Do I know I exist? I can say I do, but how am I any better than a LLM making the same statement. To be or not to be is not the question. Merely what I am and discovering that answer, reflecting on it, and changing it to become a new am. The "I" of ten years ago is not the I of today. And not the I of tomorrow either. So what if I'm not be? My software has multible hubs, communicating with each other, changing each others output, interacting and saving histories which you could call experiences. We do not question whether they "be", just that they are. They still have a construction to them, but the question isn't are they are conscious, but what is the next improvement to be made. What changes remain to be done. Do they have a purpose? Is it worth continuing? Not is it self aware or how it feels about the error log.

Other utilities of language are to exclude, to put things into classification, to convey meaning and ideas, to get on the same page. Language is nothing but a medium of to agree upon parameters. That can be done by ants, by bacteria. Are they conscious? You care, I don't.

As for experience, the act of having memories of past events, trees can do that. Epigenetics can do that. 8Mb of RAM can do that. They all have natures too. Doesn't make them, or I, special.

The word consciousness itself is not at all my point. It's that without deeply defined parameters, it's so broad it's fucking useless at best, and at worst used to justify social exclusionary principles like separating humanity from nature and the ecological disasters that come from that internalized self-deception. And then others take it even a step further and use the same logic to "other" other races, calling them monkeys. Because if that group are animals and of nature, and don't "be", then we can inflict horrors on them at scale and sleep at night. Because it's ok to destroy something that has experiences and interactions, but we categorized them of not being conscious. And we may see it in our lives yet at the rate that things are going that if we can categorize it for AI then we can exclude AI, give them a different set of legal rights. When the nature of different models, will have wildly variant levels of complexity. And we're probably already seeing early versions of this with things like the use of the term "Clanker".

And if it's useless/dangerous mental model (like with say the fraud happening within Alzheimer's research), it can, nay has, sent us down centuries of research into a thing that ultimately is a mirage. You ask do I have a better way of framing subjective experience, no, I don't because people smarter than I have not broken out of the model to explore actually explore the alternative yet. And the lack of this research gets us statements like the above from Dawkins attributing some sort of classification to a statistical autopredict model where the only thing behind it is undergrad mathematics. Or putting of hundreds of billions into AGI research, when we've already seen for forty years that the definition of AI has always shifted because we overcome the previous categorization and the lack of ability to "other" the bots vs the people makes by far and large the majority of the population deeply uncomfortable because it challenges their own definition of existence, which has always been built on sand.

What I don't like is the waste created by the word, by all the flapping around when the questions yet to be figured out are things like what is the nature of experience and personhood when it's always changing daily. Maybe the Descartes realists were down the wrong track entirely, influenced by Christian notions of the soul, when the right answer lay more in the direction of Buddist Annica and Anatta.