> you have already said that what I consider subjective experience is just 'my imagination'

Subjective experience is an emerging property. Your imagination is "just" the "uniqueness" of it, that is, that belief of yours that subjective experience doesn't emerge from effectively computational processing of all the rules which directly follow from the initial conditions (matter and energy existing) and the physical laws (the rules that govern how matter and energy react to each other).

> why are you still trying to convince me that subjective experience is something that will somehow be shown to be an 'emergent' property? Is it illusory or not?

The illusion is the "uniqueness" of it -- you personally have an illusion of subjective experience as not being an emerging property, just like a traveler across the hot sand would see in the distance what would appear to him as a small lake, only to turn into a hot sand the closer he gets to that point. The existence of a human who thinks he sees the water is real, his thoughts are real, an in that specific example, even the picture formed in his eye is real (these phenomena can be photographed https://nikhilerigila.wordpress.com/tag/mirage/ ) just the existence of the water itself is a complete illusion.

> I have run out of ways to try to illustrate just how qualitatively different these things are

That's what you believe, but I can't remember to have read anything more then your claim that you "see/experience that it's different" which is what I tried to show you is not surprising at all, it's completely logical to happen as an emergent property in animals that move, eat or are being eaten and reproduce sexually.

Moreover, it will be possible to "teach" the computer to "experience that" just like humans experience it now. Because how we think about the world is a product of what we learn and the physical inputs we become while growing and living. As our thinking is effectively just a result of 1) processing of the information we get 2) the internal state of our body and 3) external inputs; eventually we will be able to construct a machine that will be able to process enough information, to the point of "thinking" in the same symbols (language) as we do, which has big enough internal state (memory) and which has enough of external inputs to behave, for us, surprisingly humane, even to the point of that computer claiming having a "subjective experience" which would also appear to the computer as "unique."

So is "subjective experience" illusory or not you ask? It exists, just like the mentioned human on the hot sand (or on the hot road) sees "water" in the distance and just like, similarly, the belief in gods exists among a lot of humans. But that belief is not something from the outside world: the gods were also invented by humans and there's nothing mysterious about that too:

https://donparrish.com/EssayMencken.html

The processes involved in such emerging properties appearing aren't mysterious but quite trivial. The rules are simple, the pure immense scale of the conditions and the parallel processing results in all we see.

> then there must still be something that is 'being tricked'

Yes, correct. You are being tricked that your "experience" is something special. It's not.

> then the question becomes how that phenomenon can happen.

Trivially. At the end, it's always that simple rules applied on enough particles in parallel produce the emerging properties that aren't simple. In between is people inventing the beliefs in gods or in the "uniqueness" of their "experience" but where every particle of them still behaved according to the rules. Emerging properties.

See the animations: http://www.conwaylife.com/wiki/Spaceship these objects move and keep moving. You have to play the game to see how this happens in front of your eyes, from the input you make, and from just four immensely simpler rules than the all which exist in nature (for the start, the game happens in only two dimensions an the time). If you know how to program you can make your own program from the scratch. Nothing mysterious.

See the rules here: http://www.conwaylife.com/wiki/Life just four and very simple:

- Any "live" cell with fewer than two "live" neighbours "dies".

- Any "live" cell with more than three "live" neighbours dies

- Any "live" cell with two or three live neighbours "lives", unchanged, to the next generation.

- Any "dead" cell with exactly three "live" neighbours will "come to life".

Note "live", the term used by the players of the game, actually just means "the cell is black" "dead" means "the cell is white." "Dies" means "becomes white" and "comes to life" means "becomes black." Also note that it's the humans who invented the names of "lives" "dies" for the change of the color property of the cell. That's how humans invent their beliefs. By using language (symbolical processing) to describe the properties. That symbolical processing produces false results when the use of some symbols for some phenomena is deeply wrong, even if it appears "natural" to those who use them, like here when the players of the game talk about the cells that "live." They are just black or white. But teach some children that that is the meaning of the word "live" and leave them alone and they can believe until they die (physically) that that what happens in the game is also "a life." To them it would be undeniable.