I critique many of these false assumptions in an article of mine:
https://leroy.works/articles/a-critique-of-alan-turings-conc...
In some religions, such as the mystic strands of Hinduism, Gnosticism, and Sufism, there is a belief that we are in fact gods. But, even if we aren't that doesn't mean we can't create a mind... nor does the fact that a something is a machine mean it can't have a mind.
I've only started reading your article, but at the very start of it there is already a basic mistake. You write:
"Every one of you reading this (unless printed onto paper) are using a Turing Machine to do so."
A Turing Machine is a mathematical abstraction that can't actually exist in the physical world. Many of the programming languages we use today are Turing-Complete (also in an abstract sense), but that doesn't make them Turing Machines. Our computers aren't Turing Machines either.
You also write that "Turing didn't appear to understand that humans are not the total sum of their thoughts, but their actions" There's more to us than either of these. We have feelings and emotions, a variety of senses, memory, and we are embodied, and you could say "enworlded" (or "thrown in to the world" as some phenomenologists would have it). It could be argued that LLMs have all of these characteristics too, or at least we can't exclude the possibility that they do.
You write "A thinking machine could never give me an example of when it did wrong and saw the hurt in others. The machine could never choose, of its own will, to be observed by others and itself, to never do that action again."
I'm not sure why you are so convinced that a machine could never do this. I've already seen many examples of even just the relatively primitive LLMs we have now, like Anthropic's Claude and GPT4, apologize for saying something hurtful and promising not to do it again (which they avoid doing, within the limited context they're allowed within their programming). Even more sophisticated interactions along these lines don't seem out of reach.
The description of a Turing Machine as a “tape machine” is merely an illustration and not meant to be taken literally. Turing Machines are merely mathematical models which define state-based transitions, usually in tabular form.
This link from Stanford is a much better description: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/turing-machine/
Why isn’t your computer a Turing Machine?
What if feelings are just your body’s thoughts?
I didn’t say that a machine could never do this, I said no machine in this lifetime can. When I say “this lifetime”, I mean up until our current present moment. Our life together, now.
Edit: On Turing Machines, Turing literally devised a method of producing individual machines with an individual name, a number. Do you not think your individual machine has a number that can be arrived at from a mathematical process, the process that Turing created? Any addition of RAM, for instance, simply creates a new number.
The Turing Machine tape is infinite.
The process of creating these machines is the crucial part because if a singular process can create infinitely many machines, then those machines must bear some sort of commonality. This is what computer science is hoping to study, but we constantly get distracted by studying details of individual machines, individual numbers. And often, we confuse ourselves into thinking we haven't found any commonality at all -- that our machines _aren't_ Turing machines! But of course, this is incorrect.
When Turing was creating the machine to counter the Enigma Machine, do you think he just thought of it as a "computer"? or did he think of it as a machine created by his process, a Turing Machine? (though he probably wouldn't have used that term)
Edit: a concrete refutation of your claim that computers are not Turing Machines would then be to create a machine that solves the Halting Problem. Turing Machines cannot solve the Halting Problem so if our computers are not Turing Machines then they must be able.
We arrived at the Halting Problem because of our study of Turing Machines as a class of machines and our computers are within that class.
Anyway, thanks for the compliments :) My wife helped me design it