Alan Turing — "The extent to which we regard mind as distinct from matter, is a matter of conve…"
The extent to which we regard mind as distinct from matter, is a matter of convention.
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More from Alan Turing
"The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination."
"I'm afraid that the following syllogism may be used by some in the future. Turing believes machines think. Turing lies with men. Therefore machines do not think. Yours in distress, Alan."
"The isolated man does not develop any intellectual power. It is necessary for him to be immersed in an environment of other men, whose techniques he absorbs during the first twenty years of his life."
"I've now got myself into the kind of trouble that I have always considered to be quite a possibility for me, though I have usually rated it at about 10:1 against."
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Understanding this quote
What it means
The sharp divide we draw between mind and physical matter isn't a fixed truth of nature—it's a convention, a chosen framework. We decide to treat consciousness as fundamentally different from brain tissue, but that decision is pragmatic, not necessary. The boundary could be redrawn. This rejects hard dualism and opens the door to treating thought as a physical, computable process—no mystical substance required, just a useful distinction we've agreed to observe.
Relevance to Alan Turing
Turing's 1950 paper introducing the Turing Test deliberately avoided defining consciousness, asking instead whether a machine's behavior was indistinguishable from a human's—the pragmatic move this quote predicts. If mind-matter distinction is conventional, define thinking behaviorally, not metaphysically. Turing believed computation was a form of thought: his theoretical machines processed symbols by mechanical rules, collapsing the boundary. His codebreaking at Bletchley further showed that pure logical process could crack what human minds produced.
The era
Writing in the late 1940s and early 1950s, Turing worked amid the birth of digital computing and Norbert Wiener's cybernetics movement, which reframed minds as information systems. Logical positivism was pushing philosophy away from metaphysics toward the observable and measurable. The first programmable computers—Colossus, ENIAC, Manchester Baby—forced genuine questions about machine intelligence for the first time. Culturally, humanity's claim to unique spiritual status felt newly fragile after the industrialized horror of World War II.
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