What the AI consciousness argument has exposed is not a factual disagreement but a prior commitment about what kind of question 'Is AI conscious?' actually is. The biological-substrate position treats it as empirically closed: evolution produced consciousness, computation cannot reproduce the substrate, therefore the answer is no before any measurement is taken . The hard-problem position treats it as permanently open: since behavioral evidence is necessary but not sufficient for mind-attribution in any entity, , no accumulation of behavioral data can settle the question either way.…