[mjburgess]

For the purposes of my criticism of the Turing test, any discussion whatsoever about what capacities ground intelligence is already entertaining what Turing ruled out. He made the extremely pseudoscientific behaviourist assumption that no such science was required, that intelligent agents are just input-output relata on thin I/O boundaries.

Any even plausible scientific account of what capacities ground intelligence would render this view false. Whatever capacities you want to grant, no plausible ones are compatible with Turing's view nor the Turing test.

Consider imagination. You can replace a faculty to imagine with a set of models of ({prompt, reply},) histories for a human observer who is only concerned with those prompts and those replies. But as soon as anything changes in the world, you have to imagine novel things (eg., SpaceX is founded, we visit mars, a new TV show is released...). So questions such as, "what would the latest SpaceGuys TV show be like if Elon handed just launched BlahBlahRocket5 ?" cannot be given fit answers). These require the actual faculty of imagination, along with being in the world and so on.

As soon as you enter a sincere scientific attempt to characterise these features, you see immediately that whilst modelling historical frequencies of human-produced data can fool humans, it cannot impart these capacities.

[nl]

I don't understand your argument well at all.

> So questions such as, "what would the latest SpaceGuys TV show be like if Elon handed just launched BlahBlahRocket5 ?" cannot be given fit answers

I don't understand this at all. ChatGPT can do a great job imagining a world like this right now, and there is no substantial difference in the output of a LLM based "imagination" vs a human based "imagination".

> These require the actual faculty of imagination, along with being in the world and so on.

I think you are implying by this that human's imagination requires a consistent world model and that because LLM's don't really have this they can't be intelligent. Apologies if I have misinterpreted this!

But human imagination isn't consistent at all (as anyone who as edited a fiction story will tell you). Our creative imagination process generates wrong thoughts all the time, and then we self-critic and correct it. It's quite possible for LLMs to do this fine too!

Basically I think my point is that I believe a perfect simulation of intelligence is intelligence, whereas I suspect you don't think it is, maybe?