He brought ESP up in his paper about the Turing Test. My understanding is that it is possible counter argument to his proposed machine intelligence.
Belief in ESP back then is more understandable since they didn't have the experiments that disproved it, or the knowledge of biology that doesn't show a mechanism.
> Belief in ESP back then is more understandable since they didn't have the experiments that disproved it, or the knowledge of biology that doesn't show a mechanism.
IMO, quite the opposite. They had more than sufficient knowledge about biology to entertain hypotheses about how it could work in theory, e.g. electrical signals leaking from the brain, etc. And there was plenty of "science" purporting to show an effect, if not the mechanism. OTOH, every generation since before time immemorial[1] has been burned by people making and profiting from these and similar claims. So just paying attention to what the old timers tell you, and keeping tabs on claims as you age, remembering how they pan out, can go a long way to honing one's B.S. detector. (This current ESP fad and the "tests" used to prove it seems to mirror identically a similar wave of claims I remember hearing about on the news and TV talk shows as a kid in the 1980s.) But some generations get carried away more than others, perhaps because of excessive optimism during periods of rapid technological advancement. Even stone cold geniuses can be too credulous; being optimistically credulous may even positively correlate with success in advancing fields of endeavor.
