I think this argument is fragile, especially when you consider agents like Claws. Any LLM that is training on its own previous interactions with users has indeed directly experienced them.

But also, what's the difference between having the memory of a prior experience and actually having gone through that experience?

For humans, reading a book about an experience and living an experience is different, because for a human the actual experience has so many more inputs attached (the sights, the smells, the sounds, etc).

For LLMs, when they train on a memory they can actually truly recapture that memory entirely by replaying the senses exactly. And LLMs are no longer limited to just text, they can do sound and video as tokens too.

Though, it's not clear why that matters to a consciousness. Whether your inputs are of one type or two or two hundred, there's no clear indication that a specific number is required as a catalyst.