AMBIVALENCE IN MACHINE INTELLIGENCE: THE EPISTEMOLOGICAL ROOTS OF THE TURING MACHINE.

The Turing Machine (tm) presents itself as the very landmark and initial design of digital automata present in all modern general-purpose digital computers and whose design on computable numbers implies deeply ontological as well as epistemological foundations for today's computers. These lines of work attempt to briefly analyze the fundamental epistemological problem that rose in the late 19th and early 20th century whereby "machine cognition" emerges. The epistemological roots addressed in the tm and notably in its "Halting Problem" uncovers the tension between determinism and uncertainty, regarded here as the primal and inherent features of machine cognition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]