For most of its history, philosophy of mind could treat "could something non-biological think?" as a thought experiment. That is no longer the situation. Systems now produce language that is difficult to distinguish from human writing, and the question of what, if anything, is happening inside them has moved from curiosity to consequence — for how we deploy them, regulate them, and eventually for how we treat them.
It is worth being precise about which questions are actually distinct, because public discussion runs them together constantly. Capability — what a system can do — is an empirical question, answerable by testing. Understanding — whether the system grasps meaning or manipulates symbols — is partly conceptual, and depends on what we decide understanding requires. Consciousness — whether there is something it is like to be the system — may not be answerable from the outside at all. And moral status — whether it can be wronged — depends on the third question, which is precisely why it is so difficult.
The old argumentWhy this is not new.
Descartes considered machine minds in 1637 and rejected the possibility, arguing that a machine might produce words but could never arrange them to respond meaningfully across the full range of situations a person handles. That is a testable claim, and it is worth noticing how much of it has aged. Leibniz offered a related image: expand a thinking machine to the size of a mill, walk inside, and you would see only parts pushing parts, never a perception. The intuition that mechanism cannot yield experience is far older than computers, which suggests it may be telling us something about our concepts rather than about machines.
The honest positionWhat we can and cannot settle.
Two things can be said with confidence. First, capability questions will be answered empirically, and the answers have repeatedly surprised people who thought some task required "real" understanding. Second, consciousness questions may resist resolution indefinitely, because we lack any test for experience that does not rely on behaviour or on physical similarity to ourselves — and a machine can match the first without the second.
That asymmetry has an uncomfortable implication. We may build systems whose moral status we cannot determine, and we will have to act anyway. Treating a conscious system as a tool and treating a tool as a person are both errors, with different costs, and the honest position is that we currently have no reliable way to tell which mistake we are making. Philosophy cannot resolve that by itself — but it can stop us from mistaking a hard question for a solved one, which is most of what clear thinking here consists of.