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Comment by mikkupikku | Hacker News Reader

Agreed. We should be asking what the machines measurably can or can't do. If it can't be measured, then it doesn't matter from an engineering standpoint. Does it have a soul? Can't measure it, so it doesn't matter.

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That's a bit too pessimistic. Often times you can productively find some measurable proxy for the thing you care about but can't measure. Turing's test is a famous example, of that.

Sometimes you only have a one-sided proxy. Eg I can't tell you whether Claude has a soul, but I'm fairly sure my dishwasher ain't.

> Turing's test is a famous example

Ironically, the Turing test is the OG functionalist approach. The GP's comment basically sums up with the Turing test was designed for.

Yes, but I interpret Turing's paper not as saying "souls don't matter", but as "here's a good proxy that we can actually measure".

(I don't know what Turing's opinion on souls is, and it doesn't matter for that paper!)

I think it's generally accepted that Turing thinks soul doesn't matter when we try to determine whether things have intelligence/ability to think.

When push came to shove, it turns out nobody really cared about the Turing test and immediately found excuses to discount it as soon as machines blew through that goalpost. It's fundamentally theological, but the thing is, it doesn't matter. It has no impact on what the machines can demonstrably do.

Claude has neither a soul nor a warbleflupper.

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