The Information - James Gleick [122]
The original question, “Can machines think?” I believe to be too meaningless to deserve discussion. Nevertheless I believe that at the end of the century the use of words and general educated opinion will have altered so much that one will be able to speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted.♦
He did not live to see how apt his prophecy was. In 1952 he was arrested for the crime of homosexuality, tried, convicted, stripped of his security clearance, and subjected by the British authorities to a humiliating, emasculating program of estrogen injections. In 1954 he took his own life.
Until years later, few knew of Turing’s crucial secret work for his country on the Enigma project at Bletchley Park. His ideas of thinking machines did attract attention, on both sides of the Atlantic. Some of the people who found the notion absurd or even frightening appealed to Shannon for his opinion; he stood squarely with Turing. “The idea of a machine thinking is by no means repugnant to all of us,” Shannon told one engineer. “In fact, I find the converse idea, that the human brain may itself be a machine which could be duplicated functionally with inanimate objects, quite attractive.” More useful, anyway, than “hypothecating intangible and unreachable ‘vital forces,’ ‘souls’ and the like.”♦
Computer scientists wanted to know what their machines could do. Psychologists wanted to know whether brains are computers—or perhaps whether brains are merely computers. At midcentury computer scientists were new; but so, in their way, were psychologists.
Psychology at midcentury had grown moribund. Of all the sciences, it always had the most difficulty in saying what exactly it studied. Originally its object was the soul, as opposed to the body (somatology) and the blood (hematology). “Psychologie is a doctrine which searches out man’s Soul, and the effects of it; this is the part without which a man cannot consist,”♦ wrote James de Back in the seventeenth century. Almost by definition, though, the soul was ineffable—hardly a thing to be known. Complicating matters further was the entanglement (in psychology as in no other field) of the observer with the observed. In 1854, when it was still more likely to be called “mental philosophy,” David Brewster lamented that no other department of knowledge had made so little progress as “the science of mind, if it can be called a science.”♦
Viewed as material by one inquirer, as spiritual by another, and by others as mysteriously compounded as both, the human mind escapes from the cognisance of sense and reason, and lies, a waste field with a northern exposure, upon which every passing speculator casts his mental tares.
The passing speculators were still looking mainly inward, and the limits of introspection were apparent. Looking for rigor, verifiability, and perhaps even mathematicization, students of the mind veered in radically different directions by the turn of the twentieth century. Sigmund Freud’s path was only one. In the United States, William James constructed a discipline of psychology almost single-handed—professor of the first university courses, author of the first comprehensive textbook—and when he was done, he threw up his hands. His own Principles of Psychology, he wrote, was “a loathsome, distended, tumefied, bloated, dropsical mass, testifying to but two facts: 1st, that there is no such thing as a science of psychology, and 2nd, that WJ is an incapable.”♦
In Russia, a new strain of psychology began with a physiologist, Ivan Petrovich Pavlov, known for his Nobel Prize–winning study of digestion, who scorned the word psychology and all its associated terminology. James, in his better moods, considered psychology the science of mental life, but for Pavlov there was no mind, only behavior. Mental states, thoughts, emotions, goals, and purpose—all these were intangible, subjective, and out of reach. They bore the