Comment by bonoboTP

> It doesn't matter what the property is or what it is called. Such tests might even help us see what those properties are.

This is a very good point and somewhat novel to me in its explicitness.

There's no reason to think that we already have the concepts and terminology to point out the gaps between the current state and human-level intelligence and beyond. It's incredibly naive to think we have armchair-generated already those concepts by pure self-reflection and philosophizing. This is obvious in fields like physics. Experiments were necessary to even come up with the basic concepts of electromagnetism or relativity or quantum mechanics.

I think the reason is that pure philosophizing is still more prestigious than getting down in the weeds and dirt and doing limited-scope well-defined experiments on concrete things. So people feel smart by wielding poorly defined concepts like "understanding" or "reasoning" or "thinking", contrasting it with "mere pattern matching", a bit like the stalemate that philosophy as a field often hits, as opposed to the more pragmatic approach in the sciences, where empirical contact with reality allows more consensus and clarity without getting caught up in mere semantics.