Alan Turing — "The human brain is a very complex machine, but it is still a machine."
The human brain is a very complex machine, but it is still a machine.
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More from Alan Turing
"If a machine is expected to be infallible, it cannot also be intelligent."
"The problem of consciousness is a difficult one, and I do not have a solution to it."
"We are trying to make a brain."
"There would be great opposition from the intellectuals who were afraid of being put out of a job. It is probable though that the intellectuals would be mistaken about this. There would be plenty to do…"
"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."
Details
Attributed, often cited in discussions of computational neuroscience.
Date: Unknown
Nature & WorldVerification
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Understanding this quote
What it means
Despite its staggering complexity, the human brain follows physical and logical rules — not some supernatural force. Intelligence, thought, and consciousness are ultimately mechanical processes that can, in principle, be understood, modeled, and replicated. This challenges the idea that human minds occupy a category beyond scientific explanation, asserting instead that thinking is a form of computation and therefore something science can fully investigate.
Relevance to Alan Turing
Turing spent his career formalizing computation through the abstract Turing machine and cracking Enigma at Bletchley Park via mechanical reasoning. His landmark 1950 paper 'Computing Machinery and Intelligence' asked directly whether machines can think. Viewing the brain as a machine was not reductive for him — it was the philosophical cornerstone justifying his life's work: if minds are machines, building artificial ones is a legitimate scientific goal.
The era
In the late 1940s and early 1950s, the first real computers — ENIAC, the Manchester Baby, Turing's ACE — were just being built. Cold War pressure drove rapid investment in computation. Yet mainstream philosophy, theology, and even psychology still treated human consciousness as uniquely divine or irreducible to mechanism. Turing's assertion landed at the precise historical moment machines were first demonstrating capabilities previously considered exclusively human.
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