Mind

I read in Clarke's "2001: A Space Odyssey" about the Turing test. Is this a good test for whether a thing is conscious?

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According to the Turing Test, if you have an extended email conversation probing to see whether your interlocutor is a person or a machine and you eventually decide it is a person, but it turns out to be a computer, then we ought to say that the computer is intelligent. Taken as a test for consciousness (probably not Turing's own intention), there are two important considerations in favour. One is that the test provides a neat way of avoiding any prejudice against computers on the grounds that they don't look human. The other is the thought that at the end of the day our best evidence that other people are conscious may be their intelligent linguistic behavior. There are also two important considerations against the test. One is that there seems no reason to say that the computer couldn't fool us without being conscious. The other is the thought that my confidence that other humans on conscious might depend on my knowledge that I myself am conscious and that you and I have a similar biology.

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