Turing and the arguments against machines thinking by GPT-4o

1. The theological argument:
   • Description: only humans can think because only humans have immortal souls.
   • Turing’s Refutation: Turing suggests this argument imposes a self-limiting belief. He also mentions that if we accept that God can grant souls to anyone, there’s no reason to believe He couldn’t give a soul to a machine.
2. The argument from consciousness:
   • Description: machines cannot have consciousness, sensations, emotions, or subjective experiences.
   • Turing’s refutation: Turing argues that we can’t truly know if other people have consciousness, yet we accept they do. Similarly, we should consider the possibility that machines might have a form of consciousness if they act similarly to humans.
3. The Lady Lovelace objection:
   • Description: machines can only do what they are programmed to do; they cannot be creative or original. This argument is named after Ada Lovelace, who stated that the Analytical Engine has no pretensions to originate anything, it can only do what we order it to perform.
   • Turing’s refutation: Turing explains that originality is hard to define and many human actions considered original can be seen as combinations of prior ideas. He also cites examples of machines producing surprising and original results, suggesting they can have some capacity for creativity.
4. The mathematical objection:
   • Description: due to Gödel’s incompleteness theorems, there are problems machines cannot solve, indicating a fundamental limitation in their thinking capacity.
   • Turing’s refutation: Turing acknowledges that there are limits to what machines can do but argues that humans also have cognitive limitations. The presence of limits does not imply the absence of thinking ability.
5. The argument from physical impossibility:
   • Description: machines cannot replicate the physical and biological complexity of the human brain.
   • Turing’s refutation: Turing suggests that we do not need to replicate the human brain’s exact structure to create a machine that can think. What matters is the function and behavior, not the physical structure.

6. The argument from animal consciousness:

• Description: animals can think, but their thoughts are different from humans and cannot be compared to machines.
• Turing’s refutation: Turing holds that if we accept animals can think differently from humans, we should also consider that machines might have a different form of thinking that is still valid.

7. The argument from incapacity to make certain errors:

• Description: machines cannot make human-like errors and therefore cannot think like humans.
• Turing’s Refutation: Turing argues that the ability to make errors is not an essential requirement for thinking. Moreover, machines can be programmed to simulate human errors if necessary.