Illuminating! I am not as well versed in the debates of Turings day as you, but I always imagined his use of the word “thinking” was meant to evoke not just intelligence, but personhood. Even if explicit testing is beside the point, I think it’s reasonable to claim that modern llms “pass” the Turing test in a meaningful way. This poses a challenge (which I have taken to be the point of the thought experiment): On what basis are we denying the llms personhood?
It’s rather the other way around. The reason for suspecting thought/reason/understanding/sentience is established once the machine seems human-like enough to pass the test, implicitly or explicitly. It is worse to treat a person as an object than the other way around. The more pressing question is therefore whether we can prove that it doesn’t have these traits (or that they don’t imply moral worth) and that we are justified in treating it as an object like we are currently doing.
Illuminating! I am not as well versed in the debates of Turings day as you, but I always imagined his use of the word “thinking” was meant to evoke not just intelligence, but personhood. Even if explicit testing is beside the point, I think it’s reasonable to claim that modern llms “pass” the Turing test in a meaningful way. This poses a challenge (which I have taken to be the point of the thought experiment): On what basis are we denying the llms personhood?
Tricky! I think this is part of the problem: how can we expect one experiment to be a cipher for behaviour, cognition, consciousness etc.?
It’s rather the other way around. The reason for suspecting thought/reason/understanding/sentience is established once the machine seems human-like enough to pass the test, implicitly or explicitly. It is worse to treat a person as an object than the other way around. The more pressing question is therefore whether we can prove that it doesn’t have these traits (or that they don’t imply moral worth) and that we are justified in treating it as an object like we are currently doing.