Turing, A.I. and ESP- part 2 of (2/2)

[Spencer Thiel]

At 5:24 AM -0600 1/3/00, jodi wrote:

[snip]
>It does not seem surprising to me, now that I think about it, that he
>entertained the possibility of E.S.P. He was certainly a visionary. And
>while he probably had no inkling that by the end of the century we would be
>splicing genes from one species, nay, one phylum to another, or growing
>pluri-potential stem cells in a petri dish and cloning sheep- let alone the
>entire human genome- he certainly had first hand knowledge of powerful,
>ambitious and frequently desparate men with secrets in need of keeping.
>Exactly what he was privy to, and what he was not, we will probably never
>know:
[snip]

Does his entertainment of the idea of ESP have anything to do with his
status as a visionary?  As far as I can tell, this is just careful science
on Turing's part.  At Turing's time, you had a number of intellectuals
entertaining the thought of and dedicating their lives to the study of
parapsychology (most notably Coover at Stanford and Rhine at Duke (both
labs still fully operational) and Arthur Koestler).  Up to this point I am
troubled that any belief about ESP is attributed to Turing beyond what he
has written: 'statistical evidence is overwhelming'.  He is merely pointing
out, rightly so, that statistical evidence in favor of ESP is too abundant
to ignore.  I had to write psychology research papers in school and if I
didn't give a nod to the possibility that unaccountable human intuition
played a part in the results, I would have been given a big fat F.
-- 
Spencer Thiel
_____________    ________________    ____________
      // Able Minds, Inc. // 415.752.6515 //
http://www.cyberkids.com | http://www.cyberkids.com
	http://www.youngcomposers.com