[killswitched]

1) Built a neural network for which consciousness that experiences and expresses pleasure and pain emerges from the neuron’s physical properties (in other words, not a contrived simulation), but is fundamentally different than the DNA/carbon systems upon which we are built (artificially designed and constructed versus conceived organically). If you can ask a computer whether it experiences pleasure or pain, it needs to be designed to do so without being explicitly programmed in contrived fashion.

Or:

2) Augmented: Integrate human (or primate, for instance) nervous systems with artificial intelligence such that the experience of the AI exceeds the capacity of the organic host to differentiate between conscious reality and dreaming, but is still distilled down in a way that allows the human host to have a sufficiently symbiotic interaction as it pertains to the processing of pain and pleasure with the connected AI. The feedback loops between the pain/pleasure experience of the human host would govern the wholistic experience of the connected AI, and the human would experience the conscious aspect. You might not say that the AI is conscious, but the human host would have an intimate sense of the AI being part of an overall consciousness. (Note: must prevent the development of immortality technology for nervous systems, to avoid testing the halting problem for sentient beings.)

[hackerman123469]

Pain is not real and is just the result of signals sent through our nerves to our brain. It has no real meaning other than being a "warning sign" to our brains.

You cannot use pain as a measure for consciousness either because some humans cannot experience pain either.

[killswitched]

Pain is real when a person experiences it. It’s part of the Hard Problem, which separates the study of the signals from objective description of the inner experience.

A human who is wired to not experience pain probably has the brain capacity to experience it, with the appropriate modifications. We do agree that all experience is perfectly correlated to a physical states/transitions, so it’s conceivable to arrange organic matter in a way that a conscious entity could experience real (to them) pain. We may not have this technology and it would seem far off for now. But we are scratching the surface.

A monk who can rewire the experience of pain (e.g. while burning to death) still has something meaningful to communicate about their conscious experience beyond the pain receptors transmitting info to their brain. But perhaps if one’s arrangement of brain/nervous system matter isn’t so free as to be trained to overcome or modify instinctual pain response (e.g. brain in a vat), anyone can be forced to experience pain.