is an excellent book by Martin Davis (isbn 978-1-4665-0519-3). As
usual I'm going to quote from a few pages:
Liebnitz's involvement with the Harz Mountain mining project ultimately proved to be a fiasco.
In his optimism, he had not forseen the natural hostility of the expert mining engineers
towards a novice proposing to teach them their trade. Nor had he allowed for the
inevitable break-in period a novel piece of machinery requires or for the
unreliability of the winds.
Unlike the usual experience with a new untried gadget, Turing's Bombes, built
from his design, worked correctly as soon as they were made.
"There are several theorems which say almost exactly that ... if a machine
is expected to be infallible, it cannot also be intelligent...
But these theorems say nothing about how much intelligence
may be displayed if a machine makes no pretence at infallibility." [Turing]
There is nothing in Godel's theorem to preclude the
mathematical powers of a human mind being
equivalent to an algorithmic process that produces
false as well as true statements.
It is interesting to contrast von Neumann's view of computer
programming as an activity with Turing's; von Neumann called
it "coding" and made it clear that he thought of it as a clerical
task requiring little intellect. A revealing anecdote tells of a
practice at the Institute for Advanced Study computer facility
of using students to translate by hand, computer instructions
written using human-readable mnemonics into machine
language. A young hot-shot programmer proposed to write
an assembler that would do this conversion automatically.
Von Neumann is said to have responded angrily that it would
be wasteful to use a valuable scientific tool to do a mere
clerical job. In his ACE report, Turing said that the process
of computer programming "should be very fascinating. There
need be no real danger of it ever becoming a drudge, for any
processes that are quite mechanical may be turned over to
the machine itself."
There is no reason to think that a full scale ACE-style
computer would not have worked well if the organization
and resources to build one had been there. The issue is
best understood in the more general context of the question
of which computer functions should be supplied by the
hardware and which by software. Turing had proposed a
relatively simple machine in which a lot was left to be
supplied by software, but where, in compensation, the
programmer had very substantial control of underlying
machine operations.
"I expect that digital computing machines will eventually
stimulate a considerable interest in symbolic logic...
The language in which on communicates with these
machines ... forms a sort of symbolic logic." [Turing]
Searle tells us that Deep Blue "has a bunch of meaningless
symbols." Well, if you could look inside Deep Blue when it
was in operation, you wouldn't see any symbols, meaningful
or not. At the level of circuits, electrons are moving around. Just
as, if you look inside Kasparov's skull while he is playing, you
wouldn't see any chess pieces, you'd see neurons firing.
Our consciousness is a principal way in which each of us
experiences his or her unique individuality. But we know it
only from the inside. We experience our own consciousness but
not that of anyone else.
