In Alan Turing's seminal 1950 paper, he explores the implications of extra-sensory perception on his famous 'imitation game' or Turing test. He argues that telepathy might invalidate the test, as communication between the human subjects could mislead the observer into incorrectly identifying the machine's intelligence. Turing proposes conducting the experiment in a 'telepathy-proof room' to mitigate this risk. Despite being a pioneer of computer science, he seriously considered the impact of paranormal phenomena, reflecting his open-mindedness to unconventional ideas in the philosophical discourse about artificial intelligence and human cognition.
"I assume that the reader is familiar with the idea of extra-sensory perception ... telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition and psycho-kinesis. These disturbing phenomena seem to deny all our usual scientific ideas ..."
"If the human and the observer could communicate telepathically (which the machine supposedly could not do), then the test would fail. 'This argument is to my mind quite a strong one,' says Turing."
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