Consciousness, "Thinking" and the Turing Test

MIT's Mark Halpern has an article up at the New Atlantis on the Turing Test. It's quite interesting.

Many AI opponents presuppose that to do bona fide thinking, the "thinking" entity has to be aware that it is thinking. But that metaphysic is something Turing seems quite explicitly to want to abstract away. (As should be clear from the structure of his test, Turing was concerned with the operational aspects of thinking.)

As such, it's at least arguable that while AI is nowhere near realizing human forms of thought in computation, modern computation nonetheless may be realizing some form of thought. And whether such thought is a conscious form of thought should be (but seemingly rarely is) approached as a completely different question.

(Via Arts & Letters Daily.)