Yes, but are they really in there??

I just don’t see how it could possibly come back to anything but a question of consciousness. From my perspective in 2013, it seems inevitable that a computer will eventually be able to trick his interviewer with some incredible algorithm. Even now, Siri may not be the brightest, but she definitely has a personality. (And it was no trouble at all for me to identify her as “she.”) Is this really the tricky problem Turing and others imagined? He addresses consciousness as one of the possible forms of objection, but only so far as to say that some people argue that consciousness is required to carry out a sufficiently convincing conversation for their interviewer. While I don’t share that view, I believe that “thinking” means something very different from “processing.” See: Chinese Room. Turing changes the “can machines think” question into a test that seems far less relevant and interesting. I don’t know the cultural context that this paper was published in, and I hardly want to accuse Alan Turing of missing the point, but his question seems far less deep and meaningful that “Can machines think?”

This article reminded me of a Star Trek episode where they ended by deciding that an android functioned as a member of the crew, not as a piece of equipment. The android, Data, regularly passed the Turing test and even had to convince people that he was not, in fact, human. He had a thinking face and made insightful and self-reflective statements, but at his core was simply a processor. It is strange to think that we are, in a sense, biological processors at our cores, but somehow we do find ourselves to be conscious creatures. I just can’t accept that any digital computer could possibly feel the same awareness I do. I didn't intend for this post to get so personal, but I suppose that's in the nature of the question.