Bill D:

I don't think "finding someone who cannot be stumped" is an evidentiary requirement worth a fart in a high wind. In fact the insistence on "repeatability in the face of intentional challenge" is the kind of test criteria drawn from working with material systems in material science. Life itself, whatever you choose to call it, and the consciousness it generates, does not actually work that way. As any teenager knows, its potentials can be ruined by invalidative remarks, if they are not proofed up against. If you create an anti-conscious environment in which to test consciousness, you are doing th equivalent of conducting basic physics tests in an antimatter room, or standing next to a black hole, or something similarly disruptive.

This doesn't mean testing cannot occur but it does mean that the WAY of testing has to be thought through with an understandingthe fundamentals which are different from the fundamentals of matter in its blind replicability. Asking consciousness to exhibit obdurate, blind replicability is like fucking for virginity...

A