AI Consciousness: A Centrist Manifesto

Names the impossible middle position. Challenge One: millions misattributing consciousness to chatbots. Challenge Two: genuinely alien consciousness might emerge but our tools are too immature to confirm. The gaming problem is the key concept: LLMs are 'incentivized and enabled to game our criteria whether conscious or not' — behavioral evidence loses its positive evidential value. The Janus problem: the same architectural evidence points toward consciousness for functionalists and away from it for biological naturalists. Two-level deadlock. Birch's escape route: long-term comparative animal studies to winnow biological naturalist hypotheses. The paper the garden's dual uncertainty was waiting for.