I certainly agree that Adler's provocative tone is not helpful and his strokes are sometimes too broad to be fully correct as you have rightfully pointed out, b

I certainly agree that Adler's provocative tone is not helpful and his strokes are sometimes too broad to be fully correct as you have rightfully pointed out, but the general point stands. To me the Turing test gives a falsifiable experiment that defines what "thinking like a human being" means. It does so by focusing only on the input output. To do that, it puts the system under test out of view of the experimenter and mediates the experiment with written text. So yes, the input output is the important part, the Turing test, albeit flawed, is interesting, and any claim that machines can't think based on a definition of "think" that does not lend itself to a falsifiable experiment, such as Searle's, is uninteresting. I will leave it at that and make a quick exit, as Adler suggests.