Alan Turing — "I am not concerned with whether a machine has feelings, but whether it can perfo…"
I am not concerned with whether a machine has feelings, but whether it can perform tasks that require intelligence.
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More from Alan Turing
"No, I am not interested in developing a powerful brain. All I am after is just a mediocre brain, something like the Brain of the Man in the Street."
"We are not interested in the fact that a machine can do something, but in the fact that it can learn to do something."
"I am a homosexual. I have been convicted of gross indecency. I have been subjected to chemical castration."
"The machine should be able to carry out logical deductions."
"The extent to which we regard mind as an attribute of the body, or something separable from it, is largely a matter of convenience."
Details
Attributed, general implication from his writings, but exact quote is elusive.
Date: Approx. 1950
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Unverifiable
Found in 1 providers: grok
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Understanding this quote
What it means
Intelligence isn't about inner experience or emotion — it's about what you can actually do. The quote argues for judging minds by observable performance, not unknowable internal states. If a machine solves problems, reasons through complexity, and produces intelligent outputs, it qualifies as intelligent regardless of whether anything feels like something inside it. This is behavioral functionalism: capability, not consciousness, defines intelligence.
Relevance to Alan Turing
Turing formalized this exact idea in his 1950 paper 'Computing Machinery and Intelligence,' introducing the Imitation Game — now called the Turing Test — which evaluates machine intelligence through conversation, not introspection. A mathematician and codebreaker who cracked Nazi Enigma through logical rigor, Turing valued testable definitions over philosophical speculation. Tragically prosecuted for his sexuality, he knew firsthand how inner experience was dismissed; capability was the only fair measure.
The era
In the late 1940s and 1950s, the first electronic computers — ENIAC, Manchester Mark 1 — were just emerging, and society had no framework for thinking about machine minds. Philosophy was dominated by Cartesian dualism separating mind from matter. Turing's era witnessed the birth of cybernetics and information theory. His pragmatic stance cut through metaphysical fog at the exact moment humanity needed a workable definition of intelligence to guide the computing revolution.
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