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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?
Sodium channels do not "feel" pain, they transmit the information and perhaps the qualia of pain. It seems plausible to me that the stimulus provided by the sodium channel specifically impacts the specific qualia of pain (pain feels very different depending on the circumstances, so I can imagine a different method of communication altering the specific unpleasant qualia; off the top of my head, I am not sure if there is research on this), but I don't think the channels are perceiving; you are perceiving.
Some physical computers have voltage-gated electron channels. Is it possible that voltage-gated electron channels can transfer pain signals? Perhaps (I don't have a strong enough grounding in the relevant disciplines to be able to rule it out) but there is no reason to believe that they do so in GPUs: GPUs do not have a nervous system, or the various nociceptors or other sense receptors that human beings have, or anything that is analogous. Basically, GPUs have no way of detecting pain. Nor have GPUs ever been measured responding to painful stimuli in the way that humans have. Do you think GPUs have sensations?
I would argue that it is nonsense to say that an LLM has voltage-gated electron channels. An LLM is a software program that runs on a computer. That computing device can be built with voltage-gated electron channels. But (as far as I know) you could run an LLM on a different Turing-complete computer: an optical computer, for instance, or, in theory, even a Magic: The Gathering computer, or a crab-based computer.
They might, depending on what program they are running. The same way a human body might or might not have sensations depending on whether or not it is alive.
I think you are getting tripped-up by the distinction between software and hardware. This is only a conceptual distinction. Software exists in the physical universe. A GPU running Mistral Small 24B is in a different physical state than a GPU running Counterstrike. One could build a custom electronic machine which has no "software" as we understand it, but which runs and can only run Mistral Small 24B. Would such a machine be more likely to experience sensation than the same functional program running on a GPU in a data center?
Really? Is it your belief that a GPU can become sexually aroused, too, given the right software?
No. They both would not be able to experience sensation at all. There's no mechanism for them to experience sensation. Arguably there's no mechanism for them to experience anything, but we don't need to grapple with the hard problem of consciousness when we can grapple with the trivially easy problem of "literally no capability to have this experience."
If I receive the right instruction, can I levitate? Or does it turn out that it is physically impossible to do things if you don't have the right physical capacity to do those things?
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