Dawkins:
Let’s graduate the definition as follows: the more prolonged, rigorous and searching your interrogation, the stronger should be your conviction that an entity that passes the test is conscious.
When Turing wrote — and for most of the years since — it was possible to accept the hypothetical conclusion that, if a machine ever passed his operational test, we might consider it to be conscious.
[It's Dawkins, certainly not Turing, who made the test into a test for "consciousness". We'll soon see where this gets him. - jb]
We were comfortably secure in the confidence that this was a very big if, kicked into future touch. However, the advent of large language models (LLM) such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and others has provoked a hasty scramble to move the goalposts. It was one thing to grant consciousness to a hypothetical machine that — just imagine! — could one day succeed at the Imitation Game. But now that LLMs can actually pass the Turing Test? “Well, er, perhaps, um… Look here, I didn’t really mean it when, back then, I accepted Turing’s operational definition of a conscious being…”
[Again: this was not Turing's definition of consciousness. If it's yours, please don't hide behind Turing. - jb]
(2/n)
