Was den Menschen zum Menschen macht

Alan Turing

4 Min. Lesezeit

🇩🇪 Deutsche Version: Alan Turing

Alan Mathison Turing — mathematician, logician, and founder of theoretical computer science — matters for the book not as a proponent but as a contrast figure. His Turing Test (1950) shows ex negativo what personhood is not: a matter of observable behavior.

Key Contribution

In 1950 Turing published the essay “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” in the journal Mind, one of the founding texts of artificial intelligence. Instead of answering the metaphysical question “Can machines think?” directly, he proposed an operational criterion: the imitation game. If an interrogator in a text conversation cannot reliably distinguish a machine from a human being, Turing argued, then one should ascribe thinking to the machine.

Turing predicted that around the year 2000 there would be computers capable of deceiving an average interrogator in five-minute conversations in 30% of cases. Recent studies (Jones & Bergen 2024/2025) show that modern language models now clearly surpass this criterion.

Turing’s Nine Objections

Remarkably, Turing himself discussed nine objections to his thesis in his paper — among them the argument from consciousness (machines have no subjective experience) and Lady Lovelace’s objection (machines cannot originate anything new). Turing rejected both, arguing that behavior is the only access to another’s consciousness. Precisely there, from the standpoint of personal ontology, lies his error.

Significance for Personal Ontology

Turing’s test is philosophically instructive because it thinks the empirical-functionalist concept of person through to its consequence: if personhood is defined by observable functions, then a functionally equivalent machine must count as a person. That this is absurd reveals the error of the underlying concept of person.

Personal ontology replies:

  1. Operatio sequitur esse: activity follows being, not the other way round. Behavioral equivalence says nothing about the being of an entity.
  2. Personhood as Prote Energeia: the person is First Actuality — she is not the result of an alteration, but of a coming-into-being.
  3. Intentionality: genuine understanding is not symbol-processing, but the reception of the form of the known without its matter (Thomas Aquinas).

Turing himself was aware of the philosophical stakes. To the argument from consciousness he replied that, to be consistent, one would then also have to accept solipsism — for in the case of other human beings, too, we have no direct access to consciousness. Personal ontology disagrees: consciousness is a archphenomenon that shows itself in personal encounter — not an inference from behavioral data.

Historical Context

Turing did groundbreaking work in mathematics (the Turing machine, the decision problem), in cryptography (breaking the Enigma in the Second World War), and in theoretical biology (morphogenesis). His tragic fate — he was criminally prosecuted in 1952 for his homosexuality and died in 1954 — shows where oblivion of the person can lead in practice: the dignity of the person was disregarded for the sake of a social norm.

Place in the Book

Turing is not cited directly in the dissertation, but his test is the implicit background of the AI debate conducted on the concept pages on the basis of the Personhood ontology. Personal ontology shows why the Turing Test must fail as a criterion for personhood — and why the question “Can a machine think?” conceals the real question: “What is thinking, and what must a being be in order to perform it?”

Sources: Bexten 2017, pp. 90–100 (the Turing Test as the implicit background of the critique of the empirical-functionalist concept of person).

Further sources:

  • Turing, Alan M. (1950): “Computing Machinery and Intelligence”. Mind 59(236), pp. 433–460 (the Turing Test as an operational criterion for intelligence — shows ex negativo what personhood is not).
  • Jones, Cameron R. / Bergen, Benjamin K. (2024): “Does GPT-4 Pass the Turing Test?“. In: Proceedings of NAACL-HLT 2024, Vol. 1: Long Papers, pp. 5183–5210. Mexico City: ACL. arXiv:2310.20216.
  • Jones, Cameron R. / Bergen, Benjamin K. (2025): “Large Language Models Pass the Turing Test”. arXiv:2503.23674.
  • Hodges, Andrew (1983): Alan Turing: The Enigma. London: Burnett Books / New York: Simon & Schuster, ix + 587 pp.

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