Alan Turing — "The extent to which we regard mind as an attribute of the body, or something sep…"
The extent to which we regard mind as an attribute of the body, or something separable from it, is largely a matter of convenience.
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More from Alan Turing
"We are not interested in the fact that a machine can solve a problem, but in the fact that it can solve a problem that we cannot."
"No, I am not interested in developing a powerful brain. All I am interested in is a rather crude imitation of a child's brain."
"The machine has to be able to do something which it has never been programmed to do."
"The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance, but the illusion of knowledge."
"We are not interested in the fact that the machine can do well, but in the fact that it can do badly."
Details
Attributed, philosophical stance, hard to pin down exact wording/source.
Date: Approx. 1950
ShockingVerification
Unverifiable
Found in 1 providers: grok
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Understanding this quote
What it means
The quote argues that the ancient debate over whether the mind is physical or somehow separate from the body isn't a question with a fixed true answer—it's a pragmatic choice. Depending on the problem at hand, one framing is more useful than the other. Turing treats philosophical categories as tools, not eternal facts, sidestepping metaphysics entirely in favor of whatever framework does the most explanatory work.
Relevance to Alan Turing
Turing's entire career forced him to confront this question directly. Designing the Turing Test in 1950, he deliberately avoided asking whether machines truly possess minds, asking only whether they behave intelligently—pure convenience thinking applied. His theoretical work treated computation as potentially equivalent to cognition, dissolving the brain-machine boundary. Personally, British law prosecuted his body as a moral problem distinct from his celebrated intellect, a cruel real-world inversion of the very pragmatism he championed.
The era
Turing wrote during the post-WWII rise of cybernetics and early computing, when the boundary between human thought and machine processing was suddenly blurring. Norbert Wiener's cybernetics (1948) framed brains and machines as equivalent feedback systems. Behaviorism dominated psychology, dismissing inner mental states as unscientific. Against this backdrop, Turing's pragmatic dissolution of the mind-body problem cleared philosophical space for taking machine intelligence seriously without first resolving centuries-old metaphysical disputes that had no clean answer.
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