Franklin Wayne Poley wrote, regarding artificial intelligences and human
ones:
> Do humans have some kind of "psychic" ability beyond any physical
structures and
> functioning which would always put them on a higher level?
Interestingly, this is precisely what Alan Turing suspected. If you read his
original paper proposing the "Turing test" for determining whether an AI has
human-equivalent intelligence, you will see that Turing believed that ESP
could be a significant factor. It's quite curious that this fact has been
conveniently forgotten by so many of Turing's intellectual heirs.
Below is the relevant section from Turing's paper "The Imitation Game" in
COMPUTING MACHINERY AND INTELLIGENCE.
(http://www.abelard.org/turpap/turpap.htm)
(9) The Argument from Extra-Sensory Perception I assume that the reader is
familiar with the idea of extra-sensory perception, and the meaning of the
four items of it, viz. telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition and
psycho-kinesis. These disturbing phenomena seem to deny all our usual
scientific ideas. How we should like to discredit them! Unfortunately the
statistical evidence, at least for telepathy, is overwhelming. It is very
difficult to rearrange one's ideas so as to fit these new facts in. Once one
has accepted them it does not seem a very big step to believe in ghosts and
bogies. The idea that our bodies move simply according to the known laws of
physics, together with some others not yet discovered but somewhat similar,
would be one of the first to go.
This argument is to my mind quite a strong one. One can say in reply that
many scientific theories seem to remain workable in practice, in spite of
clashing with E.S.P.; that in fact one can get along very nicely if one
forgets about it. This is rather cold comfort, and one fears that thinking
is just the kind of phenomenon where E.S.P. may be especially relevant.
A more specific argument based on E.S.P. might run as follows:
"Let us play the imitation game, using as witnesses a man who is good as a
telepathic receiver, and a digital computer. The interrogator can ask such
questions as 'What suit does the card in my right hand belong to?' The man
by telepathy or clairvoyance gives the right answer 130 times out of 400
cards. The machine can only guess at random, and perhaps gets 104 right, so
the interrogator makes the right identification." There is an interesting
possibility which opens here. Suppose the digital computer contains a random
number generator. Then it will be natural to use this to decide what answer
to give. But then the random number generator will be subject to the
psycho-kinetic powers of the interrogator. Perhaps this psycho-kinesis might
cause the machine to guess right more often than would be expected on a
probability calculation, so that the interrogator {p.454} might still be
unable to make the right identification. On the other hand, he might be able
to guess right without any questioning, by clairvoyance. With E.S.P.
anything may happen.
If telepathy is admitted it will be necessary to tighten our test up. The
situation could be regarded as analogous to that which would occur if the
interrogator were talking to himself and one of the competitors was
listening with his ear to the wall. To put the competitors into a
'telepathy-proof room' would satisfy all requirements."
................................................
Regards,
Michael LaTorra
mike99@lascruces.com
mlatorra@excite.com
3229 Risner Street
Las Cruces, NM 88011-4823
USA
505.522.5121
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