Your unusual argument recalls a discussion I once had with members of the Go club at my alma mater, nearly 10 years ago. On the question of whether Go would ever be mastered by a computer, one asserted that the game needed to be understood at a spiritual level - not simply as a computational problem - and that’s why computers would never reach the level of humans. The game was simply too sublime and complex, came the claim.
At the time this might have seemed reasonable - after all, Go software struggled mightily for years to achieve even beginner levels of play, and seemed incapable of mastering the intricacies of high-level play.
Well, we know now in retrospect that spirit was unnecessary to play Go. We know now that it was, in fact, a computational problem. There’s really no reason to expect that “spirit” is necessary to perform the tasks of language or cognition - tasks which are demonstrably executed by impulses of chemicals and electricity pulsing through the brain.
I know spiritual reality is sometimes invoked in discussions about things we haven't yet mastered or understood in science and engineering (one might even accuse me of doing that). But your story is kind of a straw man example, because even 50 years ago we knew of algorithms that could theoretically render Go a solved game, given enough computing resources. You could just as easily say modern cryptography is spiritual in its essence, which would be nonsensical.
Emulating a human mind with computers is an entirely different class of problem. We don't even have a mathematically rigorous definition of what constitutes a mind, much less know of any algorithm that could implement or solve it, even with any given supply of computing resources.
But we do know there must be algorithms capable of solving the Turing test, since there are only finite questions you could ask and only finite answers you could get back (just like how we know Go is solvable). Whether or not that's equivalent to emulating the human mind is unknown, but what's the difference in practice? Anything that could solve the Turing test is necessarily equally as powerful as humans at the use of language, which was the original problem being addressed in your post.
> But we do know there must be algorithms capable of solving the Turing test, since there are only finite questions you could ask and only finite answers you could get back
Only if the algorithm itself encodes the entirety of those finite questions and answers. You might as well say that pi (or any irrational number) is intelligent, since every sentence ever spoken by any human is encoded therein somewhere.
The problem is that intelligently selecting the index of pi to use at a given time (or writing the algorithm that knows what to say in advance) is an act that itself requires a human mind's intelligence. You're only moving the problem one step back. You might as well reverse engineer every possible AES-128 output for every possible key and input (up to a certain length) and declare the cipher broken. It might be possible given infinite computing resources, but doing so wouldn't offer any insight.
Having insight is different than solving the problem. For example, developing AlphaGo didn't give us any insight into how to play Go (besides through watching it play). Similarly, it might be the case that developing a software which passes the Turing test gives us no insight into the nature of language. Nonetheless the problem would still be solved.
> You might as well reverse engineer every possible AES-128 output for every possible key and input (up to a certain length) and declare the cipher broken.
But we don't say that AES is impossible to crack. We only say that it's infeasible to crack. Just like with Go, where we had algorithms to solve it even 50 years ago, but it was just infeasible at that time. If what you are saying is that solving the Turing test is possible, but infeasible, then that is a more agreeable position to me. Regardless, I don't see how you can say that the Turing test is "spiritual in nature" while AES isn't.
At the time this might have seemed reasonable - after all, Go software struggled mightily for years to achieve even beginner levels of play, and seemed incapable of mastering the intricacies of high-level play.
Well, we know now in retrospect that spirit was unnecessary to play Go. We know now that it was, in fact, a computational problem. There’s really no reason to expect that “spirit” is necessary to perform the tasks of language or cognition - tasks which are demonstrably executed by impulses of chemicals and electricity pulsing through the brain.