A common argumentative move in contemporary philosophy of mind holds that because an artificial system's behavior might reflect mere pattern-matching rather than genuine cognition, observers cannot legitimately attribute consciousness to such systems on the basis of behavioral evidence alone. This paper argues that this move, when examined carefully, collapses into one of two untenable positions: either global epistemic skepticism (including denial of one's own self-awareness and the minds of other humans), or inconsistent reasoning that selectively privileges biological substrate without principled ground.
Corey Robichaud (Mon,) studied this question.