352 | 32 TURING AND THE PARANORmAl
to machine intelligence. Like him they saw themselves as being on the vanguard, like him they
understood that their arguments would meet with considerable resistance, and, like him, they
felt the need to defuse this resistance in advance.
Turing and spiritualism
The tone of Turing’s reply to argument 9, like so much of ‘Computing machinery and intel-
ligence’, was jocular. Earlier in the paper he had dispensed briskly with what he termed the
‘heads-in-the-sand’ objection to machine intelligence—‘The consequences of machines think-
ing would be too dreadful. Let us hope and believe that they cannot do so.’—on the grounds that
this objection ‘was not sufficiently substantial to require refutation. Consolation would be more
appropriate; perhaps this should be sought in the transmigration of souls.’^24 Now, in responding
to the ‘overwhelming’ evidence for ESP, Turing postulated, and then rejected, a similar ‘heads-
in-the sand’ response:^25
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.
Thinking (in particular, machine thinking) was, of course, a matter of paramount impor-
tance to Turing. The dilemma that ESP poses is how^26
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 sim-
ply 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.
In fact, Turing had addressed this very question twenty years earlier. The occasion was an
odd little essay entitled ‘Nature of spirit’ that he wrote in the spring of 1932 while on a visit to
the Clock House, the family home of his beloved friend Christopher Morcom who had died two
years previously. Turing wrote:^27
We have a will which is able to determine the action of the atoms probably in a small portion
of the brain, or possibly all over it. The rest of the body acts so as to amplify this. There is now
the question which must be answered as to how the action of the other atoms of the universe
are regulated. Probably by the same law and simply by the remote effects of spirit but since they
have no amplifying apparatus they seem to be regulated by pure chance. The apparent non-
predestination of physics is almost a combination of chances.
‘Almost a combination of chances’: as the will ‘probably’ plays a role in the functioning of the
brain, so ‘the remote effects of spirit’ may have some effect on the atoms that comprise the rest
of the universe, even though these seem to be regulated by pure chance. ‘As McTaggart shows’,
Turing continued, ‘matter is meaningless in the absence of spirit’.
Such a notion of ‘spirit’ as a sort of cosmic gasoline was very much in the air in the Cambridge
of 1932, a period when the philosopher G. E. Moore, and through him the ghost of the late J.
M. E. McTaggart (not coincidentally Broad’s mentor), exerted a tremendous influence. Twenty
years on, Turing would refer to ‘the transmigration of souls’ ironically, as a source of ‘consolation’