> How can you have a subjective experience without a body?

Easy, you don't have subjective experiences because you have body in the first place. You have them because some signals come in from your nerves, which your brain turns into a world model. You are effectively a "brain in a vat", the vat just happens to be placed on top of your body.

An AI system constructs the world model a little different, by all the text that gets feed into it, but that doesn't mean that there is anything fundamentally different in the world model it builds. Consciousness operates on world model, not on the world or even the body itself.

The AI's world model might be missing some information, because they weren't described in enough detail in text, but that shouldn't matter for consciousness. A blind or deaf person isn't less conscious than one that can see or hear just because some information is missing from their world model.

Your point generalizes to, your emotional state is a reflection of the state of your physical medium.

Why can't that physical medium be GPUs and RAM? And temperature sensors and cameras? What's special about our meat that it's our "body" in the way a computer is not the body of an AI?

I don't think the point being argued can be true without some incredibly contrived, human centric definitions of "body".

> How can you have a subjective experience without a body?

Great q. Deepening it further-how can you have a subjective experience without consciousness, which isn't necessarily tied to physicality. Taking it one step further-can you have consciousness without a mind? Who's the first mind, the first cause of it all, that begot both the material and immaterial world?

Fun stuff eh?

> How can you have a subjective experience without a body?

If every neuron of your brain were simulated precisely on a sufficiently powerful computer, that simulation would have subjective experiences, without having a body.

How can you have a subjective experience without a body?

Some anecdotal data.

Many dreams I have are just of the computer screen of some coding problem. I think the problem could be x, so I try x. But I don't type the keyboard or anything, the code just magically appears as soon as I think of the solution. Then run the code (but no clicking) and it works or not. I feel in the dream success feeling or failure feeling but there is no body at all.

Also I have other dreams where there is no body that I am aware of but not going there in public.

There is no body sensation in these dreams. But dreaming is very much being consciousness as well as feeling emotions. So answering your question its possible to have a subjective experience without a body but whether you needed the body to learn to have that sensation without a body in the first place is unanswered.

I suspect sensory inputs are more important than a body. If that is the case then eyes can be replaced with cameras, ears with microphones etc. Text input is just another sensory input.

You need to draw that thinking out to it's natural conclusion, though. If I cut out your brain and stopped you from hearing or seeing or feeling - you would still be a conscious human being capable of thinking and awareness.

If I hooked up electrodes to the hearing centers of your brain and force fed you dialog you perceive as speech (but is really a great deceiver), then responded in what you thought was speech (but are really just probes I use to convert your thoughts to text), that wouldn't suddenly be less real to you. It wouldn't devalue your sapience.

Every computer/program I have ever used has a body and sensors (afferent)and actuators (efferent).

So I have no idea what distinction Ted Chiang is trying to draw