Vegan ML engineer here. In total agreement with you. People are just moving the goal post to keep themselves protected from the obvious conclusion: there is nothing really all that special about us humans. Perhaps subjective experience is simply the internal state of a self supervised continuous learning algorithm and we don't like that conclusion very much.
It's too bad it's so hard to pin down a definition, but in practice I feel like most animals with brains experience degrees of qualia. Some mornings after a night of poor sleep when I wake up super-slow I wonder if that's how animals experience thinking.
My biggest problem with "brains are machines" arguments is that there is a risk there is unknown physics at work that is not representable as a Turing machine. What if there is some quantum field effect powering everything?
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