Alan Turing — "There are many questions which we shall have to answer, for example, what is the…"
There are many questions which we shall have to answer, for example, what is the nature of consciousness?
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More from Alan Turing
"The most important thing for a mathematician is intuition."
"We are not interested in the fact that a machine can do something, but in the fact that it can learn to do something."
"It is not possible to produce a machine which will be intelligent in the same way that a human being is intelligent."
"I have had a number of conversations with people who are convinced that machines cannot think. I have not been convinced by their arguments."
"The machine has to be able to do something which it has never been programmed to do."
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Understanding this quote
What it means
What does it mean to be aware, to think, to experience? This question probes whether consciousness is purely mechanical or something more — whether a mind can be reduced to processes, computations, or biological machinery. It challenges us to define the boundary between mere information processing and genuine subjective experience, a puzzle that remains unresolved despite centuries of philosophy and decades of neuroscience.
Relevance to Alan Turing
Turing spent his career asking whether machines could think, culminating in the famous Turing Test. This question about consciousness was not abstract for him — it was professional and personal. He needed to understand what distinguished human cognition from computation. His own inner life, including his persecution for homosexuality, likely sharpened his sensitivity to questions of what it means to have a mind that others might dismiss or misunderstand.
The era
Writing in the early 1950s, Turing lived through the birth of electronic computing, when machines first performed logical operations previously exclusive to humans. Simultaneously, behaviorism dominated psychology, reducing minds to observable inputs and outputs. These tensions — mechanical brain vs. felt experience — made consciousness newly urgent. Cold War pressures to build thinking machines and decrypt human communication made this philosophical question suddenly practical and geopolitical.
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