it's more like someone writing about a character getting angry in a book... I don't think anyone would argue that a character actually experienced anger, right? there's no subjectivity in that experience... it's the output of someone else's experience on what they'd expect the character's reaction to be, not a genuine outcome of that character's experience

That's the same here, LLMs are outputting the result of the written experiences of others... not its own experience, which it does and can not have.

Put another way, it only "knows" what it just output by reading it... it doesn't actually build experience to know anything.

We might be closer than ever to building these things, but they're not here yet.