I do not wish to give the impression that I think there is no mystery about consciousness. There is, for instance, something of a paradox connected with any attempt to localize it.
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From the paper “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” published in “Mind”, volume 49, number 236.
Date: 1950
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Consciousness remains genuinely mysterious and cannot be pinned to a specific location or mechanism. Any attempt to say 'consciousness happens here' creates a logical contradiction, because the very act of localizing it requires the consciousness you're trying to locate. The mind observing itself generates an infinite regress, making consciousness resistant to the same analytical reduction we apply to other phenomena.
Turing spent his career reducing intelligence to formal computation, yet openly acknowledged consciousness defied his own methods. His 1950 paper introducing the Turing Test deliberately sidestepped defining consciousness, testing behavioral outputs instead. Having suffered profound psychological torment from state persecution of his homosexuality, Turing understood intimately that inner experience resists external measurement or categorization.
The 1950s saw computing machines emerging as potential rivals to human thought, forcing urgent philosophical questions about mind and machine. Behaviorism dominated psychology, dismissing inner experience as unscientific. Meanwhile, Wittgenstein's philosophy and early cybernetics were reshaping how thinkers approached mind. Turing's candor about consciousness's mystery was intellectually courageous against a backdrop demanding mechanistic, measurable explanations for everything.
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