There is an exactly analogous argument about the human brain and its cells; and I understand the Turing test as a thought experiment that shows it to be invalid in any meaningful sense. If a machine (or a seeming person on the end of a terminal) says they perceive and think, how are you to argue otherwise? You have no evidence other humans, let alone other machines, actually can perceive or think, other than how they seem to act.
IMO, the Turing test is conclusive to the extent one accepts Berkleyian idealism and abandons a belief in the necessity of other minds. Under those premises, solutions to the Turing test are, at this point, trivial as ELIZA long ago demonstrated.
I would argue that ELIZA, and the chatbots that have been programmed since, are not solutions to the Turing test.
Have you ever tried holding an actual conversation with a chatbot? They almost invariably fail the real-life Turing test within two or three messages. They parse natural language incorrectly, they can't keep track of the topic of conversation, and they often reply with non-sequitor errors.
Certainly, chatbots can appear to act with intelligence in certain situations. Given enough back-and-forth communication, however, a human will always realize that the bot is just parroting words and phrases that are statistically relevant to the human's questions.
I don't think it's unreasonable to define Turing test success as the ability to consistently fool ordinary human beings through intelligent communication- and that, so far, has not been accomplished.
>"Given enough back-and-forth communication, however, a human will always realize that the bot is just parroting words and phrases that are statistically relevant to the human's questions."
That however is not the Turing Test at all. Here is what Turing actually wrote:
I believe that in about fty years' time it will be possible,
to programme computers, with a storage capacity of about
109, to make them play the imitation game so well that
an average interrogator will not have more than 70 per cent
chance of making the right identi cation after ve minutes of
questioning.
