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for those who could not tolerate the inevitability of machine intelligence. Here his treatment of
the idea is in earnest:
Personally I think that spirit is really eternally connected with matter but certainly not always in the
same kind of body. I did believe it possible for spirit at death to go to a universe entirely separate
from our own, but now I consider that matter and spirit are so connected that this would be a
contradiction in terms . . . Then as regards the actual connection between spirit and body I consider
that the body by reason of being a living body can ‘attract’ and hold on to a ‘spirit’, whilst the body
is alive and awake the two are firmly connected. When the body dies the ‘mechanism’ of the body,
holding the spirit, is gone and the spirit finds a new body sooner or later, perhaps immediately.
Such words would not have been out of place in the Journal of the Society for Psychical
Research. Nor would the SPR have failed to take an interest in Turing’s account of his own ‘crisis
apparition’ on the occasion of Christopher Morcom’s death. At a quarter to three one morning,
the ringing of an abbey bell drew Turing out of bed and to his dormitory window, where he
looked at the moon and thought that it was giving him a sign: ‘Goodbye to Morcom’.^28 A little
more than a week later Morcom was dead, and Turing wrote to his own mother:^29
I feel sure that I shall meet Morcom again somewhere, & that there will be some work for us to
do together even as I believed there was for us to do here. Now that I am left to do it alone I
must not let him down but put as much energy into it, if not as much interest, as if he were still
here. If I succeed I shall be more fit to enjoy his company than I am now.
Turing and parapsychology
That Turing was conversant in the language of parapsychology, so much in the air in 1949, is
evident from the examples he gave of how ESP might affect the results of his test for machine
intelligence:^30
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 times. The machine can only guess at random, and perhaps gets 104 right, so the inter-
rogator makes the right identification.
The scenario that Turing drew here is almost identical to the one used for the ‘scientific’
testing of telepathy, except that in this case the ‘agent’ is a computer. Through telepathy or clair-
voyance the ‘percipient’ is able to make the correct identification more often than a probability
calculation would suggest. Meanwhile, the computer has no choice but to assume the role of
the non-telepathic guesser, a role to which it would be particularly well suited if it had built
into it a ‘random number generator’. (As it happened, the Ferranti Mark I, on which Turing was
working in 1949, had been equipped with just such an element—at Turing’s insistence.^31 ). As
Turing observed:^32
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 which answer to give. But
then the random number generator will be subject to the psycho-kinetic powers of the interro-
gator. Perhaps this psycho-kinesis might cause the machine to guess right more often than would