The Imitation Fallacy: Why Behavioral Equivalence Cannot Verify Artificial Consciousness
International Conference on Cognitive Machine Intelligence November 12, 2025 A. Gauba
Modern language models and multimodal agents routinely pass behavioral benchmarks that once served as proxies for ‘thinking.’ Popular discourse increasingly treats these performances as evidence of consciousness. We argue that this inference commits the Imitation Fallacy: confusing behavioral equivalence with experiential equivalence. Building on the Subjectivity Barrier, the epistemic fact...