[ExI] The digital nature of brains

[Ben Zaiboc]

<jameschoate at austin.rr.com> claimed:

> ---- Ben Zaiboc <bbenzai at yahoo.com>
> wrote: 
> 
> > The Turing test was designed to answer the question
> "can machines think?".

> No it does not. It is test which asks if a human being can
> tell the difference through a remote communications channel
> between a machine and a human.
> 
> It says absolutely nothing about intelligence, thinking, or
> anything like that with regard to machines. These sorts of
> claims demonstrate that the claimant has an inverted
> understanding of the issue. The Turing Test has one, and
> only one outcome...to measure the limits of human ability.

Well, we're talking about different things.  I said "it was designed to..", and you replied "no it does not".  Both of these can be true.

The test was intended to test the abilities of a machine to convince a human, not to test the abilities of the human.  Of course that may well be one of its side effects! (apparently a disturbingly high proportion of people - mostly teenagers I think - are convinced by some chatbots)

Ben Zaiboc