Alan Turing — "The extent to which we regard thinking as a function of the brain rather than th…"
The extent to which we regard thinking as a function of the brain rather than the entire body is very much a matter of taste.
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More from Alan Turing
"No, I am not interested in developing a powerful brain. All I am after is just a mediocre brain, something like the Brain of the Man in the Street."
"I don't think that human beings are the be-all and end-all of creation."
"The extent to which we regard mind as distinct from matter, is a matter of convention."
"The important thing is not to stop questioning."
"Mathematical logic, as a subject, is going to have a great future."
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Understanding this quote
What it means
Whether thinking belongs to the brain alone or spreads across the whole body isn't a settled scientific fact — it's a subjective preference. By calling it a matter of taste, Turing dismantles the assumption that cognition is definitively biological. If the boundary is arbitrary, a machine processing information could satisfy any reasonable definition of thought just as well as flesh does, making the human-machine distinction philosophically unstable.
Relevance to Alan Turing
Turing published this in his 1950 paper "Computing Machinery and Intelligence," which introduced the Imitation Game — later the Turing Test. He built his career on treating reasoning as mechanical process, cracking Enigma by reducing codebreaking to computation. His 1952 prosecution for homosexuality likely sharpened his distrust of arbitrary social definitions: taste, not evidence, dictates what society labels essentially human.
The era
In 1950, the first stored-program computers had just run, yet most scientists assumed cognition was exclusively biological. Behaviorism dominated psychology, treating mind as stimulus-response loops. Cold War pressure accelerated automation and cryptanalysis. Philosophy of mind was torn between dualists and materialists. Turing's offhand 'matter of taste' was a deliberate provocation — reframing the era's deepest contested question as merely a definitional preference, not empirical fact.
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