[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.