> When I ask people, "When did you first remember feeling conscious?" and receive nonsense replies - mostly people respond with their first memories and make no reference to the feeling of consciousness.

Mm. My answer would be:

The first time I remember feeling conscious, was the first time I, while conscious, noticed the absence of the feeling.

I've been told this is "dissociation"? The sense that I was no longer present in the moment, that I was watching myself as if a homunculus sitting in a cinema? It was brought on by tiredness, I think.

Depends on what you mean, of course. This is the *feeling* of consciousness I refer to, and in the absence of that feeling I still had qualia, it's just that the qualia failed to include the sense of "being there". For a lot of people, qualia is the important thing; I think for most people asking them "When did you first remember feeling conscious?" is like asking a (non-flying) fish "When did you first remember feeling wet?"

> There's no way to measure it. At least with other sense we can set up discriminative tests - I can use my feeling of the qualia of color to distinguish objects.

Indeed, the capacity to have qualia is not measurable from the outside. This is why I am skeptical of all claims, pro and con, about if any given AI has, or lacks, qualia.

However, I do know from experience that I can have altered states of consciousness.