The Turing test is a test for machine intelligence devised by the British genius Alan Turing in the middle of the 20th century. The idea is this: A person (the judge) conducts a typed conversation with a system. If after some period of time of chatting in this manner, say half an hour, the judge can not determine that the system they are talking to is not human, then the system is intelligent.
In my opinion, a system that passes the Turing test is precisely a system that passes the Turing test (and is therefore remarkable) but it is not necessarily intelligent (in a sense that does justice to our intuitions of what this term means at any rate), and certainly not necessarily conscious. Turing himself did not mention consciousness explicitly when he formulated the test. Nevertheless, it is tempting to regard any system that exhibits intelligent behavior as automatically conscious as well as intelligent, although I do not necessarily regard such a system as either.
Ned Block (1995) had a fascinating response to the proposed test. He suggested a way to beat it with an algorithm. His solution is technically infeasible, but presents a challenge to our thinking about algorithms in general. You know the old saying that infinite monkeys typing would eventually produce the complete works of Shakespeare? What if, instead of letting our monkeys pound away randomly, we got systematic with that approach and really exhausted the combinatorial possibilities?
Let us say that the test lasts half an hour. Let us also say that the communication line between the judge and the system under test (let us just call this the system's side of the conversation) is somewhat slow, but fast enough not to be frustrating to an average human typist, say 50 characters per second. Let us also say that both parties are capable of typing upper and lower case letters, the numerals, the common punctuation marks, say, 100 different characters in all. Given that both ends of the conversation can type at the same time for the entire duration of the test, each of them may type any of 100 characters (or no character at all) each 50th of a second during the entire half hour test. That means there are exactly 100 to the power of (2 (parties) X 50 (characters per second) X 60 (seconds per minute) X 30 (minutes in the test)), or 100180,000 different entire conversations that could possibly take place during the half-hour test, from both parties holding down the 'a' key for the whole half hour, to both of them holding down the 'z' key for the whole half hour.
Now, imagine that we write a simple computer program to generate each of these possible conversations, and that we submit the resulting (staggering) pile of transcripts to a vast committee and give them a huge amount of time to sort them into two piles: pile A of all of the conversations in which the system side of the conversation seemed non-human, and pile B, the (much smaller) pile in which the system side of the conversation seemed to conduct a conversation that would pass for rational human conversation to an average person.
Note that pile B contains the rational-seeming responses on the system side of the conversation, even if the judge's side is gibberish - pile B is selected only on the basis of the reasonableness of the system side of the conversation. In fact, it contains rational-seeming responses to all possible conversations from the judge's side (there are 100 to the power of 50 (characters per second) X 60 (seconds per minute) X 30 (minutes in the test), or 10090,000 of them). Moreover, it contains, for each of the 10090,000 possible judge's sides of the conversation, all possible rational-seeming system sides of the conversation. After all, given any particular judge's side of the conversation, how many ways are there of filling in the gaps so that the system seemed to respond as another human would? A lot.
The committee would then throw the pile A out. They would take pile B, the one with all the coherent, human-seeming conversations on the system side, and load this pile into a computer, along with a very, very simple program. Once the test started, the program would only choose randomly, each 50th of a second, from among the conversations in its memory that are consistent with everything that has already been typed by both sides of the conversation. Once it has chosen a conversation that meets this criterion, it simply types out the character that the conversation says the system should type out at that particular 50th of a second (or no character at all, if that's what the chosen conversation specifies).
This program could be written in about half an hour by any decent programmer, and it would be guaranteed to pass the Turing test, using this huge pile of canned responses, assuming the vast committee exercised proper judgment in deciding which conversations appeared human and which did not. The intelligence in such a system is in the data, programmed in by the human committee, and clearly not in the tiny, stupid execution engine that reads and acts on the data. Given that the Turing test supposedly tests for machine intelligence, not the intelligence of the human programmers of the machine, I think that most people would agree that to characterize such a system as conscious or even intelligent misses the point of consciousness and intelligence.
Assuming that you accept that Block's machine is not conscious (even if, by some characterizations of the term, it is intelligent), if you have a favorite computer architecture that you think is conscious, you really should specify where the difference is between your machine and Block's. Some people insist that a truly conscious computer must be a parallel processing machine, with many processors (inter)acting together. But it has been shown that any parallel processing computation can be emulated perfectly well on a single processor (for each timeslice, you make your single processor simulate each of the parallel processors in turn for that timeslice. Then you move onto the next timeslice. So the whole computation just takes n times as long as it would on an n-processor parallel machine).
Block's "algorithm" would clearly pass the Turing Test, but in a really dumb way. It combines a dead simple execution engine with a massive flat table of raw data that the engine indexes into. This seems to violate the spirit of the Turing Test, and the spirit of what we call algorithms. This sense of discomfort with his solution is the point, and it is why this thought experiment is relevant to this book.
Block's machine is monstrously complex - as complex as any you could propose - the complexity is in the table. In essence, the table is the algorithm. Whatever your favorite conscious architecture, it should be clear that its outward behavior would be exactly matched by that of Block's machine. There is some mapping between your machine, with its models-of-self, or its Darwinian memosphere, or whatever, and Block's machine. Both machines are doing the same thing. The only difference between Block's table-driven Turing Test beater and any more "intelligent" algorithm is purely one of optimization, implementation, and engineering efficiencies.
The difference between the two algorithms is one of encoding, much like the difference between a program written in assembly language as opposed to C++, or the difference between an uncompressed file and one that has been shrunk with a data compression utility. Any "true AI" is nothing above and beyond Block's Turing Test Beater, just more efficient, with a lot of redundancies squeezed out. Just because it is easier for you to understand a machine by seeing its bits flipping at a "higher level", or as "representing" this or that, does not make it so.
We have a comfortable intuition that the "true AI" is doing something special, but it is doing the exact same thing that Block's table-driven machine does, and it is doing it in exactly the same way, albeit more optimally from an implementation point of view. But this intuition that the true AI is somehow fundamentally different than the huge table plus tiny execution engine is anthropomorphism on our part. If you think a computer could ever be conscious, you must say why your algorithm is substantially different than Block's, in a way that does not seem like an arbitrary line drawn to reinforce your intuitions. In the spectrum of algorithms, ranging from a "true" AI and Block's algorithm, where does the fairy of consciousness wave her magic wand?