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The Turing Test: an Examination of Its Nature and Its Mentalistic Ontology

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The Turing Test: an Examination of Its Nature and Its Mentalistic Ontology Danish Yearbook of Philosophy, Vol. 40 (2005), 109-144 THE TURING TEST: AN EXAMINATION OF ITS NATURE AND ITS MENTALISTIC ONTOLOGY CHRISTIAN BEENFELDT University of Copenhagen I. Exordium We live in a culture that, within a mere half-century has become saturated by a panoply of computer technology - from the ubiquity of the personal computer and the globally reticulated Internet, to the sublunary existence of data satel­ lites and the embedded presence of information technology in entertainment devices, cars, airplanes, medical instruments and soon, perhaps, also in our very bodies. Coetaneous with this development, the question 0/ machine intel­ ligence has arisen in the study of mind - a question that was famously posed by the British mathematician Alan Turing while the early behemothian digital computers were still in their very infancy. "r propose to consider the question, 'Can machines think?''' Thus begins Turing's paper, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, which appeared in Mind in 1950 and introduced what has subsequently become known as the Turing Test. The paper is widely recognized to have exercised a vast influence both upon the philosophy of mind and upon the then fledgling fields of cognitive science and artificial intelligence. Assessments of its influ­ ence incIude the following: Moor: Fifty years ago Alan Turing published his famous articIe "Computing Machinery and rn­ telligence" in the journal Mind. This articIe is arguably the most influential and widely read articIe in the philosophy of artificial intelligence ... His vision of the possibility of ma­ chine intelligence has been highly inspiring and extremely controversial. 1 110 CHRISTI AN BEENFELDT French: Turing's article has unquestionably generated more commentary and controversy than any other article in the field of artificial intelligence with few papers in any field creating such an enduring reaction.2 It is arguably one of the most widely discussed scientific papers ever written.3 Preston: 'Computing Machinery and Intelligence' is surely the most famous, most widely read and reprinted, and the most influential article ever to have been published in a philosophy jour­ na1. 4 While Turing seemed have intended his test to settle the question of machine thinking in a fairly straightforward manner - offering a "philosophical conver­ sation-stopper", as Daniel Dennett puts it - the antipodean state of affairs has nevertheless ensued. Far from proroguing the discussion, the test sparked a highly controversial and prolific debate that has lasted more than half a centu­ ry so far, and has involved a number of different fields - from philosophy, arti­ ficial intelligence and cognitive science to psychology and communication studies. In 2000, as the test passed the half-century mark since its introduction, its continuing relevance to the contemporary debate was underscored by the fact that an entire issue of the journal Mind and Machines was dedicated to it. Two years later, Oxford University Press published Views Into the Chinese Room, a collection of articles by such renowned philosophers and cognitive scientists as Ned Block, Stevan Harnad, Terry Winograd, Jack Copeland, Roger Penrose and John Haugeland, pertaining to John Searle's Chinese Room Argument - a Gedankenexperiment which derives its farne from challenging the assumption of Turing's (and, subsequently, also of many other thinkers in artificial intelli­ gence and cognitive science) that an appropriately programmed computer, by virtue of the program it is instantiating, really would have a mind of its own. Those are merely two recent highpoints drawn from the substantial fabric of cross-disciplinary discussion involving the Turing Test. To point out a few in­ tertwined threads in this plentiful garment, one could mention the following: the debate about the operational or inductive nature of the test;5 the discussion of the level of intelligence ascribed by the test (discussed below); the question of the gender identity of the being imitated;6 the challenge of the Chinese .
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