The Gospel of Alan Turing

[jporter]

It was 49 years ago, not long after his stint at Bletchley Park, that Alan
Turing made the following comments:

>[Nevertheless] I believe that at the end of the century the use of words
>and general educated opinion >will have altered so much that one will be
>able to speak of machines thinking without expecting to be >contradicted.
>I believe further that no useful purpose is served by concealing these
>beliefs.  [MIND, VOL. >LIX. No.236. October, 1950]


Turing, along with several other geniuses, laid the foundation for the
computers we are all now using. Apparently, he under-estimated the length
of time required to produce machines capable of fooling real people into
believing that they- the machines- are thinking. I say "apparently" because
the majority of us are not privy to the newest and most powerful computers
in use today.

But given Turing's (perhaps) inaccurate prediction, I was amused to read
the posts discussing the relative transcendental experiences, or lack there
of, of Slothrop and Tchitcherine, both of whom are fictions. I was amused
because I had the feeling (although I may be wrong) that both rj and dm
would argue against Turing's conjecture, that inanimate machines will ever
prove capable of thought- with the implied notion of a soul- let alone, by
millenium's end.

My amusement turned to goose bumps, however, when I read Section 6 of
Turing's article, where he ennumerates the nine major arguments opposed to
his idea of thinking machines, and then shoots them down, one by one, until
he comes to Number Nine:

>9) The Argument from Extra-Sensory Perception. I assume that the reader is
>familiar with the idea of >extra-sensory perception, and the meaning of
>the four items of it, viz. telepathy, clairvoyance, >precognition and
>psycho-kinesis. These disturbing phenomena seem to deny all our usual
>scientific >ideas. How we should like to discredit them! Unfortunately the
>statistical evidence, at least for telepathy, >is overwhelming. It is very
>difficult to rearrange one's ideas so as to fit these new facts in. Once
>one has >accepted them it does not seem a very big step to believe in
>ghosts and bogies. The idea that our bodies >move simply according to the
>known laws of physics, together with some others not yet discovered but
>>somewhat similar, would be one of the first to go.

>This argument is to my mind quite a strong one. One can say in reply that
>many scientific theories seem >to remain workable in practice, in spite of
>clashing with E.S.P.; that in fact one can get along very nicely >if one
>forgets about it. This is rather cold comfort, and one fears that thinking
>is just the kind of >phenomenon where E.S.P. may be especially relevant.

>A more specific argument based on E.S.P. might run as follows:

          {snip, see- http://www.abelard.org/turpap/turpap.htm}

>With E.S.P. anything may happen....


Wow! and from Turing, no less! He sees as the main obstacle in proving
Artificial Intelligence, that, "the statistical evidence, at least for
telepathy, is overwhelming." In other words, unless he can build a computer
that can mimic the telepathic power of the human brain, his machine might
flunk the Turing Test! He suggests that housing the human competitors in a
"telepathy-proof room," might do the trick. He does not elaborate on what
such a room would need to be like. Perhaps, unlike ULTRA and Bletchley
Park, the details of such installations remain classified.

Later, Turing goes on to say:

>The 'skin of an onion' analogy is also helpful. In considering the
>functions of the mind or the brain we >find certain operations which we
>can explain in purely mechanical terms. This we say does not >correspond
>to the real mind: it is a sort of skin which we must strip off if we are
>to find the real mind. But >then in what remains we find a further skin to
>be stripped off, and so on. Proceeding in this way do we >ever come to the
>'real' mind, or do we eventually come to the skin which has nothing in it?
>In the latter >case the whole mind is mechanical....


>The only really satisfactory support that can be given for the view
>expressed...will be that provided by >waiting for the end of the century
>and then doing the experiment described. But what can we say in the
>>meantime? What steps should be taken now if the experiment is to be
>successful?


I'm not sure that the steps haven't been taken. Nor I am sure that an
experimental thinking machine was the most significant point of Turing's
historic article. At any rate, the time is now.


Looking through the bent backed tulips,

jody