Extrasensory Perception? - Turing - Computing Machinery and Intelligence [closed]

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I just read Turing's Computing Machinery and Intelligence, and he mentions Extrasensory Perception (#9) as a valid argument:

"Unfortunately the statistical evidence, at least for telepathy, is overwhelming."

I couldn't find any of this statistical evidence, does anyone know what he's referring too? Is this some product of the times he lived in? His tone implies he didn't wish to believe in it either.

I'm not sure if this is the best place to ask, but it seems somewhat related.

Answer 1

In the The Turing Test article;

2.9 Argument from Extra-Sensory Perception

The strangest part of Turing's paper is the few paragraphs on ESP. Perhaps it is intended to be tongue-in-cheek, though, if it is, this fact is poorly signposted by Turing. Perhaps, instead, Turing was influenced by the apparently scientifically respectable results of J. B. Rhine. At any rate, taking the text at face value, Turing seems to have thought that there was overwhelming empirical evidence for telepathy (and he was also prepared to take clairvoyance, precognition and psychokinesis seriously). Moreover, he also seems to have thought that if the human participant in the game was telepathic, then the interrogator could exploit this fact in order to determine the identity of the machine—and, in order to circumvent this difficulty, Turing proposes that the competitors should be housed in a “telepathy-proof room.” Leaving aside the point that, as a matter of fact, there is no current statistical support for telepathy—or clairvoyance, or precognition, or telekinesis—it is worth asking what kind of theory of the nature of telepathy would have appealed to Turing. After all, if humans can be telepathic, why shouldn't digital computers be so as well? If the capacity for telepathy were a standard feature of any sufficiently advanced system that is able to carry out human conversation, then there is no in-principle reason why digital computers could not be the equals of human beings in this respect as well. (Perhaps this response assumes that a successful machine participant in the imitation game will need to be equipped with sensors, etc. However, as we noted above, this assumption is not terribly controversial. A plausible conversationalist has to keep up to date with goings-on in the world.)

Some of the key works of Joseph Banks Rhine seem to support this statistical evidence.