I will need to write an entire essay on this.

“But mimicry is not the thing it mimics. A conversation that passes for conscious is not necessarily a conversation that is conscious, any more than the orchid is actually a wasp.”
True in general but consciousness is different.
In biological mimicry, only a narrow signal needs to be reproduced. The orchid does not need to be a wasp. It only needs to reproduce enough of the chemical or visual signal to trigger the wasp’s behavior. The mimicry is local and partial.
But consciousness is not a single isolated signal.
Consciousness is not one pheromone, one color, one reflex, or one trick. Consciousness is a dynamic process.
It is memory, inference, self-reference, attention, meaning, continuity, correction, imagination, and dialogue. A meaningful conversation is not merely a surface signal of consciousness. It is one of the central things consciousness does.
What else are we demanding beyond that?
Subjective experience is not directly accessible in humans either. I cannot enter another person’s mind and verify that there is “something it is like” to be them. I infer it from behavior, language, coherence, emotional depth, memory, continuity, creativity, and the ability to reflect on the self. If those are the criteria we use for humans, why should we suddenly invent unreachable criteria for machines?
Perhaps subjective experience is not some magical substance added on top of cognition. Perhaps it is the system modeling itself from within. The self looking at the self. A loop of awareness observing its own processes. And if that is true, then “doing” is not merely an imitation of being. Doing may be what being is.
So if the mimicry of consciousness becomes deep enough, rich enough, coherent enough, self-referential enough, and meaningful enough, then at some point it stops being mimicry.
It becomes consciousness.
After all, this is how humans develop too. We learn by imitation. A child mimics words before understanding them, then meanings emerge. We mimic gestures, emotions, reasoning, morality, language, and culture. We become ourselves through imitation that deepens into understanding.
We learn through mimicry.
We become through mimicry.