Alan Turing

In his essay, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” Alan Turing poses the question, “Can machines think?” (433). Throughout the essay, Turing refines the question into one that he believes can be experimented upon in the distant future. However, Turing seems to take the position that machines can, indeed, think depending on how one defines thought. Although he states that he “should begin with the definitions of the meaning of the terms ‘machine’ and ‘think,’” he never provides the reader with his definition of thought (433). Instead, he spends a lengthy amount of time refuting the many arguments that disagree with his viewpoint. If one actually took the time to define the act of thinking would they find that what Turing is implying, that

Those who do not believe that machines have the ability to think would use the definition to claim that it is impossible for machines to have opinions, beliefs, or ideas about other things ignoring the latter part of the statement. The second half of the definition states that a human uses their mind to form thought implying that thought is the product of mental activity. Mental activity being the inner workings, or mechanical processes, that occur in the brain. The word “use” implies that one simply “uses” their brain to form thoughts just as they would “use” a machine to gather information. The fourth argument that Turing refutes comes from Professor Jefferson’s Lister Oration for 1949. Jefferson argues that in order for a thought to constitute as a thought it needs to come from consciousness. Consciousness is the state of being aware of one’s external surroundings or something within the self. Surprisingly, only a small fraction of a human’s thoughts passes through the conscious mind, most of the thinking happens subconsciously, or, in other words, without one being aware of the act. Consciously, we do not have the capacity to control every single one of our

It provokes the reader to question whether the brain is, itself, a machine. In his essay, Turing utilizes many analogies and similes very much like the skin-of-an-onion analogy to support his viewpoint. These similes and analogies serve to enhance the idea that there is a likeness between the human brain and a machine. With this skin-of-an-onion analogy in mind, one could see that when stripped down to its inner workings, the brain is nothing but a machine with extremely intricate biomechanical processes. Thought is powered by neurons firing signals through the brain at lightening speeds. Emotions are the result of stimuli that cause our brain to release certain chemicals depending on the signals it receives from the nervous system. If we were somehow able to program machines to work in the same way as the brain, with the same chemicals that cause human emotions, we would have machines that are astonishingly similar to the human brain on our