Turing test their cars, ascribe desire and intentions to natural forces (e.g., "nature abhors a vacuum"), and worship the sun as a human-like being with intelligence. If the Turing test is applied to religious objects, Shermer argues, then, that inanimate statues, rocks, and places have consistently passed the test throughout history. This human tendency towards anthropomorphism effectively lowers the bar for the Turing test, unless interrogators are specifically trained to avoid it. One interesting feature of the Turing test is the frequency of the confederate effect, when the confederate (tested) humans are misidentified by the interrogators as machines. It has been suggested
Turing test is not really a conscious being, but only a dummy or a machine, is that it fails to satisfy one of the empirical tests by which the presence or absence of consciousness is determined." (This suggestion is very similar to the Turing test, but is concerned with consciousness rather than intelligence. Moreover, it is not certain that Ayer's popular philosophical classic was familiar to Turing.) In other words, a thing is not conscious if it fails the consciousness test. Researchers in the United Kingdom had been exploring "machine intelligence" for up to ten years prior to the founding of the