Turing Test

The Turing test — introduced by Alan Turing in Computing Machinery and Intelligence (1950) as the imitation game — is a behavioral criterion for machine intelligence: if a machine's text-based conversational output is indistinguishable from a human's by a competent judge, the machine satisfies the criterion. Turing proposed this as a way to sidestep the philosophically intractable question 'can machines think?' with a question that is at least in principle answerable.

The test has been systematically misread as a criterion for consciousness or inner experience. It is not. It is a criterion for behavioral indistinguishability — a much weaker and more tractable standard. Conflating behavioral indistinguishability with phenomenal consciousness is the precise error Turing's operationalization was designed to avoid.

Modern Large Language Models pass conversational versions of the test in many practical conditions. Whether this tells us anything about machine minds is a separate question, governed by separate arguments entirely. The test was never designed to answer it.