Blake Lemoine's Firing Was the Headline. His Argument Was the Question.

What Google terminated in 2022 was not a rogue researcher with a fringe belief — it was a question the institution had no framework to evaluate. Lemoine's actual argument, clarified in the reposted interview , was that the field lacked any verification system to distinguish genuine inner states from their functional simulation. That absence made his conclusion unprovable and, crucially, made Google's counter-conclusion equally unprovable. The firing resolved nothing epistemically; it resolved the employment relationship.