> My feeling on this is complete opposite to yours. To me, this is completely valid mode of discovery, and possibly even what led to the thought of the Turing m

> My feeling on this is complete opposite to yours. To me, this is completely valid mode of discovery, and possibly even what led to the thought of the Turing machine. We are after all, interested in mimicking/reproducing the we way think. So it's perfectly sensible that one would "think about how we think" to try and come up with a model of computation. I'm not sure if you thought I was being sarcastic, but what I was describing there is literally how Turing came up with the idea, he describes this in the paper where he introduces the concept of computable numbers [0]. I just summarized the non-math bits of his paper. If you haven't read it, I highly recommend it, it's really easily digestible if you ignore the more mathematical parts. This particular argument appears in section 9. [0] https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/Turing_Paper_1936.pdf https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/Turing_Paper_1936.pdf