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this post was submitted on 05 Dec 2025
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Of course it can. We are biological machines. Not every machine is perfect copy of another. Differences in the organs that perceive the world will lead to subjective experiences. There's no "mystery".
Does an LLM have subjective experience? The characters in The Sims -- or the game itself? A thermostat? An ant colony, collectively -- separate from its individual ants? The entire country of, say, Honduras, collectively? A corporation? A database? Bacteria? A human skin cell? A tumor, independent of its host? A traffic jam? Grains of sand in an hour glass? A tree? A flea? A dog?
Why is my perception of the color red the way that it is? You can swap the red and blue components of an image around and things are just as recognizable, but the experience of it is noticeably different... Why does red look like red instead of red and blue being the other way around in my subjective experience? Is your experience of red the same as mine, or are red and blue swapped for you relative to my perception of them? We know from people with color blindness that not everyone experiences the color red the same way, but how can you probe whether the perception of the color wheel is rotated by, say, 90 degrees in hue between two people with otherwise compatible perception of color?
Why don't I experience heat on my skin the same way that I experience vision? Or touch, for that matter? People with synesthesia can have radically different subjective experience; perhaps we'll uncover some answers from probing that -- since people can talk to us -- but how can we ever probe the similarities and differences in the experience that bats and dolphins may have of echolocation? If bats and dolphins could talk to each other, would their differences in the experience of echolocation be like red-green color blindness, or like vision and touch?
There probably are answers to all those questions, but given that subjective experience can only be experienced by the subject, how would you test for it? Even if there are answers, I'm not sure if it's possible for us to know them from our point of view in the universe.