Maybe I’m just small brained but I’ve never understood this phrase
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If you were magically turned into a stone, you would be dead, because a stone has no “experiences,” meaning a stone does not feel or think anything. If you were magically turned into another mentally-uninjured human, you would still be alive because a mentally-uninjured human has “experiences.”
Example: we know ChatGPT is not alive because it is using complicated math to predict text. This is not an “experience.” A truly conscious machine, whatever form that would take, would be alive in the sense that it thinks, therefore it is.
This is where the concept of the “philosophical zombie” comes in, which is a hypothetical creature that seems to be human, you could talk to it and it would talk back, convincing you it was alive, but in fact it is not thinking, it would merely be following instructions to simulate conversation. It does not think, therefore it “is not.”
See also: the Chinese Room Argument. Imagine you are in a room with books of instructions on how to answer any question in Chinese. Under the door, papers are slipped in, written in Chinese. You can answer any question by looking up the proper response in your instruction books, writing the response down, and slipping the paper back under the door. The person outside thinks they are conversing with someone who understands Chinese fluently. But you aren’t; all you’re doing is following instructions. You don’t actually understand Chinese.
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