This is the essay on the Turing Test that I wish I were capable of writing. It takes a while to get up to speed, but when it does it's just delightful.
I am not as suspicious of the spiritual as Searle or Turing, and am broadly willing to entertain the possibility that there is such a thing as a soul that proves the essential difference between the thought of a man and a machine. But this seems beside the point. To my mind, Searle’s Chinese Rooms, though useful in thinking about artificial intelligence in the same way Schrödinger’s Cat is useful in thinking about quantum mechanics, simply puts the cart before the horse. Let the high speed men with paper, pencil, and rubber commence using their rulebook to carry on a conversation, whether in Chinese or any other language, and then we can discuss the metaphysical implications.
One needn’t go as far as souls anyway. Jefferson’s hypothesis—that there is some electrochemical basis to thought—is sufficient to solve the problem. Were it true, the reason computers seem fundamentally blocked from progress on the Turing Test would amount to the fact that they are wholly mechanical objects, while “thought” is as much a biological function as “digestion” or “copulation.” What’s notable to me is simply that the idea is instantly credible in the context of observable reality. I think about my household pets, and even though none of them are close to passing the Turing Test, not least due to their complete inability to use language, they are clearly routinely engaging in something that is closer to thought than anything LLMs serve up. It is possible to communicate with them, albeit non-verbally—if I pick up and shake the container they know contains treats, my cats recognize that as a symbol that I am offering treats, just as I understand that when they stand by the empty food bowl and scream they are asking me to fix the problem. This means that they have notions of both objects and desire. Frankly, on the evidence, I’d be a lot less surprised by my dog learning to use language than I would by my laptop.