Are We (Still) Living in a Computer Simulation?: Althusser and Turing

Taking Althusser’s hostility to formalism and logicism as read, along with the fact that today our social system is dominated by the logic of inputs and outputs, this essay counterintuitively argues that the theory of computation pioneered by Alan Turing in the 1930s and 1940s, and further developed in the digital philosophy of Gregory Chaitin and others, is perfectly attuned to the detotalization that Althusser, in both Initiation à la philosophie pour les non-philosophes and Être marxiste en philosophie, sees as the true task of an aleatory materialist philosophy.