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Professor Donald Michie
Turing Institute
George House
36 North Hanover Street
Glasgow G1 2AD
United Kingdom
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Dear Donald:

	I just read your ``Turing's test and conscious thought''.

	My opinion about consciousness is that we won't be able
to pass the Turing test in its simple form (or program Searle's
Chinese room) without explicitly building in consciousness.
Therefore, we should take the design stance towards consciousness,
i.e. decide what kind of consciousness including self-consciousness
is necessary for intelligence.

	I agree that our observation of our own mental processes
is very spotty.  Some of the difficulty might be that massively
parallel processes might be inherently unobservable, but I would
guess that nature just hasn't happened to evolve some forms
of introspection that would be quite feasible.  There is
every reason to build these into our programs.

	I think the ability to notice Halle's rules is a frill
as far as intelligence goes.

	I agree with the propaganda aspects of your paper.

	Enclosed are two recent relevant writings.  The review
of Penrose will appear in the {\it Bulletin of the American
Mathematical Society}.  I suspect I would have heard from
 {\it Scientific American} by now if they intended to print
my letter.

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Best Regards,
John McCarthy
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