Author's Introduction
- ‘Iassume that the reader is familiar with the idea of extra-sensory perception … telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition and psycho-kinesis. These disturbing phenomena seem to deny all our usual scientific ideas … Unfortunately the statistical evidence, at least for telepathy, is overwhelming … Once one has accepted them it does not seem a very big step to believe in ghosts and bogies.’
- These words weren’t published in the pages of an obscure occult journal or declared at a secret parapsychology conference. They weren’t written by a Victorian spiritualist or a séance attendee. In fact, their author is Alan Turing, the father of computer science, and they appear in his seminal paper "Turing (Alan) - Computing Machinery and Intelligence" (1950), which describes the ‘imitation game’ (more commonly known as the ‘Turing test’) designed to establish whether a machine’s intelligence could be distinguished from that of a human.
- The paper starts by setting up the now-famous thought experiment: a human, a machine, and an observer who asks questions. If the observer cannot work out which one is which based on their responses, the machine has passed the test: its intelligence is indistinguishable from that of a human mind. The vast majority of the paper addresses various objections against the experiment from mathematics, philosophy of mind, or from those sceptical about the power of computers.
- But, about two-thirds of the way through the paper, Turing addresses an unexpected worry that might disrupt the imitation game: telepathy. If the human and the observer could communicate telepathically (which the machine supposedly could not do), then the test would fail. ‘This argument is to my mind quite a strong one,’ says Turing. In the end, he suggests that, for the test to work properly, the experiment must take place in a ‘telepathy-proof room’.
- Why did Turing feel the need to talk about telepathy? Why did he consider extrasensory perception a serious objection to his thought experiment? And what about his peculiar mention of ghosts?
Author's Conclusion
- Many of these philosophical engagements with parapsychology and psychical research have now been forgotten – or perhaps brushed under the carpet out of embarrassment. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, for example, only contains a few words about Broad and Price’s interest in parapsychology, and my own forthcoming paper is currently the only one on Lewy’s work on psychical research.
- Some of Broad and Price’s contemporaries also thought that psychical research was not worth any attention by historians of philosophy. Rudolf Metz’s tome A Hundred Years of British Philosophy (1938) contains a mere two pages on psychical ‘researchers’ (the quotation marks are his) and their ‘voluminous writings’. His tone is dismissive, and he says that ‘it hardly redounds to the credit of modern British philosophy that so many thinkers and investigators who have otherwise to be taken seriously have on this ground proved so over-venturesome.’
- Despite Metz’s dismissal, many philosophers continued working on questions in psychical research long into the 1950s and ’60s, after psychical research had left other departments in the modern university. These philosophers included Antony Flew, Martha Kneale and other overlooked thinkers such as C T K Chari, H A C Dobbs and Clement Mundle. It also appears that Kurt Gödel believed in the afterlife.
- Cambridge was one of the birthplaces of analytic philosophy, which prides itself on dispensing with speculative metaphysics, and putting a heavy emphasis on scientific precision and empiricism. But ‘spooky’ topics like telepathy, after-death survival and ghosts permeated the philosophical ecosystem in Cambridge and beyond long into the 1960s. It pushed many of the thinkers interested in it towards new and creative explorations of the nature of time, matter and language. So, when Alan Turing, one of Cambridge’s most famous alumni, turned his attention to artificial intelligence and made his era-defining contribution, it was natural that he would be concerned about a problem many of his peers considered deeply puzzling: telepathy.
Author Narrative
- Matyáš Moravec is a lecturer in philosophy at Queen’s University Belfast. He is the author of Henri Bergson and the Philosophy of Religion (2024).
Notes
Comment:
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