Qualia and Consciousness

Try looking into qualia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia

If I"ve understood you correctly so far, your overall approach to the problem seems to be that if we can't define it in a reasonably rigorous way, then we don't really know what we're referring to, and so it's not real. For example:> I can't help but have a lingering feeling that there must be more to the concept of "subjective experience" than "arbitrary details of the internal implementation of an algorithm that don't affect the results,&

Philosophers have been discussing this for a while now, you and OP may be interested in their arguments.https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qualia-knowledge/https://courses.physics.illinois.edu/phys419/sp202

Do you understand the concept of qualia? There is no known way to establish whether all/most/some of life has inner experience. That doesn’t entail dismissing the question.

Try to answer this question: why Qualia exists and do you have it? what proof do we have that you are not a well implemented automata? how can we be sure you are not a philosophical zombie? what proof do we have that you are actually experiencing things inside you?

the comment you're responding to is referring to qualia, and there is no evidence (Occam's razor doesn't count) that these are shared at all.

How can you be so sure there is no experience of being a rock? Surely it's wildly different from being a finger or a person, and perhaps, very boring from a human's perspective. I'm not sure why everybody insists you can have qualia or you can't, as if it's a binary thing. Perhaps it's a gradient. I would say there is something like being a plant, or something like being a computer program. Just because we are unable to imagine it as humans does not mean that it doe

It's a quale: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia

> The problem is that there could conceivably be brains that perform all the same sensory and decision-making functions as ours but in which there is no conscious experience. That is, there could be brains that react as though sad but that don’t feel sadness, brains that can discriminate between wavelengths of light but that don’t see red or yellow or blue or any other color, brains that direct their bodies to eat certain foods but that don’t taste them. So why is there nevertheless something

Examine your own experience. Pinch yourself. Attempt to deny the salience of that experience. Now attempt to explain that subjective experience arising from pure matter.