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Rethinking Turing’s Test and the Philosophical Implications

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Abstract

In the 70 years since Alan Turing’s ‘Computing Machinery and Intelligence’ appeared in Mind, there have been two widely-accepted interpretations of the Turing test: the canonical behaviourist interpretation and the rival inductive or epistemic interpretation. These readings are based on Turing’s Mind paper; few seem aware that Turing described two other versions of the imitation game. I have argued that both readings are inconsistent with Turing’s 1948 and 1952 statements about intelligence, and fail to explain the design of his game. I argue instead for a response-dependence interpretation (Proudfoot 2013). This interpretation has implications for Turing’s view of free will: I argue that Turing’s writings suggest a new form of free will compatibilism, which I call response-dependence compatibilism (Proudfoot 2017a). The philosophical implications of rethinking Turing’s test go yet further. It is assumed by numerous theorists that Turing anticipated the computational theory of mind. On the contrary, I argue, his remarks on intelligence and free will lead to a new objection to computationalism.

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Notes

  1. Similarly, Marvin Minsky said that the Turing test is a ‘joke’ and that Turing ‘never intended it as the way to decide whether a machine was really intelligent’ (Minsky on Singularity 1 on 1: the Turing test is a joke! Interview with Nikola Danaylov, 2013, www.youtube.com/watch?v=3PdxQbOvAll). Also, according to Drew McDermott, all that Turing wanted to do was to ‘shake people’s intuitions up’ (McDermott 2010).

  2. In a letter to the Times on 13 November, Sir Charles Darwin, Director of the National Physical Laboratory, explained that Mountbatten had been ‘fully informed’ about the ACE (Darwin 1946).

  3. The Mercury, 3 January 1947, p. 5.

  4. The Motherwell Times 8 November 1946.

  5. ‘The Brain Machine’, The Evening Telegraph and Post, 2 November 1946, p. 4.

  6. The Motherwell Times 8 November 1946.

  7. ‘Electronic “Brain”’, Palestine Post, 7 November 1946.

  8. ‘Le “cerveau electronique”’, La Sentinelle 8 November 1946.

  9. ‘An “Electronic Brain”: Reference by Lord Mountbatten’, The Press 4 November 1946.

  10. Galveston Daily News November 4, 1946.

  11. ‘Zwischen Gestern und Morgen’, Die Tat 3 November 1946.

  12. Even worse, according to Hartree, ‘The fashion which has sprung up in the last 20 years to decry human reason [in favour of machine reasoning] is a path which leads straight to Nazism’ (Hartree quoted in ‘“ACE” will speed jet flying’, Daily Telegraph, 8 November 1946).

  13. For Turing’s other uses of the expression ‘emotional’ in the case of machines, see (Proudfoot 2014).

  14. It would be anachronistic to ask whether Turing proposed a response-dependence understanding of the property, rather than the concept, of intelligence—in fact his remarks suggest both.

  15. See Copeland (2000b) for an alternative way of interpreting Turing’s emphasis on real-world machines, to avoid the humongous lookup table objection.

  16. What if Aunt Bubbles could be built in the actual world (because the calculation underlying the claim that the number of strings is ‘too vast to exist’ is mistaken—or, as is sometimes claimed, as a consequence of technological progress)? Drew McDermott argues that a humongous lookup table machine could be ‘computationally equivalent to a very clever program indeed’ (2014, p. 144)—if so, on both the behaviourist and inner-state readings of the Turing test, the humongous lookup table machine’s passing the test would not count as a false positive.

  17. Jefferson’s challenge to Turing is one source of Turing’s treatment of (what he called) ‘The Argument from Consciousness’ (Turing 1950, p. 451). A frequent objection to Turing’s test is that it fails as a criterion of thinking in machines just because it does not test for consciousness, and that alternative tests that can be used as a criterion of consciousness are required—for example, the ‘AI Consciousness Test’, which is presented as a ‘zombie filter’ (Schneider 2019, p. 56; see also Schneider and Turner 2017). This objection to Turing’s test is, however, premised on the mistaken view that Turing’s test offers a behaviourist criterion of thinking.

  18. Turing quoted in ‘The Mechanical Brain: Answer Found to 300-Year-Old Sum’, Times [London, England], 11 June (1949), p. 4. In this article, Turing added, ‘I do not think you can even draw the line about sonnets, though the comparison is perhaps a little unfair because a sonnet written by a machine will be better appreciated by another machine’.

  19. The Press and Journal 23 June 1949. Overseas newspapers, again including local and regional papers, followed suit (see e.g. the Palestine Post for 24 June 1949). For example, the Zanesville Times Recorder headlined ‘Electronic brain can’t write poem’ (Zanesville Times Recorder July 9, 1949); and the Canton Herald reported Jefferson as declaring that electronic brains ‘will never be able to bridge the gap between brain and mind’ (‘Electronic brain is able to solve many human acts’, Canton Herald July 7, 1949).

  20. Turing quoted in ‘Mechanical Brain Is Learning To Play Chess’, The Irish Times, 13 June 1949, p. 7.

  21. I am grateful to the School Archivist, Rachel Hassall, for this information.

  22. ‘Nature of Spirit’ is a hand-written manuscript in the Turing Digital Archive, King’s College Cambridge, catalogue reference AMT/C/29; all quotations in the text are from this manuscript. The manuscript is also transcribed in Hodges (2014, pp. 82–3). It is not known exactly when Turing wrote ‘Nature of Spirit’. Andrew Hodges suggests April 1932 (2014, pp. 82, 683); the King’s College Archive has this date, probably supplied by Hodges (personal communication from the KCC Archivist, Patricia McGuire).

  23. AMT/D/4 image 14, The Turing Digital Archive. This postcard, sent to Robin Gandy, is dated 8 March 1954 (AMT/D/4 image 13). In a letter to Max Newman, Gandy wrote, ‘During this spring [Turing] spent some time inventing a new quantum mechanics; it was not intended to be taken very seriously (almost in the “for amusement only” class)’. According to Gandy, this work showed Turing ‘at his most lively and inventive’ (letter from Robin Gandy to M.H.A. Newman, n.d. [1955], AMT/A/8 image 1d, Turing Digital Archive). Even so, Gandy remarked, ‘no doubt [Turing] hoped that something might turn up in it which could be taken seriously’ (ibid.).

  24. Later Michie said, ‘[T]he child-machine concept gripped me. I resolved to make machine intelligence my life as soon as such an enterprise became feasible’ (2002). Like Turing, Michie thought that the ‘hallmark’ of intelligence is ‘the ability to learn’ (1989, p. 118). According to Michie, like a ‘newborn baby’, a computer’s possibilities ‘depend upon the education which is fed into it’ (1966). Michie too emphasized the experimenter’s response to the machine, saying, with respect to ‘the child-machine concept, how much of value and use could a school teacher impart to a child with whom rapport was impossible?’ (2001, p. 17).

    In the 1960s, Michie built famous early learning machines. His MENACE machine (Matchbox Educable Noughts-And-Crosses Engine) could be trained to improve its game. The FREDERICK robots (Friendly Robot for Education, Discussion and Entertainment, the Retrieval of Information, and the Collation of Knowledge, usually known as FREDDY), built in Michie’s lab at the University of Edinburgh, learned to manipulate various objects, including how to put differently shaped blocks together in order to create a toy. (MENACE was reported in Michie (1961); the first FREDDY robot was built in (1969) and reported in Barrow and Salter (1969).

  25. According to Turing, a ‘digital computer with a random element’ is sometimes ‘described as having free will’ (1950, p. 445). Turing said, however: ‘I would not use this phrase myself’ (ibid.).

  26. Again, it would be anachronistic to ask whether Turing proposed a response-dependence approach to the property, rather than the concept, of freewill.

  27. Even if the concept of free will is response-dependent, it may be that in fact only entities with certain observer-independent properties—for example, being equipped with a ‘random element’—generate the appropriate response in observers.

  28. Cobb calls for ‘modesty’ and ‘realism’ with respect to ‘the difficulties of drawing parallels between brains and artificial systems’ (2020a, p. 379).

  29. For the argument that ‘computationalism’ about the mind differs from the ‘computational theory of mind’, see e.g. Miłkowski (2018a). Likewise, inclusive views of computationalism sometimes refer to the ‘computational approach’ or ‘computational paradigm’, and even to computationalism as a research ‘programme’ or ‘tradition’, rather than as a theory.

  30. According to Piccinini, ‘Contrary to a popular belief, modern computationalism is not due to Alan Turing but to Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts’ (2009, p. 517). In Piccinini’s view, McCulloch and Pitts’ famous 1943 paper proposes ‘the first modern computational theory of mind and brain’ (2004, p. 176). Similarly, Morgan and Piccinini claim that ‘the first rigorous computational theory of the mindbrain [was] proposed by McCulloch and Pitts’ (1943, p. 123).

  31. Sometimes the attribution is implicit. For example, Carrie Figdor writes: ‘until Turing, we lacked an empirically plausible model of how the mind could be material’ (2018, p. 283).

  32. The view that cognitive science depends on computationalism is widespread; for example, ‘Cognitive science was founded on a computational theory of mind’ (Morgan and Piccinini 2018, p. 123).

  33. ‘If the brain is not a serial algorithm-crunching machine … what is it?’, Marcus asks (2015).

  34. For Turing’s reply to such arguments, see his treatment of the ‘Mathematical Objection’ (Turing 1950, p. 450); see Copeland and Shagrir (2013) for a detailed analysis and assessment of Turing’s reply.

  35. For Turing’s response to considerations pertaining to consciousness, see his treatment of the ‘Argument from Consciousness’.

  36. Shaun Gallagher makes the analogous claim that free will is relational: in his view, ‘it is better to conceive of autonomy as relational, rather than as a pre-established character of human nature’ (2019, p. 805). Gallagher’s target appears to be a localized account of free will—‘Understood enactively, freely willed action is not something that occurs in the head’, he says (Gallagher 2017, p. 148). On his alternative approach, what matters for free will is that the individual possesses a certain property—‘a specific type of consciousness … embedded or situated in the particular context’ (ibid., p. 145). This is a very different view from the response-dependent account of free will that I have outlined in this paper..

  37. According to Kiverstein and Miller (2015), the function of any brain region is determined by ‘its interactions with the other elements to which it is connected in a network’ (p. 6). According to Hutto and Myin (2013), we can understand cognition ‘as involving a complex series of systematic—but not contentfully mediated—interactions between well-tuned mechanisms’ (p. 71).

  38. To use the enactivists’ vocabulary (Hutto and Myin 2017, p. 10).

  39. For Searle, attributions of intentionality to computers are merely ‘metaphorical or as-if’ (1994, p. 156).

  40. Further, if there is no such thing as ‘intrinsic’ thinking, and if thinking is a necessary property of mind, then there is nothing ‘genuinely mental’ that is observer-independent.

  41. Computationalism appears to be formulated chiefly as a thesis about the mind (e.g. ‘Computationalism in the philosophy of mind is the view that mental processes, including perceptual processes, are computational’ (Nico 2019)). On the other hand, some still say that computationalism is ‘the view that the brain is some kind of computer’ (Maley 2018, p. 78). Other theorists assume that there is no need for a distinction; thus Morgan and Piccinnini attribute ‘the first rigorous computational theory of the mindbrain’ to McCulloch and Pitts (1943)’ (2018, p. 123).

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Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Jack Copeland and to three anonymous reviewers for Minds and Machines for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper.

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Correspondence to Diane Proudfoot.

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Proudfoot, D. Rethinking Turing’s Test and the Philosophical Implications. Minds & Machines 30, 487–512 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11023-020-09534-7

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