Meeting People and Turing Test

Meeting people is highly complex, or at least can seem so, especially if you do not possess the same language skills as them. While meeting is a lot about the unsaid, about looks and chemistry, there is a language skill also. We may look great, have the right clothes, stand the correct way, behave cool yet find ourselves unable to think of the right things to say, and worse have the right wit for the group: humour being a very important part of language. It all makes for quite a wall that separates people, when all people want to do really is trust and love one another.

Turing Test is a similar problem, but the wall is very refined, just language. Suppose we have a morse-code box and must communicate with just dots and dashes. Suppose we are stranded on a desert island after our ship has sunk with no survivors but us. Hope is lost of ever seeing anyone again, but we keep sounding out ...---... into the empty radio space around. And then we get a signal back perhaps just --- -.- (OK). And we SOS again and get OK back. We don't know if it is machine but we are in communication with something, and that something is enough. Its the most reduced version of meeting someone and speaking to them, with all the social complexities removed simply the bare acknowledgement that each of you exist. Turing asked how complex does the signal need to be to prove that the responder is a human (even if that human looks like a robot). Human's were the best option. If humans think the responder is a human, then it is. But perhaps not everyone agrees and some humans might think the responder human, and some not. I don't know how democratic the Turing Test is.

But there is another way to experience other people, and that is passively. Not in a recording but in listening or sensing another person in real time. Without being the object of a communication, and without all the complications that come from our half of the communication, it is very rewarding to simply sense another person. Voyeurism it could be called. Not secretively, and not with out regard for the other, but simply appreciate their existence in its pure form without the worries of what part we play in the communication. Perhaps hearing someone walking down the road late at night outside our window. It is a very rewarding experience, to peacefully appreciate their existence and wish them well.

There is a slight more personalised version of this where we believe that someone distant is thinking of us. Perhaps when we receive a letter or email. While they are not present we have proof that they were in existence, and they acknowledge our own existence. Yet still without the immediately layers of social activity that a face to face entails. This also is a very rewarding experience, a pure meeting of people, without superficial coatings. And similar to this is just believing that someone is thinking of us, even without proof - that is an appreciation of another's existence, and in turn support for our own existence and self.

But of course the real experience is the full dynamic interaction of people face to face. Perhaps with good friends it is a very peaceful and joyful event. Perhaps with strangers it is a very exciting event. Perhaps also as said above it is fraught with many concerns. But embedded in these colourful and complex meetings are the simple elements mentioned of appreciating each other's existence that we see on the desert island or with the well wishing voyeur or with the essence of the Turning Test.