Peeking behind the screen: the unsuspected power of the standard Turing Test

No computer that had not experienced the world as we humans had could pass a rigorously administered standard Turing Test. This paper will show that the use of ‘subcognitive’ questions allows the standard Turing Test to indirectly probe the human subcognitive associative concept network built up over a lifetime of experience with the world. Not only can this probing reveal differences in cognitive abilities, but crucially, even differences in physical aspects of the candidates can be detected. Consequently, it is unnecessary to propose even harder versions of the Test in which all physical and behavioural aspects of the two candidates had to be indistinguishable before allowing the machine to pass the Test. Any machine that passed the ‘simpler’ symbols-in symbols-out test as originally proposed by Turing would be intelligent. The problem is that, even in its original form, the Turing Test is already too hard and too anthropocentric for any machine that was not a physical, social and behavioural carbon copy of ourselves to actually pass it. Consequently, the Turing Test, even in its standard version, is not a reasonable test for general machine intelligence. There is no need for an even stronger version of the Test.