[agronomov]

I'm not talking about souls! What the heck is that anyways. Yes, I'm talking about the fact that our understanding of how physical systems work (neurons and all that) give us no understanding of why we need to experience things. We could have worked just fine without it (again, see the hard problem of consciousness). So I assert that AI would function perfectly just fine without subjective feeling as well, and we would't know it because there's no way to establish it. However, we would fail the mirror test: it looks like us, behaves like us, hence it feels like us, but it's just a quality imitation.

[oefnak]

I believe it is not possible to imitate a human without the imitation being so complex as to experience reality itself. Your argument is basically the Chinese Room experiment, in which my view is that the whole room is conscious.