Alan Turing — "The problem of consciousness is a difficult one, and I do not have a solution to…"
The problem of consciousness is a difficult one, and I do not have a solution to it.
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More from Alan Turing
"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."
"The idea of a 'thinking machine' is not so absurd as it seems."
"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."
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"The problem of consciousness is a hard problem, and I don't know the answer."
Details
Attributed, philosophical stance, hard to pin down exact wording/source.
Date: Approx. 1950
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Unverifiable
Found in 1 providers: grok
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Understanding this quote
What it means
Consciousness — the subjective inner experience of being aware — remains one of philosophy and science's deepest unsolved problems. Turing is admitting he can build machines that behave intelligently but cannot explain what makes something genuinely conscious versus merely simulating it. No algorithm automatically answers whether there is 'something it is like' to be a machine. He draws a clear, honest line between functional intelligence and inner experience, refusing to pretend the gap doesn't exist.
Relevance to Alan Turing
Turing's 1950 paper 'Computing Machinery and Intelligence' proposed the Imitation Game precisely because defining consciousness was intractable — he sidestepped it, asking whether machines could behave indistinguishably from humans instead. Persecuted by a state that legally denied his inner life any validity, Turing understood personally what it meant to have one's consciousness dismissed. His humility here reflects a scientist who founded artificial intelligence while honestly admitting its central mystery — what awareness actually is — remained completely unsolved.
The era
Turing wrote in the early 1950s as behaviorism dominated psychology, holding that inner mental states were scientifically irrelevant and only observable behavior mattered. Simultaneously, the first programmable computers were emerging, forcing urgent new questions about machine thought. Cold War pressures accelerated computing research while existentialist philosophy challenged assumptions about human selfhood. These converging forces made Turing's admission striking — even the architect of the modern computer and the Turing Test could not resolve what consciousness fundamentally is.
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