Footnote on the Turing Test
A last observation about the so-called Turing Test:
Asked about whether calculating machines could think, Alan Turing dismissed, rather than addressed, the question, saying that since “thought” was an entity science could not define, a more pragmatic and hence English way of muddling through the question would be to test empirically whether a calculating machine, for all practical purposes, could imitate the outward appearances or forms of thought.
The answer to this is both trivial and profoundly, if not vastly, uninteresting: of course calculating machine can perform calculations. That is what they are for.
Of course anything that can be reduced to a calculation can be performed by a calculation machine.
Whether or not holding a coherent conversation in English is one of those things, he does not answer nor address.
Instead he offers that an imitation game, that is, the ability to proffer certain typed sentences in return for other typed sentences, can indeed by performed by calculation.
Please notice that the real question being asked is a metaphysical, ontological question about the relation between mechanical and final causation, between form and content of thought, and, in short, between the substance of matter and the substance of mind.
It is two of the the most profound questions in philosophy wrapped into one: the ontological question of dualism and the metaphysical question of appearance and actuality.
Instead of answering, Turing offers the appallingly self-evident epistemological tautology that thought is expressed in the forms that express thought (as, for example, spoken or written material changes in pressure waves in the air, or ink-marks on paper), and that any form lacking content would be undistinguishable from form with content, provided that it was undistinguishable.
His answer is crap. All he has done is kicked over the chessboard, and prevented a sober discussion of the real question being asked for a generation or more.
As if he were asked whether an abacus can count, instead of answering with a simple negative, Turing says that if you count in your head or if you count by pushing beads on an abacus, the number is the same.
So if a man in a locked room does the addition in his head, and types the answer on a roll of paper, or if he uses and adding machine that types the answer onto a roll, lo and behold, the observer outside the locked room, receiving both rolls through a mail slot, that observer cannot tell which on was done manually, and which mechanically. Quelle Surprise!
Because the evidence needed to determine the real answer is in a locked room the observer, by hypothesis, cannot enter.
So, actually, we all knew that answer without consulting a world famous cryptographer and mathematician, and, more to the point, that is not the question being asked.
I have a suspicion as to why Mr. Turing gave this non-answer. It is only a suspicion, and should not be regarded as anything but.
I have a suspicion (and it is no more than a suspicion) that Mr. Turing, as an Englishman whose youth was formed by the dismal period between the Wars, was merely following the intellectual fashions of his time when asked for an opinion outside his scope of expertise.
Any Englishman educated in a posh school of the time, if parroting the fashionable opinions of the time, would dismiss philosophy and metaphysics as mere word-play.
Any posh Englishman of the day would promote a secular, allegedly pragmatic approach, of dealing with a philosophical issue “scientifically”, by which they mean according to the philosophy and metaphysics of such writers as Hobbes, Hume, Nietzsche, Marx, and, above all, Wittgenstein, as well as the writings of crackpots like Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell.
The crackpots fashionable in that day were heavily enamored of the irrationalism promoted by Nietzsche, that is, the idea that willpower and passion absent more defined the truth of life in a godless universe, and infatuated with the nihilism of Logical Positivism, a philosophy that defines itself out of existence, by dismissing all philosophy as meaningless word-play.
It is to be noted that a strong push among physicists toward the logically absurd metaphysical interpretation of quantum mechanics, following Schroedinger and Heisenberg and Bell, rather than following Einstein or Bohm or de Broglie some form of pilot wave theory, which sticks to empirical conclusions and does not touch metaphysics.
Likewise among computer scientists and mathematicians, the scoffing at the philosophical underpinnings of their own fields was all the rage, and the favorite pastimes, aside from refuting their own conclusions for such an intellectual was drilling holes in the bottom of the lifeboat in which he himself sat, or sawing off the tree-branch where he himself was perched.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
