My assertion is that it would be impossible for a non-conscious entity to speak convincingly about consciousness. But to be more specific, I think of qualia as

My assertion is that it would be impossible for a non-conscious entity to speak convincingly about consciousness. But to be more specific, I think of qualia as a kind of combinator. You can combine qualia together to produce new qualia. So for example, combine the number 5 with the color yellow. Now you see a yellow 5 in your imagination. Now think of combining yellow with blue. You see green? Now think of adding a yellow 5 to a blue 2. You see a green 7? As simple as this little-thought experiment is, training a non-conscious program to follow along would require teaching it the patterns involved in math and color combination. But because any qualia can be combined with any other qualia, you have infinite patterns that cannot be captured in any training set. Ultimately what this means is that qualia, creativity, and intelligence are the same thing.