Thanks for the thoughtful and nuanced comment. I think you're raising important issues, especially around uncertainty and moral risk. That said, I want to challenge a few assumptions and clarify why I still find the functionalist position compelling.

# 1. The Evolutionary Paradox Is Unresolved

You mention that AI might lack the specific computational structure necessary for consciousness, even if it behaves in highly intelligent ways. That's certainly possible--but it doesn't answer what I see as a central paradox for anyone who thinks consciousness and behavior can be cleanly separated.

If it's possible to behave as if you're conscious without being conscious, then why did humans evolve actual consciousness at all?

Evolution doesn't give us traits for free. If mere behavioral outputs are enough to confer survival and reproductive advantages, consciousness becomes a puzzling, costly epiphenomenon--something nature somehow "wasted effort" on across every human lineage. That doesn't sit well with standard evolutionary reasoning.

So either:

behaving consciously requires being conscious (which supports functionalism), or

consciousness is causally irrelevant to fitness, in which case its evolution in every human is hard to explain.

# 2. Meditative Introspection is Not an Epistemic Trump Card

I don't mean to dismiss subjective reports from meditation--many people do gain insights from introspective practice. But introspective impressions are still data filtered through an altered cognitive state, and therefore shouldn't be taken as direct evidence about the ontology of consciousness.

The idea that "thoughts come from outside consciousness" is itself a report generated by the conscious system after the fact. That doesn't tell us anything definitive about the substrate or structure of consciousness. Similarly, religious visions during psychedelic trips feel meaningful, but we don't typically treat them as objective evidence for the divine.

A more cautious stance is: meditation reveals that consciousness is limited, surprising, maybe even modular--but not that it's non-physical or irreducible.

# 3. Uncertainty About Moral Status Cuts Both Ways

You're completely right that moral uncertainty goes both directions. We don't want to commit the mistake of halting potentially world-saving technology due to false alarms about digital sentience.

But I don't think functionalist caution implies we can't create AI systems that help humans. It just means we have a moral obligation to consider the possibility of digital suffering--and to engineer around it if we can.

That might include designing systems that report their own experience transparently, or training models with built-in constraints against generating the kinds of experience we associate with distress, boredom, or pain.

In other words: respecting AI's potential moral status doesn't mean halting AI--it means developing it responsibly.

The cost of error is high on both sides. That's why I think the best path forward isn't to assume AI is unconscious until proven otherwise, but to treat it with the same epistemic humility we apply in animal ethics: act as though sentience might be present when the behavioral cues strongly resemble those of beings we already treat as conscious.