Turing test - Wikipedia
Many cite Turing Test criterion as proof of mind being nothing beyond material controlled computation. People think that through his discovery of computational universality and the Test criterion for intelligence, Turing had proven that there was nothing more to mind, brain, or the physical world than the unfolding of an immense computation.
But is this assessment correct?
in a 1951 radio address Turing himself brought up Eddington, and the possible limits on prediction of human brains imposed by the uncertainty principle:
If it is accepted that real brains, as found in animals, and in particular in men, are a sort of machine it will follow that our digital computer suitably programmed, will behave like a brain. [But the argument for this conclusion] involves several assumptions which can quite reasonably be challenged. [It is] necessary that this machine should be of the sort whose behaviour is in principle predictable by calculation. We certainly do not know how any such calculation should be done, and it was even argued by Sir Arthur Eddington that on account of the indeterminacy principle in quantum mechanics no such prediction is even theoretically possible.
Furthermore, in 1954 again Turing quoted Eddington in postcard message to Robin Gandy, that reads, in part:
Messages from the Unseen World
The Universe is the interior of the Light Cone of the Creation. Science is a Differential Equation. Religion is a Boundary Condition
The point however seems even more deeper in light of Turing's reference to "
The Universe is the interior of the Light Cone of the Creation. Science is a Differential Equation. Religion is a Boundary Condition". It is, in my opinion, a point related to operation of will.
Niels Bohr, from a 1932 lecture about the implications of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle:
[W]e should doubtless kill an animal if we tried to carry the investigation of its organs so far that we could tell the part played by the single atoms in vital functions. In every experiment on living organisms there must remain some uncertainty as regards the physical conditions to which they are subjected, and the idea suggests itself that the minimal freedom we must allow the organism will be just large enough to permit it, so to say, to hide its ultimate secrets from us.
Or this, from the physicist Arthur Compton:
A set of known physical conditions is not adequate to specify precisely what a forth- coming event will be. These conditions, insofar as they can be known, define instead a range of possible events from among which some particular event will occur. When one exercises freedom, by his act of choice he is himself adding a factor not supplied by the physical conditions and is thus himself determining what will occur. That he does so is known only to the person himself. From the outside one can see in his act only the working of physical law.
So, my second question is same as the question put forth by Scott_Aaronson in his seminal work "Ghost in Quantum Turing Machine": "Does quantum mechanics (specifically, say, the No-Cloning Theorem or the uncertainty principle) put interesting limits on an external agent’s ability to scan, copy, and predict human brains and other complicated biological systems, or doesn’t it?"
.............
Note: The material for this thread is cited from the following:
Scott Aaronson. “Scott_Aaronson_Ghost in Quantum Turing Machine”.
https://www.scottaaronson.com/papers/giqtm3.pdf
Scott has cited the following papers (pertaining to this thread) in his paper:
S. M. Shieber, editor. The Turing Test: Verbal Behavior as the Hallmark of Intelligence. Bradford Books, 2004.
A. Hodges. Alan Turing: The Enigma. Princeton University Press, 2012. Centenary edition.”
N. Bohr. Atomic Physics and Human Knowledge. Dover, 2010. First published 1961.
A. H. Compton. Science and Man’s freedom. The Atlantic, 200(4):71–74, October 1957
.............
...
