interesting idea around the immeasurability of consciousness. I wonder if Sartre's phenomenology can be applied to this problem. His thesis is that we can prove the existence of consciousness by deduction rather than measurement: since the existence of a subject is necessary to perceive the bodily sensations, there must be a consciousness ('For-itself') independent of the body it is attached to ('In-itself').
Consciousness is thus defined by the capacity of being a perceiving 'subject'. He uses this idea to argue against solipsism. Since we are intuitively aware of the fact that we are an object in another person's gaze, with them being the subject and us the object, we implicitly believe that the existence of a consciousness separate from our own.
So while it is impossible to know whether an AI is conscious, just as it is impossible to know whether another human being is conscious, we could at least claim that we believe that an AI is conscious the moment that we feel self-conscious in its presence.
