I had to read the original paper in the first week of college, so my knowledge may be a little rusty, but wasn't the paper titled: Computing Machinery and
Intelligence?
I'm sure the question was asked: Can machines think? But passing the Turing Test doesn't answer this question. It answers a different question: What will happen when a machine takes the part of A in this game? Will the interrogator decide wrongly as often when the game is played like this as he does when the game is played between a man and a woman?
Its up to you if you take an affirmative answer to those questions to also answer the question it replaces: "Can machines think?" The imitation game does not aim to proof anything to this point. It aims to support its replacement questions, which we have to take at face value: that imitation is just as good (for all sense and purposes) as the real thing.
Also, you write:
>And how will we know that Watson actually feels fear? The answer to this type of conundrum is simple and well-known: a Turing test.
If I make a chatscript that tricks you into thinking it was a person feeling fear, by your own logic, you would deem that chatscript to be thinking and actually capable of intelligent conversation, even if you were told afterward it was just some lines of code, feigning you with a (if input, output: yes), it still passed the test, so your answer is: those binary bits must feel fear (or you agree that you apply the Turing Test where it makes no sense).
What entities are really feeling and how to communicate this, has no simple known answer. There have been century-old debates about Qualia. The answer certainly isn't an imitation game, if you insist it is, you are equating feigning with truly possessing. (Or you are suggesting I am a P-zombie and I take offense to that!)