Alan Turing — "The question whether machines can think is as meaningless as the question whethe…"
The question whether machines can think is as meaningless as the question whether submarines can swim.
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Details
Attributed, a popular quote, but its exact wording and source are sometimes debated. Reflects his operational definition of 'thinking'.
Date: Unknown, likely 1950s
GeneralVerification
Unverifiable
Found in 1 providers: grok
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Understanding this quote
What it means
Asking whether machines can think is a pointless semantic debate. The word 'think' carries biological baggage that clouds the real question. What matters is whether a machine can perform intelligent behavior indistinguishably from a human — a functional test, not a philosophical one. Reframing the question around observable behavior cuts through circular arguments about consciousness and gets to something actually measurable.
Relevance to Alan Turing
Turing spent his career building machines that solved problems humans considered purely mental — cracking Enigma required intuition, pattern recognition, creative leaps. He invented the Turing Test precisely to sidestep unanswerable questions about machine consciousness. His own brilliant, methodical mind made him skeptical of definitions that privileged biology over function.
The era
In the 1950s, computing was newborn and scientists fiercely debated whether machines could ever be truly intelligent. Cold War pressures accelerated computer development while philosophers questioned the nature of mind. Turing's reframing challenged both religious assumptions about the soul's uniqueness and academic philosophy's tendency toward unresolvable abstraction — radical pragmatism in a deeply ideological moment.
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