I stopped posting on the Usenet years ago (too many nuts). One can argue about the validity of the Turing Test. The real issue is not the Turing Test but this slippery word "intelligence". The word is too broad and has too many shades of meaning. For example: Is a cat intelligent? I would answer "Yes", a cat has a scaled down form of human intelligence with much of its behavior hard wired as instinct. Is a sea slug intelligent? I would answer "No", its nervous system is too primitive to be intelligent. Somewhere between a cat and a sea slug, there is a transition from being intelligent to non-intelligent. How's that transition defined? Beats me!

Finally this whole business of "intelligence" has been muddled by religion. The religious would argue that true intelligence requires a "soul". They would argue that a cat does not have a soul and therefore can not be intelligent. I would counter-argue that the soul is a fantasy and that no one has a soul including the religious. At this point the discussion flies off on a tangent with people shouting verbal abuse back and forth.

Gary