Love that story, thanks! Ok, now a serious response. You come administer a Turing Test (in sign language) to a puppet which I'm controlling with some strings which you can't see. Using puppetry, I help the puppet pass the test. Is the puppet conscious?
Is your hand conscious? Are you your hand? Am I reasonable to assume that your hand typed your comment? So how can I be sure that you are conscious and not just your hands and mouth?
I can, because those are merely the mechanisms you use to communicate. If you choose to communicate via puppet, that's still you communicating, and the puppet is not conscious. Now, if you can make a puppet that passes the test, and I mean really passes, like the example above, where there can be questions and meta questions, and no running from some topics, without you having to interfere at all during the tests, then you might have a conscious puppet after all.
