Gdel shaped our ideas of truth.
Complement this particular thread with Marcus Aurelius on mortality and the key to
living fully, Mary Oliver on the measure of aliveness, and Oliver Sacks on death,
destiny, and the redemptive radiance of a life well lived.