Rage against the machine

Rage against the machine

Alva Noë

...Instead of arguing about what thinking is, Turing envisions a scenario in which machines might be able to enter into and participate in meaningful human exchange. Would their ability to do this establish that they can think, or feel, that they have minds as we have minds? These are precisely the wrong questions to ask, according to Turing. What he does say is that machines will get better at the game, and he went so far as to venture a prediction: that by end of the century – he was writing in 1950 – ‘general educated opinion will have altered so much that one will be able to speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted.’

Despite Turing’s apparent hostility to philosophy, it is possible to read him as capturing a critical philosophical insight. Why should we expect that evidence would be able to secure the minds of machines for us, when it doesn’t perform that function in our ordinary human dealings? None of us has ever found out or proved that the people around us in our lives actually think or feel. We just take it for granted. And it is this observation that motivates his conception of his own task: not that of proving that machines can think; but rather that of integrating them into our lives so that the question, in effect, goes away, or answers itself.

It turns out, however, that not all of Turing’s replacements and substitutions are quite so straightforward as they seem. Some of them are downright misleading...

I actually have a crucial piece of evidence that Turing didn't mention.  When I look at how I think, I notice that it requires consciousness.  That IMO rules out machines thinking.