Alva Noë in Aeon Magazine: What scientists seem to have forgotten is that the human animal is a creature of disturbance. Or as the mid-20th-century philosopher of biology Hans Jonas wrote: ‘Irritability is the germ, and as it were the atom, of having a world…’ With us there is always, so to speak, a pebble in the shoe. And this is what moves us, turns us, orients us to reorient ourselves, to do things differently, so that we might carry on. It is irritation and disorientation that is the source of our concern. In the absence of disturbance, there is nothing: no language, no games, no goals, no tasks, no world, no care, and so, yes, no consciousness.
Can machines think? Turing dismissed this as ‘too meaningless to deserve discussion’. Instead of trying to make a machine that can think, he was content to design one that might count as a reasonable substitute for a thinker. Everywhere in Turing’s work, the focus is on imitation, replacement and substitution.
Consider his contribution to mathematics. A Turing machine is a formal model of the informal idea of computation: ie, the idea that some problems can be solved ‘mechanically’ by following a recipe or algorithm. (Think long division.) Turing proposed that we replace the familiar notion with his more precise analogue. Whether a given function is Turing-computable is a mathematical question, one that Turing supplied the formal means to answer rigorously. But whether Turing-computability serves to capture the essence of computation as we understand this intuitively, and whether therefore it’s a good idea to make the replacement, these are not questions that mathematics can decide. Indeed, presumably because they are themselves ‘too meaningless to deserve discussion,’ Turing left them to the philosophers.
In the same anti-philosophical spirit, Turing proposed that we replace the meaningless question Can machines think? with the empirically decidable question Can machines pass [what has come to be known as] the Turing test? To understand this proposal, we need to look at the test, which Turing called the Imitation Game.
The game is to be played by three players: one man, one woman, and one person whose gender doesn’t matter. Each has a distinct task. The player of unspecified gender, the interrogator, has the job of figuring out which of the other two is a man, and which a woman. The woman’s task is to serve as the interrogator’s ally; the man’s is to cause the interrogator to make the wrong identification.
More here.
