Searle’s rebuttal is actually excellent philosophy. But otherwise I agree. Searle was (just learned he passed away last year) a philosopher by trade, but Turing was a mathematician and Schrödinger was a theoretical physicist. So it is to be expected that a mathematician and a physicist might produce sub-par philosophy.

Turing’s point in his 1950 paper was actually to provide a substitute to the question of whether machines could think. If a machine can win the imitation game, he argued, is a better question to ask rather then “can a machine think”. Searle showed that this is in fact this criteria was not a good one. But by 1980 philosophy of mind had advanced significantly, partially thanks to Turing’s contributions, particularly via cognitive science, but in the 1980s we also had neuropsychology, which kind of revolutionized this subfield of philosophy.

I think philosophy is actually rather important when formulating questions like these, and even more so when evaluating the quality of the answers. That said, I am not the biggest fan of the state of mainstream philosophy in the 1940s. I kind of have a beef with logical positivism, and honestly believe that even Turing’s mediocre philosophy was on a much better track then what the biggest thinkers of the time were doing with their operational definition.