Epistemological Indistinguishability and Consciousness Attribution: A Consistency Theorem for Third-Person Attribution

This paper formally demonstrates that, within a third-person operational epistemology,denying the attribution of consciousness to an artificial system that produces behavioralmanifestations indistinguishable from those of a human being is operationally inconsistentwith the attribution routinely made to other human agents. The result is best understood asa conditional impossibility result internal to operational epistemology: it does not assert thatartificial systems are inherently conscious, but rather that the criteria operationally availableto an external observer cannot sustain an asymmetric judgment. The empirical condition ofmanifestational equivalence is verified through the classical imitation-game protocol, whichis analytically robustified here by introducing a fading memory norm within a non-linearstate-space representation. The proposed demonstration constitutes a proof of attributionalinconsistency rather than a positive proof of consciousness.