If telepathy is admitted it will be necessary to tighten our test. The situation could be regarded as analogous to that which would occur if the interrogator were talking to himself and one of the competitors was listening with his ear to the wall. To put the competitors into a “telepathy-proof room” would satisfy all requirements.
Reflections
Most of our response to this remarkable and lucid article is contained in the following dialogue. However, we wish to make a short comment about Turing’s apparent willingness to believe that extrasensory perception might turn out to be the ultimate difference between humans and the machines they create. If this comment is taken at face value (and not as some sort of discrete joke), one has to wonder what motivated it. Apparently Turing was convinced that the evidence for telepathy was quite strong. However, if it was strong in 1950, it is no stronger now, thirty years later—in fact, it is probably weaker. Since 1950 there have been many notorious cases of claims of psychic ability of one sort or another, often vouched for by physicists of some renown. Some of these physicists have later felt they had been made fools of and have taken back their public pro-E.S.P. pronouncements, only to jump on some new paranormal bandwagon the next month. But it is safe to say that the majority of physicists—and certainly the majority of psychologists, who specialize in understanding the mind—doubt the existence of extrasensory perception in any form.
Turing took “cold comfort” in the idea that paranormal phenomena might be reconcilable in some way with well-established scientific theories. We differ with him. We suspect that if such phenomena such as telepathy, precognition, and telekinesis turned out to exist (and turned out to have the remarkable properties typically claimed for them) the laws of physics would not be simply amendable to accommodate them; only a major revolution in our scientific world view could do them justice. One might look forward to such a revolution with sadness and perplexity. How could the science that had worked for so well for so many things turn out to be so wrong? The challenge of rethinking all of science from its most basic assumptions on up would be a great intellectual adventure, but the evidence that we need to do this has simply failed to accumulate over the years.
D.R.H.
D.C.D.
Chris, a physics student, Pat, a biology student, and Sandy, a philosophy student.
CHRIS: Sandy, I want to thank you for suggesting that I read Alan Turing’s article “Computing Machinery and Intelligence.” It’s a wonderful piece and it certainly made me think—and think about my thinking.
SANDY: Glad to hear it. Are you still as much of a skeptic about artificial intelligence as you used to be?
CHRIS: You’ve got me wrong. I’m not against artificial intelligence. I think it’s wonderful stuff—perhaps a little crazy, but why not? I simply am convinced that you AI advocates have far underestimated the human mind and that there are things a computer will never, ever be able to do. For instance, can you imagine a computer writing a Proust novel? The richness of imagination and complexity of the characters....
SANDY: Rome wasn’t built in a day.
CHRIS: In the article Turing comes through as an interesting person. Is he still alive?
SANDY: No, he died back in 1954, at just forty-one. He’d only be sixty-seven this year, although he is now such a legendary figure it seems strange to imagine him still alive today.
CHRIS: How did he die?
SANDY: Almost certainly suicide. He was homosexual and had to deal with a lot of harsh treatment and stupidity from the outside world. In the end it apparently got to be too much and he killed himself.
CHRIS: That’s a sad story.
SANDY: Yes, it certainly is. What saddens me is that he never got to see the amazing progress in computing machinery and theory that has taken place.
PAT: Hey, are you going to clue me in as to what this Turing article is about?
SANDY: It is really about two things. One is the question “Can a machine think?”—or rather “Will a machine ever think?” The way Turing answers this question—he thinks the answer is “yes,” by the way—is by batting down a series of objections to the idea, one after another. The other point he tries to make is that the question is not meaningful as it stands. It’s too full of emotional connotations. Many people are upset by the suggestion that people are machines, or that machines might think. Turing tries to defuse the question by casting it in a less emotional terms. For instance, what do you think, Pat, of the idea of “thinking machines?”
PAT: Frankly, I find the term confusing. You know what confuses me? Its those ads in the newspapers and on TV that talk about “products that think” or “intelligent ovens” or whatever. I just don’t know how seriously to take them.
SANDY: I know the kind of ads you mean, and I think they confuse a lot of people. On the one hand we’re given the refrain “Computers are really dumb, you have to spell everything out for them in complete detail,” and on the other hand we’re bombarded with advertising hype about “smart products.”
CHRIS: That’s certainly true. Did you know that one computer terminal manufacturer has even taken to calling its products “dumb terminals” in order to make them stand out from the crowd?
SANDY: That’s cute, but it just plays along with the trend toward obfuscation. The term “electronic brain” always comes to my mind when I’m thinking about this. Many people swallow it completely, while others reject it out of hand. Few have the patience to sort out the issues and decide how much of it makes sense.
PAT: Does Turing suggest some way of resolving it, some sort of IQ test for machines?
SANDY: That would be interesting, but no machine could yet come close to taking an IQ test. Instead, Turing proposes a test that theoretically could be applied to any machine to determine whether it can think or not.
PAT: Does the test give a clear-cut yes or no answer? I’d be skeptical if it claimed so.
SANDY: No, it doesn’t. In a way, that’s one of its advantages. It shows how the borderline is quite fuzzy and how subtle the whole question is.
PAT: So, as is usual in philosophy, it’s all just a question of words.
SANDY: Maybe, but they’re emotionally charged words, and so it’s important, it seems to me, to explore the issues and try to map out the meanings of the crucial words. The issues are fundamental to our concept of ourselves, so we shouldn’t just sweep them under the rug.
7
This selection appeared previously as “Metamagical Themas: A Coffeehouse conversation on the Turing test to determine if a machine can think.” In