I can’t see the supposed problem about meaning. There is a wide gulf between a computer and something with intelligence. I don’t see how anything with intelligence could only see the world as sets of symbols.
That’s the main issue… humans are intelligent and do see the world as more than a set of symbol. Computers only manipulate symbols which have meaning attributed to them by humans. Otherwise their operations are meaningless. What is not clear is why adding complexity (how much?) suddently overcomes this fact about computing, or why computers begin to do more than just manipulate symbols once they can complete the Turing test.
Turing is interested in able to decide whether a machine can think. But he wants to avoid discussion of what is a machine, since some would say that a human is a biological machine, and the discussion will disappear into metaphysical clouds and never return. He wants to avoid trying to define what is meant by thinking for the same reason. He is aware that our concepts of machine, human, thinking, intelligence are squidgy. So in the absence of universally agreed hard definitions, what will convince most people that something made by engineers can think (and perhaps can suffer)?
I understand all of that. What I’m saying is that it is philosophically meaningless. If a computer passes the Turing test, we still have to decide what that means, if it means anything. That is impossible without drawing some conclusion about what relevance there is to a computer behaving like a human in conversation, in which case one has to have at least implicit definitions of machine, human, thinking, and intelligence.
Described this way, his test looks like little more than a obscurantist, rhetorical sleight of hand.
I find the bolded portions to equivocate to some degree. The questions of whether a machine can think and what will convince most people are not the same. As I’ve said, if I’m fooled by the Turing test into thinking that a machine is human, then I’d be fooled into thinking that it thinks. But that’s about it, because humanlike behavior is just a defeasible indicator of intelligence (insofar that it is generally performed by humans, which we know to be intelligent).
I asked “So what is your alternative to Turing’s game, what would make you accept that God is omnipotent and can let a machine think?”
So OK, remove the bit about Turing, what would make you accept that God is omnipotent and can let a machine think?"
I already accept that God is omnipotent.
I would qualify what it would mean for God to let a machine think substantially (since a “machine” is by definition a man-made artifact), but for the purposes of this discussion, let’s just say that I accept that God could create a thinking machine.
My question for you, then, is: what of it? The point is a red herring. Whether God can create a thinking machine is 100% irrelevant to the Turing test which is meant to determine whether or not
man can create a thinking machine and whether passing the Turing test is a sufficient condition for intelligence.
This is just taking us further into the Slough of Definition and the Mire of Meaning. But there’s a job to be done, and it won’t get done if we say everything is subjective and so nothing can be done.
I mentioned that thinking is by any coherent definition fundamentally subjective, but that was not the whole point; the rest of my point, you seem not to have replied to.
My point was that there seems to be no warrant for seeing it as an epistemic truth that there should be a test to discover that something thinks. I didn’t say
everything is subjective. I said that
thinking is subjective, and I don’t see any coherent way to get out of that. I said that I don’t see why there must be a way to detect it objectively, so it won’t do to just say there’s a job to be done and there must be a way to do it (that would be begging the question). What reason do we have to believe that thinking
must be detectable, that there necessarily is a “job to be done”?
So let’s bring in the Marines. Are there are things we can do which mud cannot? “Yes, Sir.” Do these include curiosity, creativity, self awareness, empathy, and so on? “Yes, Sir.” Are these objective qualities, would you know them when you see them in others? “Yes, Sir.” Do you think their absence demonstrates absence of ability to think? “Yes, Sir.”
I don’t know what you’re getting at here. There are things that we can do that mud cannot. To repeat myself, what of it?
How are curiosity, creativity, self awareness, and empathy objective qualities? I might defeasibly judge that others are curious, for example, but that presupposes a judgment that they have a mental life, which presupposes that they are self aware. But self awareness definitely is not objectively observable.
There is further confusion, even. The absence of curiosity, creativity, self awareness, empathy, etc. does not suggest an absence of the ability to think, since a sleeping person has the ability to think but has none of those things.
Furthermore, even if the absence of creativity etc. did suggest the absence of ability to think, it would not follow that the presence of those behaviors
does suggest an ability to think. From ~p → ~q we cannot derive p → q; that is just formally invalid (but that would need to hold if your dialogue here had any relevance to the Turing test).
