Say what you like about Queen Elizabeth II, she has the poshest accent in the British Isles. By far. No one comes close. Her own family sound like right gor-blimeys compared to her. No one on Downton Abbey can hold a candle to the Queen’s accent. I even venture to suggest that it is not possible to speak posher than the Queen: there is no possible world in which someone speaks posher than her. For this reason alone she deserves to be the Queen of England. There are absolutely no concessions to modern demotic; not even a whiff of South London. It is the platonic form of a posh English accent. When she is gone that accent will be extinct. Thankfully, we will have recordings of it. The last person I can remember in her linguistic class was Bertrand Russell. I don’t think they ever met but if they did they would surely think: “At last someone who speaks proper”. God save the Queen’s accent!

Are there quotation marks in the language of thought? Do we have a mental equivalent of quotation? It seems clear that we can have metalinguistic thoughts, as when I think that “five” has four letters; but can thought contain mental scare-quotes? Suppose I doubt that there are inner processes: can I think that “inner processes” need outward criteria? Can I think that “military intelligence” is an oxymoron? Are these attributions really attributions of a thought that lacks quotation marks? Compare the question of whether there are genuinely metaphorical thoughts.

Turing Tests

 

 

The classic Turing test involves a robot that passes for a conscious human. The examiner spends time with the robot, asking questions, interacting, and the question is whether it presents a convincing appearance of intelligence and consciousness. It is like an audition for playing the part of a normal human being. Structurally, however, the Turing test exemplifies something more general, and it is instructive to spell out what this is.

Thus consider the Turing* test: can we construct a virtual world that passes for a real world? An engineer is making a machine that will feed inputs into the brain and produce an impression of a world of ordinary material objects; the question is whether this virtual world can convince someone that it is real. The subject can experiment on this virtual world, moving around, varying the angles, using different senses, and if after some suitable time cannot distinguish the virtual from the real, we can declare that the machine passes the Turing* test. It can produce a convincing simulacrum of a real world—as a robotics engineer might produce a convincing simulacrum of a conscious intelligence.

We could also envisage a Turing** test that concerns producing artificial plant life: can we make an object that resembles a naturally occurring plant enough to convince someone that it is really a biological plant? And we can have subdivisions of such questions: can we artificially simulate a virus, a bat, a cactus, or an octopus? The question is not specific to robots and minds at all: it is about the power to mimic naturally occurring objects by artificial contrivance. Can we make an artificial F, for arbitrary F?

Here is an interesting question of this general type—call it the super-Turing test: can we create a virtual world that contains robots that pass the classic Turing test? That is, we first have to create a virtual world of bodies, as in the Turing* test, and then we have to ensure that those virtual bodies behave in ways that perfectly mimic human bodies—so that they will pass the Turing test. Thus virtual robots may pass the super-Turing test, and hence be declared conscious intelligent beings.

Suppose they do pass that test: are they then really conscious? But how can a merely virtual being be conscious? Are people in your dreams conscious? Passing the Turing test is not logically sufficient to qualify as conscious, because passing the super-Turing test is not sufficient. Passing the test is enough to convince someone that there is a real thing here of the type in question, if they don’t know the actual nature of thing; but that is a question about evidence and belief, not about what is metaphysically possible. Anything can pass a Turing-type test for being an F but still not be an F.

 

 

Stalin famously said, “Death solves all problems–no man, no problem”. He meant that murdering people solves the problem their existence poses–hence his murder of millions of Russians who threatened to be a “problem”. I suspect many people in power have thought along similar lines–and the saying has a certain cogency. But it is important to see that it is a fallacy, a shallow fallacy. Consider Socrates: he is still a problem for those who oppose free thought and the questioning of authority. The dead can still be symbols of what the oppressor wishes to destroy–potent symbols. Alan Turing is a potent symbol, as is Oscar Wilde (actual murder may not be necessary to get someone out of the way). The dead can still cause problems, by their memory. There are many obvious historical examples. Stalin was wrong.