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Structure and Interpretation of Alan Turing's Imitation Game

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Structure and Interpretation of Alan Turing's Imitation Game UNIVERSIDADE DE SÃO PAULO FACULDADE DE FILOSOFIA, LETRAS E CIÊNCIAS HUMANAS DEPARTAMENTO DE FILOSOFIA PROGRAMA DE PÓS-GRADUAÇÃO EM FILOSOFIA Bernardo Gonçalves Machines will think: structure and interpretation of Alan Turing’s imitation game Versão corrigida São Paulo 2021 Bernardo Gonçalves Machines will think: structure and interpretation of Alan Turing’s imitation game Doctoral dissertation presented to the Graduate Program in Philosophy of the Faculty of Philosophy, Language and Literature, and Human Sciences of the University of São Paulo. Supervisor: Dr. Edelcio de Souza São Paulo 2021 Autorizo a reprodução e divulgação total ou parcial deste trabalho, por qualquer meio convencional ou eletrônico, para fins de estudo e pesquisa, desde que citada a fonte. Catalogação na Publicação Serviço de Biblioteca e Documentação Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas da Universidade de São Paulo Gonçalves, Bernardo G635m As máquinas vão pensar: estrutura e interpretação do jogo da imitação de Alan Turing / Bernardo Gonçalves; orientador Edelcio Souza - São Paulo, 2021. 290 f. Tese (Doutorado)- Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas da Universidade de São Paulo. Departamento de Filosofia. Área de concentração: Filosofia. 1. Alan Turing. 2. Podem as máquinas pensar?. 3. O jogo da imitação. 4. Experimento mental. 5. Inteligência artificial. I. Souza, Edelcio, orient. II. Título. To Prof a. Rosane Caruso (Federal University of Espírito Santo, Computer Science Department), Prof. José Karam Filho, Prof. Fábio Porto (National Laboratory for Scientific Computing, Petrópolis, Brazil), and Prof. Pablo Mariconda (University of São Paulo and Scientia Studia), for their true passion for science. To Tânia, Francisco (in memoriam), Maria José, Leonardo, Scheilla and Carolina, for their unconditional love. Acknowledgements This Ph.D. thesis was possible because of the support of some really caring people to whom I owe many thanks. I am grateful to and would like to thank: Dr. Edelcio de Souza to have kindly accepted to take over the supervision of my thesis and to have been a very kind and helpful supervisor; Dr. Osvaldo Pessoa Jr., who has been such a generous friend and lovely person, and has always been able to offer a fresh and sharply critical perspective on things; I also thank him a lot to have accepted to serve on my Ph.D. qualifying and Ph.D. defense committees; Dr. Pio Garcia for his availability and invaluable contributions to my Ph.D. research before, during and after my Ph.D. qualifying event; it has been a real pleasure to learn from him; I thank him to have accepted to serve on my Ph.D. qualifying and Ph.D. defense committees; Dr. Richard Staley to have kindly accepted to serve on my Ph.D. committee, and for his perceptive, critical yet sensitive comments; it has been a great opportunity to learn from him; Prof. Fabio Cozman to have provided me encouragement and support in every way he could in my pursuit of research on Alan Turing and artificial intelligence; Prof. Ricardo Terra to have invested time and effort to support my research on Turing so kindly, and to have nicely motivated me to wrap up and come to the point; I also thank my dear colleagues Dr. João Cortese and Dr. Lucas Petroni for their careful reading, criticism and support while I was writing this manuscript during the year of 2020; I thank João as well to have been a fantastic colleague and the kindest friend; Dr. Alexandre Moreli to have read and commented on an important part of this thesis, and to have been such an elegant colleague and friend; Dr. Marcos Camolezi for his careful reading and thoughtful comments, as always, and to have been a colleague and best friend with whom I have had the deepest exchanges; Dr. Dora Kaufman to have shared with me her knowledge and passion towards research on AI & society, and to have always been very precise in showing the importance of this topic; Luciana Barbosa to have been a nice colleague and friend, and to have shared her critical perspective on the philosophy of mind and transhumanism; Vinicius Juliani and Pedro Bravo to have been very supportive colleagues and the warmest friends; I thank Pedro to have been to me an inspiration for kindness and intellectual integrity; Dr. Marildo Menegat to have generously shared his knowledge of history of philosophy and always emphasized the crucial proposition that every theory of knowledge presupposes a social theory; Dr. Marcos Barbosa to have been such a nice fellow and have always gently shared his knowledge and experience about the history of philosophy of science and society; Dr. Plinio Smith to have taught us ancient and modern skepticism and how to read philosophical texts; Orlando Pimentel to have been an absolutely great colleague and friend ever since I started my journey in the humanities; Prof. Pablo Mariconda to have welcomed me in the humanities, to have shared his immense knowledge, great intellectual taste and critical perspective on history and philosophy of science and technology; and to have managed to give us what is for me by far the best of all things: to have gathered and provided us with a community at Scientiae Studia; Loli, my dear love and the best companion I could ever aspire to have, who helped me keep my mood up and gave me paramount support while I was writing this doctoral dissertation. Indeed, one may compare the nerves of the machine I am describing with the pipes in the works of these fountains [of a Renaissance garden]. — René Descartes (1633) The very limited character of the machinery which has been used until recent times (e.g. up to 1940) [...] encouraged the belief that machinery was necessarily limited to extremely straightforward, possibly even to repetitive, jobs. — Alan M. Turing (1948) Abstract GONÇALVES, B. Machines will think: structure and interpretation of Alan Turing’s imitation game. 2021, 290 pp. Thesis (Doctorate) — Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas. Departmento de Filosofia, Universidade de São Paulo, São Paulo, 2021. Can machines think? I present a study of Alan Turing’s iconic imitation game or test and its central question. Seventy years of commentary has been produced about Turing’s 1950 proposal. The now legendary “Turing test” has grown a life of its own in the tradition of analytic philosophy with at best loose ties to the historical imitation tests (1948-1952) posed by Turing. I shall examine the historical and epistemological roots of Turing’s various versions of imitation game or test and make the case that they came out from within a dialogue, in fact a scientific controversy, most notably with physicist and computer pioneer Douglas Hartree, chemist and philosopher Michael Polanyi, and neurosurgeon Geoffrey Jefferson. Placing Turing’s views in their historical, social and cultural context, I shall reclaim their scientific and philosophical value for the sake of the discussion in the years to come. My study is organized according to three main philosophical problems whose analyses are backed by a subsidiary chronology of the concept of machine intelligence in Turing’s thought (1936-1952). The first problem I will address is the identification of Turing’s specific ambition which led him to announce that machines will think. War hero and brilliant mathematician, he challenged the conventional wisdom of what machines really were or could be and prophesized a future pervaded by intelligent machines which may be seen as a dystopia just as much as a utopia. I shall examine Turing’s profile and take special interest in the way he was seen by his contenders. In the second problem, over and above the mere proposal of a test for machine intelligence, I will study Turing’s proposition “machines can think” and its implied existential hypothesis — “there exists (will exist) a thinking machine” — from a point of view of the history of the philosophy of science. Unlike traditional readings of Turing, I found that Turing held a non-obvious realist attitude towards the existence of a mechanical mindbrain which he conjectured to frame the human and whose digital replica he intended to build in the machine. Turing’s 1950 paper has been acknowledged as a complex and multi-layered text. Opposing views can be identified in the literature relative to the question on whether or not Turing proposed his imitation test as an experiment to decide for machine intelligence. I shall call this the Turing test dilemma and address it as my third and main problem. My findings suggest that Turing cannot have proposed his imitation game as something other than a thought experiment. And yet its critical and heuristic functions within the mind-machine controversy are striking. Keywords: Alan Turing. Can machines think?. The imitation game. Thought experiment. Artifi- cial intelligence. Resumo GONÇALVES, B. As máquinas vão pensar: estrutura e interpretação do jogo da imitação de Alan Turing. 2021, 290 f. Tese (Doutorado) — Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas. Departmento de Filosofia, Universidade de São Paulo, São Paulo, 2021. Podem as máquinas pensar? Apresento um estudo do icônico jogo ou teste da imitação de Alan Turing e sua questão central. Setenta anos de comentários foram produzidos sobre a proposta de Turing de 1950. O já lendário “teste de Turing” ganhou vida própria na tradição da filosofia analítica, na melhor das hipóteses com uma fraca relação com os testes da imitação históricos (1948-1952) apresentados por Turing. Examinarei as raízes históricas e epistemológicas das várias versões do jogo ou teste da imitação de Turing e argumentarei que elas surgiram no interior de um diálogo, de fato uma controvérsia científica, notavelmente com o físico e pioneiro da computação Douglas Hartree, o químico e filósofo Michael Polanyi e o neurocirurgião Geoffrey Jefferson.
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