The Turing Test

Technology and phenomenology tend to be philosophically separate issues, but the development of technology in recent centuries and decades has led to a place where both intersect.  The concept of artificial intelligence entails either a machine designed to act as if it is conscious when it is not or a machine that acts conscious because it actually perceives and thinks.  When it comes to either side of the concept of AI, technology and phenomenology overlap significantly, which could prompt curiosity about how exactly a machine could ever be demonstrated to be in one category or the other.  The Turing Test is one attempt to establish a machine's basic ability to imitate human speech mannerisms, making it relevant to the subject of artificial intelligence.

The Turing Test has a human attempt to tell the difference between another human and a machine that anonymously converse with each other or answer questions through written text.  If the judge cannot consistently distinguish the machine's answers from those of the other human participant, the machine is said to have passed the Turing Test.  While this scenario is very profitable for introducing or exploring certain hypothetical aspects of artificial intelligence, which might indeed be of some usefulness, it lacks any philosophical significance beyond this due to a handful of major limitations.

One such limitation is that whether a machine passes the test only reflects the human judge's subjective perceptions of which one seems to better use the textual mannerisms of an actual person.  In other words, someone could be persuaded that the human is a machine and vice versa without having anything more than mere assumptions, and thus a rationalistic analysis reveals the ultimately unhelpful nature of the test.  Nothing more than the persuasion of an individual is given the spotlight, meaning nothing is proven about the actual nature of their participant.

If the judge wishes to see how difficult it will be for them to tell which interlocutor seems to be human as a personally fascinating pastime, the Turing Test has much to offer.  If someone contemplating how to know if a machine has "intelligence" in the sense of programmed speech, abilities, or information or if it has true intelligence--the ability to actively reason soundly within one's own mind--uses the Turing Test for such ends, they are wasting their time.  This is the second limitation: not even direct observations, much less textual responses, prove that other beings or machines have their own minds.

Even if a machine passes the Turing Test, one cannot know if it is truly sentient or if it has only mimicked conscious thought to some extent.  As it is, even other humans are not truly known to be conscious--at least I am not epistemologically equipped to prove anything more than that it is logically possible that other human minds either do or do not exist and that there is indeed evidence for their existence.  If the other people that one interacts with on a (probably) daily basis cannot be demonstrated to possess their own consciousness, how could a machine even further removed from human observers be shown to be conscious?