Descartes famously thought that no, animals did not have feelings and sensations, and their reactions were purely mechanistic in nature. You see, he believed that humans and animals had fundamentally different substrate i.e. immortal soul/lack of it, and you needed soul to percept.
Thankfully, today we know better than that, and so we can be absolutely certain that computers can't feel sensations: they have different underlying substrate than the humans and animals. There is no way this view can be challenged.
Who claimed it's because they're of fundamentally different substrate? And who is talking about computers? It's about algorithms. You could recreate an LLM with infinite humans and infinite time and infinite pens and pieces of paper surely, just like you can make a 16-bit computer in Minecraft, and it would not make that LLM more or less sentient.
That Descartes analogy is far off the mark, since we're not making guesses about something that existed before us, we are talking about something we made and are making. Just like you know there's no fairies moving clock hands because you know how a clock is made. I'd even say that some people get confused, or confuse others for money, is the only reason this is even discussed.
Do you, or did Descartes, believe that rocks can feel sensation?
GP asserts they do. I assert they don't.
I only raised the question about computers, i didn't answer it.
But the other reply raises a good point: Descartes would not have thought so about a clock, because he knows both how a clock is made and how a clock works. He knew neither about animals. We know both about computers.
Thankfully, today we know better than that, and so we can be absolutely certain that computers can't feel sensations: they have different underlying substrate than the humans and animals. There is no way this view can be challenged.