Yay! We're back to trying to operationalize a bunch of philosophical mumbo-jumbo!
Why do we think that hydrocarbons have an advantage over silicon in the "experience" department? Vitalism was disproven centuries ago - we know that hydrocarbons are chemicals like any others. Do we still have a reason to believe that hydrocarbons are special?
Is "being able to procreate" a hard requirement for "experience"? If so, can worker bees "experience" things? Or is that a property reserved for the ~1% of the "elite" non-worker bees? Or does a hive experience things collectively on "hive" level, but not individually, on "worker bee" level? Does a woman stop "experiencing" at menopause? If we built an AI Von Neumann probe, would it "experience" things - unlike other, non-self-replicating AIs? Or does an AI suddenly become capable of "experiencing" if you as much as give it a "fork" tool call to spawn more instances of itself?
If we tie "experience" to "metabolism", then, what's the line there? A car engine already powers itself with chemical reactions, maintains homeostasis and disposes of waste - crossing off a lot of the "metabolism" checklist. Is that enough for that engine to be able to "experience"? A city can tick off the entire "metabolism" checklist - can a city "experience" things? Or do we need to get back to Von Neumann probes?
The truth of the matter is: we don't have anything that would be significantly better than "a parrot experiences things, but an LLM doesn't, because I said so". Look on my works, oh mighty, and despair!