Schweizer, Paul

The paper examines the possibility of a Turing test designed to answer the question of whether a computational artefact is a genuine subject of conscious experience. Even given the severe epistemological difficulties surrounding the 'other minds problem' in philosophy, we nonetheless generally believe that other human beings are conscious. Hence Turing attempts to defend his original test (2T) in terms of operational parity with the evidence at our disposal in the case of attributing understanding and consciousness to other humans. Following this same line of reasoning, I argue that the conversation-based 2T is far too weak, and we must scale up to the full linguistic and robotic standards of the Total Turing Test (3T).Within this framework, I deploy Block's distinction between Phenomenal-consciousness and Access-consciousness to argue that passing the 3T could at most provide a sufficient condition for concluding that the robot enjoys the latter but not the former. However, I then propose a variation on the 3T, adopting Dennett's method of 'heterophenomenology', to rigorously probe the robot's purported 'inner' qualitative experiences. If the robot could pass such a prolonged and intensive Qualia 3T (Q3T), then the purely behavioural evidence would seem to attain genuine parity with the human case. Although success at the Q3T would not supply definitive proof that the robot was genuinely a subject of Phenomenal-consciousness, given that the external evidence is now equivalent with the human case, apparently the only grounds for denying qualia would be appeal to difference of internal structure, either physical-physiological or functional-computational. In turn, both of these avenues are briefly examined

Could There be a Turing Test for Qualia?

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