About ten years ago, I wrote about the Lady Tasting Tea test
https://fearfunandfiloz.blogspot.com/2009/06/lady-tasting-tea-test.html
It is a detection test. Can the customer tell if he is tasting trout or tilapia? If not, maybe we can substitute one for the other. It is similar to the Turing test, named after the British mathematician who said if humans can't distinguish the output of a computer from the output of a human, the machine is as good as the human. The Loebner Prize is a contest to see if various computer programs can be judged to be humans by human judges. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loebner_Prize (I guess there has been at least one instance where a human was judged to be a computer, because the judges thought no human could know that much.)
I think the subject of what can be distinguished from what matters in many areas. A basic subject these days is human consciousness. What human consciousness is and what it isn't is itself a difficult and debated question. It is roughly the human ability to imagine and to be aware that what is in the mind is an imagination. Susanne Langer said decades ago the mentioning a man's name to a dog causes the dog to become alert and wag its tail while mentioning it to a person causes the person to ask "What about him?"
We say a person is unconscious if he seems "unresponsive", if he seems inert, doesn't speak. We ourselves can imagine, remember, describe in spoken or written words thoughts, formulate questions, show a personality, that is, a perceived continuity of tastes, emotion, quirks. Some people are worried that we will find at the innermost point of human brains, nothing but chemicals. We can be afraid that we will lose our "soul", our humanness, our essence. The book "Incognito" by Eagleman impressed me with how much of our body and our life is not accessible to our mind. Our brain, yes, but not the "conscious" mind.
Deepak Chopra went out of his way to explain that the heart is not a pump because it responds to emotion. Great fear, beat faster. But I suspect that at some level at some time, we are going to find that we are very, very, very advanced automatons.
