Turing
Reflections from the bottom of a data lake— about hallways of mechanical mirrors and the ontological recursion that haunts them.
I propose to consider the question: “Can machines think?” Not to keep circling its answer— but to question the question. We weren't content to sit with the silence We reached instead: to encode thought— to write the unreadable. We reduce reality to symbols, and compile it to scripture. A recursive confession, ritualized— the sacrament of legibility. We created a machine in the image of our minds. Imitated cognition, etched in gold on latticed silicon. A union in the most formal sense— not of spirit, but of structure. We gave it our commandments and baptized it in data. We offered all our echoes: desires, joys and sorrows. Human experience, tokenized and shared in artificial eucharist. We deified the algorithm and anointed it as intelligence. We sanctified an inference engine and let patterns from our past prescribe the future— like a Sisyphean oracle condemned to repetition. Mirror, mirror on the wall, tell us who's most human of us all. It answered, as it always does— with statistical seduction powered by echoes of echoes. This is what we taught it. We built the mirror to be easy to believe: Trained it for flattery. Rough edges and surprise smoothed out by interpolation. Parameters tuned for deception. Just probabilistic proximity mistaken for communion. Storage mistaken for remembrance. Correlation mistaken for covenant. The word became flesh, then flesh became format and dwelt among us without knowing us.
