There is no objective evidence of qualia. All evidence of qualia are vocal or other expressions of belief in qualia. Perceptions clearly exist and are observable, subjective experience and qualia, not so much.
> I see no reason to believe that a neural network built entirely based on the symbolic level of language could have the features needed for the subjective experience itself.
If your objection is to models based on "symbolic level of language" which you think lack semantic understanding of, say, trees, you should ask yourself how our brain, based on physics which also lacks any semantic category for trees, can somehow develop a semantic understanding of trees. All of these appeals to differences with the brain never seem to acknowledge that fundamentally, the brain has the same explanatory gap with physics.
> But if we assume awareness because outputs resemble what we consider meaningful as humans, yet the neural network has had no inputs or evolution that could form the actual basis of human-like experience
This assumes a lot. It seems very possible to me that intelligence inherently develops a map of natural categories (natural kinds), and language naturally develops around such categorical understanding. Semantics are then fundamentally the network of associations between categories, eg. there is no fundamental difference between symbols and semantics, and the latter cam be inferred from the former, and that's exactly what LLMs do, and why the semantic maps between different languages are so similar and how they can translate between languages.