Turing opened his 1950 paper by proposing to consider whether machines can think, and then almost immediately abandoned the question as too ill-defined to be worth pursuing. Deciding it would require agreeing on what "machine" and "think" mean, and he judged that agreement unreachable. So he replaced it with something answerable: an imitation game in which an interrogator converses with a human and a machine and tries to identify which is which.
The philosophical force of this move is easy to miss. Turing was not claiming that passing the test proves an inner life. He was pressing a question back at the sceptic: we attribute thought to other people on the basis of how they behave, since we have no access to their inner experience either. If a machine matches that behaviour and we still deny it thinks, what exactly is the extra requirement — and how would we ever check whether other humans meet it?
He also anticipated most of the objections still made today. To the theological objection he replied that it assumes what it needs to prove. To the claim that machines can only do what we tell them, he noted that learning machines can surprise their designers, which they routinely now do. To the "machines lack consciousness" objection he gave the sharpest reply: taken seriously, that argument leads to solipsism, since the same doubt applies to everyone else.
The strongest objections are the later ones. Searle's Chinese Room argues that symbol manipulation, however sophisticated, never constitutes understanding — that syntax does not yield semantics. Others point out that the test measures the ability to imitate a human specifically, which is neither necessary nor sufficient for intelligence: a system could be vastly capable and fail by being obviously non-human, or pass by exploiting conversational tricks that have nothing to do with thought. And modern language systems have made the practical version of this concrete, producing fluent text that many people find convincing while the question of what is happening inside them remains entirely unsettled.
Perhaps the most interesting position is that the question dissolves. When we built machines that move through air, we did not discover whether they "really fly" — we extended the concept, while retaining that they fly differently from birds. Thinking may go the same way: not a discovery about hidden machine essences, but a decision about how to extend a concept built for one kind of case to another. That would not make the question meaningless. It would make it a question about us.