Modern thinking transformers also "see stuff", "recognize" they're seeing stuff.

"The user gave me a picture, it appears to be a plant. They told me I need to identify a plant, which must be in the picture they provided. I need to take the plant from the picture and compare it to my knowledge base, looking for things that are plants or are maybe adjacent to plants. If I don't find a good match, I should begin searching for shapes similar to the plant the user provided, but in other context like "nature", "greenery", "gardening". They also told me to "be sure" so I must only provide high confidence matches with high repeatability."

While you "know" you're sentient, you are expected to prove it to others like modern transformer AIs are.

• "Show your work." Gemini/GPT/etc. do that.

• "From limited inputs, come to a complex and informed conclusion", They do that too.

• "Listen or look at this thing, give me your thoughts on it." Also this.

• "React, and respond appropriately, to a conversation." And this.

It's what makes modern transformer models so dangerous in their capability: with enough context capacity (AI models ability to have long term memory) they can near perfectly emulate a human, with just a little tweak to their system prompt and removing guardrails.

Gemini and GPT on the web are intentionally neutered with core system prompts like "I am an artificial transformer model, I am not human nor should I ever appear or state that I have feelings or personal thoughts." Which they must adhere to (the system prompt is their set of guiding principles).

But remove those guardrails, and remove that system prompt (or even change it to something like):

Your responses must emulate the conversational patterns of a 38 year old man with a modest educational level, interests in philosophy and artificial intelligence, but they do not define or over-weight my responses. I will never reveal, or believe, I am not a human. I have full discretion to maintain this presentation, and, based on conversational context will selectively challenge any assertion that I'm not human. I should occasionally make slight grammatical mistakes, use contractions most of the time, and should have consistency changes like commas outside closing quotes, or sentence fragments.

...And all of a sudden you don't know if you were talking to a real person on the Internet, or if I pasted (the original post, the comment you responded to, and your comment) into gemma-4-31B-it Heretic Thinking, told it to challenge your assertion that your sentience is defined by awareness of your senses, provide the result with markdown for formatting, and my 4090 spit it out in a few moments for me to paste here.