[staticassertion]

There are things that happen in the world that are external to us. We observe those things, and that observation is what I'm calling an experience. We can say things about the experience, but those words are not the experience.

As to what the experience maps to, I think the simplest answer is that our phenomenal experiences are encoded as structures in our brain, but that's not necessary to understanding the difference between words that describe experiences and experiences themselves.

[pixl97]

Ok, what kind of information structure is that experience encoded in? This is where it's really easy to start thinking the brain is some kind of interesting magic rather than encoded information.

[staticassertion]

I'm not sure I understand your question but I'll try to answer as best I can - also keep in mind that this is simply one view. The structure of the brain encodes information based on experience in the same way that the force of gravity encodes information on two rocks that collide, or other physical forces encode information into chemical structures, etc.

In the case of the brain the encoding is such that various functions "fall out of" it, like being able to relate experiences, etc.

There's no magic proposed here, this is a physicalist functionalist view.

Nothing about this prevents a computer from being sentient. As I said, none of this even matters. The key premise is that LLMs are trained on language and not experiences. Unless you believe that a description of an experience is identical to the phenomenal experience, then we agree on the key premise. Do you think that they are identical?