The Turing Experiment

1)

Alan Turing’s “Turing Experiment was proposed, quite obviously, by Alan Turing. In his Computing Machinery and Intelligence he considers the question “Can machines think”. Because the terms “machine” and “think” are not easily definable, he proposes an experiment to replace the question. The philosophical impact of the experiment that he proposed was so insightful that it continues to be the topic of much controversy and debate today.

The experiment was quite simple really. It starts out with considering 3 individuals placed in separate rooms and only able to communicate via typed message, or through a mediator that is not one of the three participating in the experiment. There is a man in one room, a woman in one room, and an interrogator in one room. It is the job of the man to convince the interrogator that he the woman, and the job of the woman to convince the interrogator that she is the woman.

Once Turing has explained the situation he poses the question “What will happen when a machine takes the part of A in this game? Will the interrogator decide wrongly as often when the game is played like this as he does when the game is played between a man and a woman?” Turing uses this new question to replace the original question “can machines think”

The argument from consciousness basically says that since a machine can not feel the way that we humans do, it cannot be said to have a mind, or even to be self aware. The main problem with this argument is that it would require someone to become the machine in question and then tell us how it felt in order to know that it feels differently, or even to know that it does not feel at all.

The argument from various disabilities is simply someone saying that machines cannot think because they cannot (insert human characteristic here). An example would be that they cannot “have initiative”. The main problem with these arguments is that they are not typically supported. They are most likely based on...