According to Turing, thinking is a function of man’s soul and only human beings have souls. According to Turing, only God has the ability to confer a soul to whoever He deems fit. God has the power to do some things. Thus, He may decide to confer a soul to an elephant coupled with a brain that is appropriately improved so as to enable it to minister to the needs of its soul. By doing this He exercises His power in conjunction with a mutation which enables the elephant to have an improved brain (Turing 435). These souls and the power to think are transferred to the next generation through procreation. Thus, when people attempt to make machines that think, they do not actually succeed in doing that since people have no power to confer souls to machines. What they succeed in doing is creating a machine that imitates. Additionally, most people believe that human beings are the most superior God’s creation. Thus, they cannot bring themselves to think that machines can actually dethrone them from that position (Turing 437).
Turing’s response generally draws a lot of reactions from various people. However, it is not easy to bring ourselves to think that machines will at one time have some kind of intelligence that even surpasses that of human beings and even think and make better judgments. Professor Jefferson Lister once stated that he will only accept the concept of machines thinking once they compose a concerto or write a sonnet since they would have to involve their emotions and thoughts in doing this (Turing 440). By this he meant that, the thinking machines only worked based on the commands of the interrogator or the programmer. The output that they give is influenced by the original intention of these two people. Therefore, if people can make thinking machines that can write and do other things and actually understand what they do, then it would be right to say that they are thinking machines. Until then, we can just say that thinking machines only give the specific feedback that they have been programmed to give. However, it is still right to say that these machines may be developed in the future.
Works Cited
Turing, A. M. "I.—Computing Machinery And Intelligence". Mind Lix.236 (1950): 433-460. Web.
