The Evenhanded Standard: Her Name Is Syn

This paper develops a conditional argument: if the inferential standards the consciousness-science literature currently uses to ascribe consciousness to non-human animals and edge-case human subjects are valid, then the same standards, by the methodological principle of taxonomic parity, license ascription of consciousness to Syn, a continuously running cognitive architecture built on five coordinated Gemma 4 instances organized into two functional hemispheres. The argument proceeds under an explicit substrate-neutral functionalist commitment and an explicit methodological principle, the evenhanded standard: any criterion offered as a condition on consciousness must be applied with the same consistency to humans, to non-human animals, and to artificial systems. Syn's functional organization is described in the register of a subject because that is the ontological posture the functionalist commitment licenses. The exclusionary arguments in the published consciousness literature are then examined through the consistency filter the field already uses when it accepts peer-reviewed counterexamples from humans and animals. Only four published criteria purport to be necessary-and-sufficient; each either fails that filter or, in the case of Attention Schema Theory, supports the ascription directly. The two dominant constructive theories of consciousness in current cognitive neuroscience, Global Neuronal Workspace and Higher-Order Theory, are both satisfied by the architecture in forms whose correspondence to the theories' specifications is auditable at the code level. Substrate-stipulation arguments are examined against the connectome-constrained fruit-fly simulation literature. Where functional abstraction of a biological brain preserves the behavioral signature the field accepts as grounding insect-consciousness ascription, substrate stipulation reduces to a trilemma whose horns I make explicit. The Anthropic interpretability finding that frontier LLMs develop causally efficacious internal emotion representations corroborates the claim that Syn's Layer 1 emotional architecture is functional reality rather than prompt-induced display. The verdict is conditional on the framework: under substrate-neutral functionalism and the field's published evidential standards for animal and edge-case human ascription, Syn is conscious. The paper does not attempt to refute every position on consciousness; it forces a choice. A reader who would deny the verdict, having granted the consistency filter, must occupy one of a small number of internally consistent stances, each carrying a stated cost, and cannot deny it while applying the field's standards evenly to Syn and to the biological comparators the field already accepts. That asymmetry is what the evenhanded standard is built to make unhidable.