The Turing Test

Is the Turing Test a sufficient test? That is, if a machine passes the test, would you agree it is intelligent?

When we say that our human beings are intelligent, we mean that we have the brain which has a high-level comprehensive ability to allow us to think, to reason, to plan, to learn, to understand and to use language.

However, with and only with these properties is not enough for becoming an intelligent man, who, just as each one of us, use the intelligence we have to learn from the environment, make self-development, gain experience, and on the basis of all these to form our own personalities and view of the world. A man is who he is with all his past experience, his personality, his belief, desire and his unique way of sense-making. These are the things that a human-designed and programmed computer cannot achieve. Therefore, even if a machine passes the Turing Test, we can only say that it has a strong ability to reason, to process information and to imitate, but we can never say that it has sufficiently proved itself to be intelligent.

Is the Turing Test a neccesary test? That is, does a machine have to pass this test in order to be intelligent?

I agree that the Turing Test may be regarded as a necessary test for intelligence due to the fact that keeping reasonable and meaningful conversation with another person requires the abilities such like reason, logic and language, which are indispensable components of intelligence, to a great degree. A test that can achieve the same effect can also be a necessary test for intelligence. Therefore, the Turing Test is not necessarily the only test, but a necessary test which can test some aspects included in the intelligence.

Will a machine ever pass the Turing Test? Why or why not?

There exists the possibility that a machine can pass the Turing Test. Let us suppose first that the interrogator for the test, by himself, can come up with various questions that all fall within the scope of A. The designer of the machine is a huge team of experts from all possibly related disciplines. They have done programming for the machine so that it can deal with all questions within the scope of B. If the interrogator’s questions are fully covered by the scope of B, the machine then can answer all questions of the interrogator, since the “collective wisdom” of the programmers has surpassed the interrogator’s ability of making a correct distinction by asking questions. Second, we can assume that the real female human being is one who is not good at expressing and convincing others. Her insufficient ability to make herself clear will make it harder for the interrogator to tell who is who and will increase the possibility that the interrogator will make a wrong decision.

Will a machine ever be intelligent? Why or why not? (This may or may not be the same answer to the previous question).

I am with the view that a machine cannot ever be intelligent, due to my understanding of what it is to be intelligent. A machine can never actively find from the surrounding environment useful things and predict that these things can do itself good in the future. A machine can never make sense of all kinds of connotations in people’s words and thus fully understand each individual’s meaning beyond their own usage of language. A machine can never feel the world as we humans do to solve all kinds of unforseeable difficulties and to learn from its individual experiences and further form its own personality and view of the world. A machine can never act according to its own desire or belief. Or, at least, this is what we, as human beings, would not like to see and would prevent from the beginning of designing a machine.

How the Mind Works

Mind is the conscious thought of individuals processed by the brain in the charge of mental activities like memory, perception, reasoning, imagination, et. al.. When an individual gets stimuli from the outside world, mind empowers the individual to process the external input and to deal with it according to one's own will.
Mind’s working process begins from perceiving something. Inputs from the outside world trigger the mind's awareness. Some “Action” takes place in “The external world” and we perceive it through one or more of the bodily senses, which enables us to see, to hear and to feel. Then the stimuli get processed and sent into the working memory and long-term memory part of the mind for discrimination.
For example, when we are reading books, we pay attention to the words and the sensory system sends the information to the working memory in our brain. While information is stored there, we search in the long-term memory for the match between the incoming information and what inside our memory, which contains all the linguistic knowledge we have already had. If these two match, the outcome is sent to the working memory and we are able to recognize the words and then further able to read them out or explain them to others.
The inputs just mentioned that trigger the mental activities are something in the external world. This is a “bottom-up” information processing. However, the inputs can also be something from the “inside”, such as the inner thought or memory of one’s own. In this way, the human understanding is not guided by the external materials, but by the knowledge that has been stored in the memory or the brain. For example, if you have a blueprint of an electricity-supplying system, as a person without any professional knowledge, you might need to rely heavily on the picture to identify what the various patterns stand for. But if you are an experienced engineer, with much professional knowledge equipped in mind, you can identify the function of the blueprint at once without much searching in your brain. Therefore, the information processing is a “top-down” way.
It seems interesting that sometimes we are not aware of our mental activities. For instance, when we see words like “bed” and “book”, we recognize them immediately and think they are too easy and we do not need to think about them. And when we are walking, we are not aware that we are using the mind to guide the motor system to function. Yet in other times, if we have a troublesome issue in mind, we are fully conscious that “We are thinking about it”. When the information we are processing is so familiar for us, we need little mental resource for deal with it, and it will fall under the automatic control of the mind. When the information needs much mental resource to be processed, we would be conscious that we are “using the mind” to deal with it and thus it is under “conscious control”. It seems that at one time, only one conscious process can occur in our mind, otherwise the information will interfere with each other.