This is like asking whether the machine learning model built into AlphaGo by Google really learned Go, or whether we have any reason to think that it is. It really doesn't matter - it just matters that it beat the best human player. Yes, it plays go.

When we take a very slightly different approach and put in computations that mimic human neural setups, and those computations (obviously - there are only like 80 billion neurons, they're slow and biological) report feeling pain, then of course they'll feel pain. It's absurd to even imply otherwise.

The stuff you said about the laws of physics and computation is a complete and utter red herring. It'd like saying "we can't genetically engineer crops, we don't even know how plants work!! Computers can't model that stuff." It doesn't really matter if they can model it or not, we're doing it.

People will be doing this very shortly.

The kind of convolutions that you would have to come up with are just insane.

Here, I'll give you an insane model that supports your hypothesis, could be reasonably believed, and is insane:

-> The human and animal nervous systems are as a matter of fact directly controlled by God to take on their emergent behavior, and God does this by means of making tiny perturbations to the random outcomes of quantum effects. So, when a quantum effect is in a laboratory, it behaves one way: but when it is part of a biological system, God influences individual quantum outcomes such that overall the object reports feeling pain. This is just the input/output between us and God. Now, separately, God also runs this "souls-r-us" place in the Ethereal plane (where we have no contact). That's where souls actually feel pain.

So the architecture is:

SOuls-R-Us <-> God -> Quantum perturbations -> Physical laws -> Output says it is feeling pain.

But that pain is really felt in the Souls-R-Us plane, not our worldly plane.

So what happens, is if you model the biological creature, the model looks like this:

Physical laws -> Output

without the quantum perturbations that let God influence the physical laws to make the output report pain.

So, under the above insane model, you're right, computing states would never cause actual pain to exist, since there's no Souls-R-Us involved, we didn't actually build one.

But that's insane and not worth discussing. The actual state of reality is quite simple: if you build it, it will report feeling pain, because it will actually feel pain.

That's it.

All of your other stuff is just noise -- like arguments for why heavier than air flight is impossible. It's a distraction. Don't waste time with that distracting line of thought. It's as big of a waste of time as adding Souls-R-Us to our model. It's just not productive. Also this isn't just "fun to think about", a server farm full of servers can do more computation than a single human brain, today. This stuff is not theoretical, it's a current issue that is actually happening. fine, a decade or two out, whatever. we aren't anywhere near a VR with a human set of neurons declaring that it's feeling pain. But we are getting news every day of virtual neural nets surpassing humans in various human computational tasks, and in many cases with similar architectures (in the sense that they're neural nets). sure it'll be a while before pain emerges - but it could also be accidental.

this stuff isn't "fun to think about", it's happening right now. You're like if Tim Berners Lee were saying, when he invented the web, "sure it's fun to think about someone one day controlling a tea kettle with it."

well a couple of decades later, we're stuck with those design choices. These things need to be done today. It's not hand-wavy, it's not "fun to think about" - it's happening right now.

As a matter of fact it's not completely out of the question that some neural net machine learning project happens to already actually feel pain but just doesn't report it. this is possible today. unlikely, but possible. it would be an absolutely shocking news report.

but not as shocking as faster than light communication. Not even as shocking as an announcement that someone has built a working fusion reactor.

Let that sink in: there's an active project, ITER, which is currently building a fusion reactor:
https://hu.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER

Someone else announcing that they've done it, would be more shocking than the discovery that some heavy machine earning project running on a few million cores happens to be feeling pain.

The latter is similar to news reports out of machine learning that we we are reading every single day.

so you need to radically realign your perspective. your comment would have made a lot of sense in 1999 - not today.