4 ms·

Turing test is generally misunderstood, much like Schrodinger's cat, it has devolved in to a pop cultural meme. The test is to evaluate if a machine can think.

• namrog84 8mo ago
  I thought that was part of the issue, is the poor understanding of is the test to evaluate if it can think or only if we think it can think. And even that is generalizable since there are different categories of thinking or concepts of the mind.
• runarberg 8mo ago
  I like the analogy with Schrödinger’s cat. Like Schrödinger’s cat it is actually not a good thought experiment. Both have been debunked. Schrödinger’s cat is applying quantum behavior (of a single interaction) to a macro system (with trillions of interactions). While the Turing test can be explained away with Searle’s Chinese room thought experiment. I would argue that Schrödinger’s cat has done more damage to the general understanding of quantum physics then it has done good. In contrary though, I don‘t think the same about the Turing test. I think it has resulted in a net positive for the theory of mind as long as people take Searle’s rebuttal into account. Without it (as is sadly common in popular philosophy) the Turing test is simply just wrong, and offers no good insight for neither philosophy nor science.
  • djoldman 8mo ago
    The Turing test and Searle's "rebuttal" are both pretty inconsequential. There's no real definition of "thinking," therefore neither proof/disprove or say much. Turing's imitation game is about making it difficult for a human to tell whether they are communicating with a computer or not. If a computer can trick the human, then... what? The computer is "thinking" ? I think most people would say that's an insufficient act to prove thinking. Even though no one has a rigorous definition of thinking either. All this stuff goes around in circles and like most philosophy makes little progress.
    • runarberg 8mo ago
      Searle’s rebuttal is actually excellent philosophy. But otherwise I agree. Searle was (just learned he passed away last year) a philosopher by trade, but Turing was a mathematician and Schrödinger was a theoretical physicist. So it is to be expected that a mathematician and a physicist might produce sub-par philosophy. Turing’s point in his 1950 paper was actually to provide a substitute to the question of whether machines could think. If a machine can win the imitation game, he argued, is a better question to ask rather then “can a machine think”. Searle showed that this is in fact this criteria was not a good one. But by 1980 philosophy of mind had advanced significantly, partially thanks to Turing’s contributions, particularly via cognitive science, but in the 1980s we also had neuropsychology, which kind of revolutionized this subfield of philosophy. I think philosophy is actually rather important when formulating questions like these, and even more so when evaluating the quality of the answers. That said, I am not the biggest fan of the state of mainstream philosophy in the 1940s. I kind of have a beef with logical positivism, and honestly believe that even Turing’s mediocre philosophy was on a much better track then what the biggest thinkers of the time were doing with their operational definition.
      • Dylan16807 8mo ago
        Even if a Chinese room isn't a real boy, if it can do basically all text tasks at a human level I'm going to say it's capable of thinking. The issue of "understanding" can be left for another day (not that I think the Chinese room is very convincing on that front either). I see no reason to disqualify p-zombies from being AGI.
    • famouswaffles 8mo ago
      >Turing's imitation game is about making it difficult for a human to tell whether they are communicating with a computer or not. If a computer can trick the human, then... what? The computer is "thinking" ? If you read his paper, Turing was trying to make a specific point. The Turing test itself is just one example of how that broader point might manifest. If a thinking machine can not be distinguished from a thinking human then it is thinking. That was his idea. In broader terms, any material distinction should be testable. If it is not, then it does not exist. What do you call 'fake gold' that looks, smells etc and reacts as 'real gold' in every testable way ? That's right - Real gold. And if you claimed otherwise, you would just look like a mad man, but swap gold for thinking, intelligence etc and it seems a lot of mad men start to appear. You don't need to 'prove' anything, and it's not important or relevant that anyone try to do so. You can't prove to me that you think, so why on earth should the machine do so ? And why would you think it matters ? Does the fact you can't prove to me that you think change the fact that it would be wise to model you as someone that does ?
  • runarberg 8mo ago
    Note: I said “theory of mind” when I (obviously) meant “philosophy of mind”.
  • gosub100 8mo ago
    What do you mean by Schrodinger's cat experiment being "debunked"? The only way I can think to debunk it is to say there are ways to determine if the cat is alive such as heartbeat or temperature, which are impossible to isolate at a quantum level. I don't think anyone claimed the animal was in a superposition.
    • Dylan16807 8mo ago
      Debunked is a weird word since it was made to be absurd. But yes the issue is about whether the cat is in superposition, and real cats can't be.
• debugnik 8mo ago
  > The test is to evaluate if a machine can think. The test is to showcase that the question of whether machines can think is meaningless. The point of Turing's thesis is that passing his test just proves the machine has the capability to pass such a test, which is actually meaningful.
• hunterpayne 8mo ago
  "Thinking cool and all but not that extraordinary. Even plants does it." Are you involved in politics somehow?