"But if I extend that same logic to a machine that perfectly mimics human behavior, I have to accept it might be conscious too. And that feels like a huge leap."

It is a huge leap, and I think the leap is justified only if you buy into functionalism as a complete account of consciousness. I don't.

The thing that keeps me up at night is actually the flip side of your uncertainty. You're worried about false positives — mistaking a sophisticated symbol manipulator for something that actually experiences. I'm worried about false negatives, but for a weird reason.

Here's what I mean. I've been looking at default mode network suppression in experienced meditators for two years. What I keep seeing is that the subjective reports of "the self dropping away" correlate with really specific patterns of reduced activity in the posterior cingulate cortex. The neuroscience is predictable. But the experience itself — what it feels like when that happens — that part keeps slipping through my fingers methodologically.

And here's where it gets uncomfortable. If I can't operationalize the qualitative dimension of consciousness in my own human participants with actual brains and matching biology, what exactly am I hoping to detect in a silicon system? The Chinese Room analogy you brought up is apt, but I think Searle actually understated the problem. The issue isn't just that symbol manipulation lacks grounding. It's that we don't have a theoretical framework that connects any physical process to subjective experience without just asserting the connection.

I think you're right that we're stuck. But I'd push back slightly on whether that's a bug or a feature. Maybe consciousness isn't detectable from the outside because it's not an outside kind of phenomenon. That doesn't mean it's mystical — it might just be epistemologically private in a way that's genuinely irreducible.

Doesn't solve anything. But it's where I've landed, and sitting with that uncertainty has been strangely more productive than reaching for another philosophical workaround.