When I say "experience," I mean a sufficient grounding of certainty about what a word means, which includes how it's used, how it relates to the world that I'm experiencing, but also the mood or valence the word carries. I can't feel your pain, or maybe you've been to a country that I haven't been to and you're conveying that experience to me. Maybe you've been to outer space. I'm not saying to understand you I need to literally have had the exact experience as you, but I should be able to sufficiently relate to the words you are saying in order to understand what you are saying. If I can't sufficiently relate, I say I don't understand. You can see how this differs from what an AI is doing. The AI is drawing on relationships between symbols, but it doesn't really have a self, or experience, etc etc.

The process of fetching symbols, as you put it, doesn't feel at all like what I do when somebody asks me what it was like to listen to the Beatles for the first time and I form a description.