Turing and the Paranormal

06.12.2024

The Galilean School of Higher Studies and the Department of Mathematics "Tullio Levi-Civita" at the University of Padua are organizing a conference on Alan Turing, to be held on Friday, December 13 at Palazzo del Bo, (5 p.m - Room E) presented by David Leavitt, author of "The Man Who Knew Too Much" and "The Indian Clerk."

The author will guide the audience through the cultural and scientific landscape in which the renowned British mathematician Alan Turing lived and worked. Turing is considered one of the fathers of Computer Science and is famous for devising a system to decrypt the Enigma code used by the Nazis during World War II.

Of the nine arguments against the validity of the imitation game that Alan Turing anticipated and refuted in advance in his “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” the most peculiar is probably the last, “The argument from extra-sensory perception.” So out of step is this argument with the rest of the paper that most writers on Turing (myself included) have tended to ignore it or gloss over it, while some editions omit it altogether.

An investigation into the research into parapsychology that had been done in the years leading up to Turing’s breakthrough paper, however, provides some context for the argument’s inclusion, as well as some surprising insights into Turing’s mind. Argument 9 begins with a statement that to many of us today will seem remarkable: “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 psychokinesis. 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….”
To what “statistical evidence” is Turing referring? It is this question—and its implications for our understanding of Turing as a thinker and as a man— that the lecture will address.

Participation is open to everyone and admission is free, with registration required.