Alan Turing — "The question of whether machines can think is a philosophical one, not a scienti…"
The question of whether machines can think is a philosophical one, not a scientific one.
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Details
Attributed, general implication from his writings, but exact quote is elusive.
Date: Approx. 1950
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Found in 1 providers: grok
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Understanding this quote
What it means
Whether machines can think depends entirely on what 'think' means — and that's a definitional dispute, not something experiments can settle. Science measures behavior, speed, and pattern recognition, but cannot determine whether any process constitutes genuine thought versus sophisticated mimicry. That distinction belongs to philosophy of mind, where competing definitions of consciousness, intentionality, and cognition remain unresolved. No instrument can answer a question whose terms aren't agreed upon.
Relevance to Alan Turing
Turing confronted this directly in his landmark 1950 paper 'Computing Machinery and Intelligence,' immediately sidestepping 'Can machines think?' as ill-defined and replacing it with the behavioral Imitation Game. His wartime codebreaking at Bletchley Park showed him machines executing complex tasks; his computability theory revealed their formal limits. He trusted rigorous framing over vague intuition — precise enough to distinguish which questions science could answer from those it structurally cannot.
The era
The early 1950s marked computing's birth as a public phenomenon. ENIAC (1945), the Manchester Baby (1948), and stored-program architectures made 'thinking machines' a live cultural question. Cold War pressures accelerated automation research while philosophers — Ryle's 'The Concept of Mind' (1949), Wittgenstein's later work — actively dismantled naive mental concepts. Society urgently debated whether machines threatened human uniqueness, making the boundary between mechanical computation and genuine thought a central anxiety of the age.
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