Alan Turing's sub-critical and super-critical minds

Two interesting similes for what I find it's like to be bipolar

I have not written about manic depression (bipolar disorder, BPD) for about 15 years. I don’t especially like to think in these terms about our lives. The medical profession took it upon themselves to define normal psychology by cataloging all the deviations from it and tasking themselves to fix them. I don’t want to participate in that power grab even if it’s all history at this point.

Yesterday I was reading Bruno Latour’s 2004 essay “Why has critique run out of steam? From matters of fact to matters of concern”. I am preparing for a podcast about Sartre and that fashionable existentialist intellectual scene in Paris. I was looking for some kind of a realist arguments against Heidegger and pro science but against the obnoxious arrogance of science. I think I found them, to the extent I understand Latour. But that’s for another day and another substack: Gas Giants.

In his essay, Latour quotes a paragraph of Alan Turing’s essay “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” in Mind 59 published in October 1950. On page 454 we find

Let us return for a moment to Lady Lovelace’s objection, which stated that the machine can only do what we tell it to do. One could say that a man can "inject" an idea into the machine, and that it will respond to a certain extent and then drop into quiescence, like a piano string struck by a hammer. Another simile would be an atomic pile of less than critical size: an injected idea is to correspond to a neutron entering the pile from without. Each such neutron will cause a certain disturbance which eventually dies away. If, however, the size of the pile is sufficiently increased, the disturbance caused by such an incoming neutron will very likely go on and on increasing until the whole pile is destroyed. Is there a corresponding phenomenon for minds, and is there one for machines? There does seem to be one for the human mind. The majority of them seem to be "sub-critical", i.e. to correspond in this analogy to piles of sub-critical size. An idea presented to such a mind will on average give rise to less than one idea in reply. A smallish proportion are super-critical. An idea presented to such a mind may give rise to a whole "theory" consisting of secondary, tertiary and more remote ideas. Animals minds seem to be very definitely sub-critical. Adhering to this analogy we ask, "Can a machine be made to be super-critical?"

Turing was speculating about artificial intelligence and where it might go. Clearly ChatGPT can produce answers longer than your questions and you can feed its output back in as more questions. So at that level we know the answer to Turing’s question, although I have doubts this will lead to generation of “a whole theory” in the near term.

And Latour is trying to use Turing’s idea to better furnish his own proposal for thinking in terms of multi-disciplinary gatherings around matters of concern, gatherings in which matters of fact are invited but not given veto over other intellectual objects.

Both are interesting lines of thought but I was struck by something different. This is what it feels like to me when my mind won’t calm down. One thought produces on average more than one new thought, like neutrons in an atomic pile that’s too big to let most of them esscape to safety. I’m not saying that my experience is like explosive atomic chain reactions. My mind is not that devoid of regulating circuits. But this idea of the system being somehow parametrically closer to or farther away from criticality is highly evocative.

And imagine having the ability to control the chains of reactions. Wouldn’t it be something to be able to arrange things in this mind so an injected idea makes it “respond to a certain extent and then drop into quiescence, like a piano string struck by a hammer”? That control would be a superpower for when I know I’m thinking too much. Imaging having the power in some way to adjust the system configuration so as to increase the neutron escape probaility, like a dog who simply chooses to lay down, close its eyes and sleep.