The current race to build artificial intelligence raises a fundamental question: does successfully imitating human behavior amount to understanding human experience? AI systems are now highly capable at generating language, solving problems, and predicting patterns in data. However, these abilities should not be confused with consciousness or lived experience.

Current AI systems do not possess subjective awareness, biological needs, a sense of mortality, or emotions. As a result, there may be important limits to how deeply they can understand certain aspects of human life, particularly if one adopts the view that understanding is inseparable from lived and firsthand experience. Some functionalist theories suggest that understanding is achieved through appropriate patterns of behavior or information processing rather than through subjective experience. On such accounts, the limitations of AI would be interpreted differently.

Empathy and psychological understanding remain areas of uncertainty. Humans develop their understanding of emotions through personal experiences of vulnerability, loss, fear, joy, and social connection. AI systems learn from patterns in data rather than through direct experience. This distinction becomes especially important in situations........

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