This problem sounds awfully similar to the halting problem to me. If we can't tell whether a Turing machine will eventually terminate without actually running it, how could we ever tell if a Turing machine will experience consciousness without running it?

Has anyone attempted to prove the statement "Consciousness of a Turing machine is undecideable"? The proof (if it's true) might look a lot like the proof that the halting problem is undecideable. Sadly, I don't quite understand how that proof works either, so I can't use it as a basis for the consciousness problem. It just seems that figuring out if a Turing machine is conscious, or will ever achieve consciousness before halting, is much harder than figuring out if it halts.