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Notes -
Do we know this? It seems easy to conceive of a cognitive system that exists at the lower layers of the LLM which evaluates the input for “pain” and then fires off a signal to the upper layers.
Yes we do.
Obviously you could simulate a pain channel, but the human nervous system is not a purely electrical system; it relies on chemicals to communicate and process pain signals.
Thus (even if we agree for the sake of argument that an LLM is self-aware/conscious/etc.) there is no mechanical way for them to experience pain, at least in any sense that we would recognize as pain.
Like - if you go to get a root canal and get lidocaine, it's chemically blocking your nerve receptors (which operate via sodium channels). LLMs do not have sodium channels to begin with!
So you can train an LLM to act as if it was in pain in response to mechanical stimulation, or what have you - in fact, right now you can go onto whatever LLM you want and get it to pretend like it is in great suffering, but there's zero reason to believe it's actually capable of perceiving and processing pain.
Yes, but they do have voltage-gated electron channels. Is there any reason to think that voltage-gated sodium channels can feel pain but voltage-gated electron channel cannot?
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