Turing Was Half Right
Does he tell us anything about consciousness?
What are you thinking? Right now? What are you thinking about? I ask.
You reply in jest: Are you flirting with me?
No. I am evaluating your humanity in a thousand subtle ways that even I don’t begin to understand let alone have the capacity to articulate. But I would be remiss if I said I had ever lacked confidence to detect your humanity as a vibe bursting from the edges of such a shared convo.
My degree in biological sciences may not qualify me to write with any authority on the subject of the conscious human mind, but I would hope that it has lain some of the foundational work for a viewpoint of rational, evidence-based inquiry on any tangential discipline. Of consciousness. Of reality.
Asks the poet: Who am I to ask what defines thought? Consciousness? Intelligence? Human-ness?
Alan Turing deigned to carry such stature far past his untimely fate. The famed mathematician and early computer scientist, posited the imitation game, a test wherein a blind conversation—a conversation between entities with access to no other information about each other than the content of the conversation—between a human and a pair of invisible interlocutors would seek to deduce which of the hidden participants was another human… and which was a machine. To win the game and pass the test the computer would need to fool a human into thinking it was the other conscious human being. Today that game is known as the Turing test and has been the subject of many science fiction stories, and as recently as March 2025 [arxiv.org/pdf/2503.23674] was convincingly passed and won by the large language model AI known as ChatGPT-4.5.
That’s it then? AI is officially our equal? Game over. Long live our computer betters.
Um. A thought on that.
Like many milestone technology achievements that came before, per those chess winning computer algorithms of the late 20th century or as with the Jeopardy! winning super computers that impressed tv audiences a few years later, I suppose such tests are clouded by a kind of tunnel-visioned skeptical perspective that is difficult to ignore with a straight face: humans are complex, intelligence is elastic and variable, and true cognition is likely something greater than a computational task. Right?
Just because I happen to think something is difficult does not mean a computational algorithm designed specifically to achieve that difficult thing has negated the humanity gap between itself and I.
I, say, cannot sort every word from the novel Moby Dick into alphabetical order with anything other than a hundred cups of coffee and a month of afternoons at my disposal. On the other hand I could have my desktop computer perform such a task in the work of a minute or less given a clever algorithm designed for the task. Does that mean my computer better appreciates than I the work of Herman Melville and can assess the allegory of the white whale in the soul and mind of a possessed man? Or does it mean that such a test may not have any meaning beyond impressing those who haven’t bothered to think it all through or understand the machinations of the ghosts buzzing around inside the silicon processor?
One is raw computation. You and I can ideally both understand that much. The other is an ineffable human skill, the poetic soul finding a connection of spirit transcending the characters inked upon the page.
I recently read a decades old popular thesis by Roger Penrose strongly hinting at the notion that consciousness may be greater than raw deterministic physics and computational processing, fumbling cautiously up towards the idea that quantum science and thoughts spanning fuzzy uncertainties involvement within the organic orbs inside our skulls. Is consciousness multi-dimensional super-positioned across time and space entangled with a flutter of weightless connections between the very states of reality itself? Is our understanding beyond our understanding? Do I buy it? You ask. The notion that we are complex beings of amazing evolutionary adaptation to a mysterious universe is clearly obvious but what is also clearly obvious is that we are almost certainly stretching our evaluations of ourselves and that universe to fit better to an alluring ideal of our own reflections.
Back to Newtonian realities for a moment we go.
Our own Turing test is yet to be deduced. Humanity? Consciousness? Intelligence? What are these things? Despite my aforementioned confidence I often cannot even be certain you or I are anything more than a simulated algorithmic computation either. What are you thinking right now? No really. Can you pin it down, hang it up, show it round and use it to affirm your own existence as a conscious being?
ChatGPT-4.5 may have passed the test, but was the test worth passing? Did it tell us anything at all about consciousness or was it just another parlour trick with a cleverly programmed ghost humming through the silicon? And does it even matter?
That’s a lot of questions. You say.
Ah, well. Philosophical musing is all about the questions to which answers are often unclear, I reply. That’s what makes us believe ourselves intelligent, after all. If you asked an AI, what would it tell you? More importantly: would you believe it understood the answer?
What is most telling of all, I think, is that we seemed to have built these machines to be convincing and pass tests even before we taught them to be good, fair, or even correct.