2. The Standard Interpretation of Turing (1950)
Turing is usually taken to be making a point about "thinking". Using the example of a party game in which one must guess which of two out-of-sight candidates is male and which is female on the basis of written messages alone (today we would say on the basis of email-interaction alone), Turing asks what would happen if the two candidates were instead a man and a machine (let us say a digital computer, for the time being) and we could not tell them apart. For then it would follow that we could have no grounds for holding that one of them was thinking and the other was not. Hence either the question "What is thinking?" is meaningless, or it is provisionally answered by whatever proves successful in passing such a test.
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