If you can implement passes_turing_test() in a way that is testable without human intervention... that would be a pretty great advance. I'm pretty sure we're not anywhere near there.

The fundamental problem, as I understand it, is that none of us really understand what consciousness is - we all "know it when we see it" - which is a test that is not so amenable to automation. Perhaps if we had enough examples of different kinds of consciousness, we could set up a ML process :)

With regards to what consciousness is, Peter Watts opened an interesting rabbit hole that I have yet to dive into. His discussion about his own real-world inquiries into consciousness is appended at the end of his fiction work "Blindsight" [1]. Search for the heading "Sentience/Intelligence", and read the first couple paragraphs there.

Watts suspects from his readings that sentience makes up the majority of our day-to-day physical and sensorium activities and sapience (consciousness) is a very thin self-aware layer on top of that. If his sources that he's reading are correct, then we can go a long way implementing practical and profitable applications with "just" ML, but with less focus on trying to reach AGI. There are more radical suggestions within the decidedly philosophical side of the cognitive science community that seem to wonder if consciousness isn't simply a very sophisticated, highly complex ML'ish pattern-matching illusion, and we're all reductively representable as deterministic entities somehow.

All this postulating is too far away from the testable engineering/tinkering/science'ing I prefer to inform myself about, so I'm not quite sure what to make of it, other than to observe that ML hasn't made much of a dent in the sentience side, as we're nowhere near a general-purpose robot that cleans floors, does the laundry, and simultaneously avoids squishing the house cat, none of which requires sapience.

[1] http://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm

"none of us really understand what consciousness is - we all "know it when we see it""

I don't think that's as solid an assumption as your comment makes it sound. We all know magic when we see it, yet it doesn't exist. Many of us recognise when something "feels pain" even if it's a cuddly toy, or recognise "evil presence in the room" when it's gas poisoning or sleep paralysis or biped-shaped-shadows and low frequency sound.

Many of us think we see a level of intelligence where there is none, in perception of God or Evolution "designing" creatures or "coming up with clever solutions", and many refuse to recognise some level of intelligence in humans in cases where they use good reasoning but get the wrong answer, or do something dumb from using the wrong reasoning, and we have ethical/medical arguments about whether people in comas and similar locked-in syndromes are conscious and aware or not, and whether any plants are.

We have continual newspaper headlines along the lines of "scientists recognise {Dolphins, Elephants, $animal} is more intelligent than previously thought" - if we simply "know it when we see it", it should be pretty clear what creatures are conscious and which aren't.

Certainly we can recognise people-like-us as conscious, but to get "enough examples of different kinds of consciousness" we'd have to be able to know it when we see it, and I'm not sure we do.

Haha. Your position, then, is that recognising consciousness is so hard that we don't even know it when we see it?.

That's fair, and in some ways I agree. But I think a certain amount of that is implicit in "I know it when I see it." The phrase implies that there may be significant divergence of opinion.

Some relevant papers:

An Approximation of the Universal Intelligence Measure

https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-642-44958-1_...

Measuring universal intelligence: Towards an anytime intelligence test

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S000437021...

I'd probably do it with a writing sample. Say, Macbeth. Just execute randomly generated bytes until they write Macbeth on their own. Of course it could pass on a 100 monkey type fluke, so after it passes then you submit it to a traditional Turing test.

Given sufficient computing resources, this should yield strong AI in just a few minutes.

You could, of course, do machine checks of some subset of "can generate syntactically correct English" -and that would cut out a whole lot more bad programs than 'can you write MacBeth.'

but- even when you pass that test, you will have a nearly infinite number of marcov-chain generators and similar programs to sort through.

My point is that if you want to solve a program by generating random code, you need machine-executable fitness test.

We don't have a machine-executable test for consciousness. The Turing test relies on the intuition of humans, and we have a very finite supply of that.

> even when you pass that test, you will have a nearly infinite number of marcov-chain generators and similar programs to sort through

Not really relevant to your point, but Markov chain generators aren't able to generate syntactically correct English.

(Or, they are able to generate it, but they aren't able to stop themselves from generating syntactically invalid English, and almost all of their output will in fact be invalid.)

I think writing Macbeth isn't a good indicator of anything except being Shakespeare. Asking it a few questions about some general concepts like logic, math, and patterns(relationships in Macbeth maybe?) would probably yield results that are much more likely to pass the test.

I disagree on all counts. The first program that would be generated by such a procedure would very likely be the constant program that happens to always respond with the correct questions to your test. It depends how you randomly generate code, of course, but I doubt the complexity of a "general AI program" would ever be smaller than the complexity of the constant program which by luck returns the correct answer to your test.

Generate the Math tests then? That prevents constants.

Generating macbeth is a prompt most people here couldn’t pass, myself included...

you can still use generating Macbeth as a good indicator, just by providing some inputs and constraints.

Input is a Macbeth outline/play summary (e.g. https://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/m/macbeth/play-summar... ) Contraints are "in the style of : KingLear and Othello"

and compare the produced text to Macbeth