Alan Turing — "I am not a believer in the idea that the human mind is something supernatural."
I am not a believer in the idea that the human mind is something supernatural.
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More from Alan Turing
"If a machine is expected to be infallible, it cannot also be intelligent."
"I have had a dream indicating rather clearly that I am on the way to being hetero, though I don't accept it with much enthusiasm either awake or in the dreams."
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Details
Attributed, general philosophical stance, hard to pin down exact wording/source.
Date: Approx. 1950s
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Unverifiable
Found in 1 providers: grok
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Understanding this quote
What it means
The human mind works by natural, physical processes—not divine intervention, spiritual forces, or anything beyond ordinary matter and causation. Intelligence, reasoning, and consciousness emerge from mechanics that can be studied, modeled, and potentially replicated. No ghost, soul, or mystical element separates human thought from other natural phenomena. If we understand the brain's rules well enough, we can reproduce its outputs—in theory, on paper, or inside a machine.
Relevance to Alan Turing
Turing spent his career formalizing thinking itself. His 1936 universal machine showed computation could simulate any mental process, and his 1950 paper 'Computing Machinery and Intelligence' proposed the Turing Test because he believed intelligence was behavior, not essence. A committed materialist, he saw no principled barrier between brain and machine. His later morphogenesis work applied the same logic to biology: complex patterns arise from chemistry alone, not from any directing spirit.
The era
Mid-twentieth-century Britain remained deeply Christian; the Church of England shaped public morality, and theology held that the soul was uniquely human and immaterial. Simultaneously, computing was emerging as a field that threatened that specialness—if a machine could mimic thought, what remained sacred about consciousness? Cold War science raced to explain everything mechanistically. Debates about mind, free will, and machine intelligence were urgent and unsettled, making Turing's flat denial of the supernatural quietly radical.
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