The Turing Test

What is it to think like a human? Presumably the Turing test would only work if it could answer that question and if it could then be shown that the computer not only understands what that thinking process is but that it can also replicate it.

How do you know, for example, that this post hasn't been automatically generated by a computer programme ("I wish it was", I hear some of you say).  

But the actual test seems to be slightly different and therefore altogether bizarre. A(man) and B (woman) behind a screen. C (the interrogator) is on the other side of the screen. A must convince C he is a woman. C "wins" if he/she can tell if A is in fact a man. In stage two of the game, A is replaced by a  computer/machine that must now convince C that it is a woman. If C is more successful in stage one than in stage two then the computer hasn't passed the test. 

I think that's it. But wow! So much to unravel here.

Is thinking just a logical set of procedures? The whole set-up is weird (not just because it is phrased as a competition). Is C a man or a woman? Do contexts, bodies and histories count in explaining how we think? Would A have the same chances of convincing C-woman that he's a woman as he would have of convincing C-man? What kind of interaction has A had with women in the past that might make him successful? He might, a la Adam Smith, be able to sympathetically imagine what a woman undergoes in childbirth but would he really be able to describe it? 

'Description' and understanding and sympathy here is surely beyond the application of formal rules and facts. 

Would C-man or C-woman have a better chance of guessing? Would their questions be different? What is the picture here? The isolated, bodiless notion of the mechanical or computational mind. "The brain is a computer".

The computer is supposed to understand humour, I suppose. But how would it do that if it's culturally specific? 

Who is B, this great, passive and innocent truth-teller? Why can't she win anything? If she could, might not she try and distinguish her answers from A's -assuming she knows them- to win the game?