Turing’s model of the mind

This chapter examines Alan Turing’s contribution to the field that offers our best understanding of the mind: cognitive science. The idea that the human mind is (in some sense) a computer is central to cognitive science. Turing played a key role in developing this idea. The precise course of Turing’s influence on cognitive science is complex and shows how seemingly abstract work in mathematical logic can spark a revolution in psychology. Alan Turing contributed to a revolutionary idea: that mental activity is computation. Turing’s work helped lay the foundation for what is now known as cognitive science. Today, computation is an essential element for explaining how the mind works. In this chapter, I return to Turing’s early attempts to understanding the mind using computation and examine the role that Turing played in the early days of cognitive science. Turing is famous as a founding figure in artificial intelligence (AI) but his contribution to cognitive science is less well known. The aim of AI is to create an intelligent machine. Turing was one of the first people to carry out research in AI, working on machine intelligence as early as 1941 and, as Chapters 29 and 30 explain, he was responsible for, or anticipated, many of the ideas that were later to shape AI. Unlike AI, cognitive science does not aim to create an intelligent machine. It aims instead to understand the mechanisms that are peculiar to human intelligence. On the face of it, human intelligence is miraculous. How do we reason, understand language, remember past events, come up with a joke? It is hard to know how even to begin to explain these phenomena. Yet, like a magic trick that looks like a miracle to the audience, but which is explained by revealing the pulleys and levers behind the stage, so human intelligence could be explained if we knew the mechanisms that lie behind its production. A first step in this direction is to examine a piece of machinery that is usually hidden from view: the human brain. A challenge is the astonishing complexity of the human brain: it is one of the most complex objects in the universe, containing 100 billion neurons and a web of around 100 trillion connections.