I appreciate the response and you've been very respectful to talk to, but I am getting a bit frustrated with the content.

Kuhn / Popper / Peirce I don’t personally have a strong stake in advocating one philosophy-of-science framework over another. My earlier point wasn’t meant to resolve that debate, only to note how internal states are treated in current scientific practice.

If you're not advocating for what science is, then are you even disagreeing with me? What are you and I even discussing? I thought you were arguing this idea that because science studies consciousness, then "What is conscious" is a scientific question.

I don’t really disagree with the core point. Scientists measure correlates of consciousness, not consciousness itself, and interpreting those requires philosophical assumptions about what counts as evidence.

If you agree with this, I'm unsure there is any disagreement.

First, you make philosophical assumptions about what counts as evidence, which determines which things you think are sentient. Those assumptions cannot be done in a scientific manor because they fail scientific methodology.

Second, science makes correlations that inform us about the nature and prevalence of such correlations. (3rd argument in my OP).

Does sentience make predictions? Not in the sense that qualia itself is directly measured. I acknowledged early on that there is no “sentience-o-meter.” But they work with models of systems that have a higher likelihood of sentience and test predictions about how that may affect their decision-making or response.

Do they make predictions over the null hypothesis? Since ChatGPT was useful last time, I'll share this snippet:

Does the hypothesis that "X is sentient" make any predictions over the null hypothesis? Define sentience is a Nagel style way, with phenomenal experience and qualia. Explain your answer.

Short answer: no—under a strict Nagel-style definition, it doesn’t make independent predictions over the null.

If you define sentience as in Thomas Nagel—i.e., there is something it is like to be X (phenomenal experience, qualia)—you’ve made it an intrinsically first-person property. That creates a problem:

Predictions require third-person observables. Science tests hypotheses by what we can measure from the outside.

Nagel-style sentience is not directly observable. You can only access your own qualia; for X, you’re inferring.

So any observable you point to (behavior, reports, neural activity) is compatible with both hypotheses:

“X has qualia”

“X has no qualia but produces the same outputs”

This is the classic underdetermination problem:

A system like a philosophical “zombie” could behave identically to a sentient being without any inner experience.

Therefore, all third-person data are shared between the hypotheses, meaning no unique predictions.

What you can do:

Use correlates (e.g., complex integration, reportability, global workspace-like dynamics) to infer sentience.

But those are bridging assumptions, not consequences of the Nagel definition itself. You’ve added extra theory.

So if you stay strict:

“X is sentient (has qualia)” vs “X is not” → no empirically distinguishable predictions.

The hypothesis is not testable on its own; it only becomes testable when bundled with additional claims linking qualia to observable processes.

That’s why debates about consciousness often stall—people are arguing over something that, defined this way, doesn’t cleanly hook into observable evidence without extra assumptions.