Turing

Turing y la telepatía

Turing dejó escrito:

[T]he statistical evidence [for extra sensorial perception], at least for telepathy, is overwhelming.

He visto usarse esta cita como evidencia de que Turing, al igual que Newton y muchos otros, daba una de cal y otra de arena. Sin embargo, el párrafo completo de donde se extrae la cita admite la ironía como muy probable interpretación alternativa:

I assume that the reader is familiar with the idea of extra-sensory perception, and the meaning of the four items of it, viz. telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition and psycho-kinesis. These disturbing phenomena seem to deny all our usual scientific ideas. How we should like to discredit them! Unfortunately the statistical evidence, at least for telepathy, is overwhelming. It is very difficult to rearrange one’s ideas so as to fit these new facts in. Once one has accepted them it does not seem a very big step to believe in ghosts and bogies. The idea that our bodies move simply according to the known laws of physics, together with some others not yet discovered but somewhat similar, would be one of the first to go.