The problem the Turing test was meant to solve is that we had, and still have, no means of recognizing a conscious mechanism. We lack a theory of consciousness that can be used to make a better test than "It could fool me", so the Turing test accepts that as the test.

In other words, the mechanism may be what consciousness is about, but we can't say anything useful about this as relates to consciousness.

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repelsteeltje 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> We lack a theory of consciousness [...]

Nitpick: off course we don't really lack a theory of consciousness. It's just that Alan Turing choose to ignore all the existing prior discourse in humanities and philosophy.

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tim333 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Nitpick nitpick: If you look at Turing's paper https://courses.cs.umbc.edu/471/papers/turing.pdf and ^F for consciousness you'll find that's not entirely true.

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pmontra 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

There are many theories of consciousness but nobody knows if one of them is correct and nobody can use one of them to build a conscious machine. Compare that to theories of physics. None of them is 100% correct but they give us the tools we are using to write these messages.

	▲	tim333 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I've got a theory of consciousness, not a very complicated one, that could be used in a machine. Basically that it evolved as a practical way for animals to make decisions like whether to run from a predator. To do that info from the billions of neurons handling senses memories and the like filter down to something like a situation summary, which is basically what the animal is conscious of which then feeds to the decision making, thinking and remembering and neurons. It would be quite interesting if/when someone tries that to see how close it is or isn't to nature.

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foldr 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The Turing test isn't a test for whether a machine is conscious but whether it can think.