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This proves too much. Imagine an alien lifeform: it won't have nociceptors, and it won't have the narrow form of a nervous system that you prescribe as necessary to feel pain. Does that mean the alien lifeform categorically can't feel pain?
You might say that it will have reward circuits implemented in whatever biological hardware it has, so we can extend our "pain" to those lifeforms. Sure. But as soon as you treat pain as something arising from reward circuits, that's a giant hole you can drive an LLM through as well. You've then got to think about exactly what kind of reward circuits qualify and which don't.
Unless you're willing to bite a bullet and say that pain is unique in humans and near relatives, and categorically nothing else in the universe has or could ever have what we'd call pain. It makes a certain amount of sense as a philosophical stance, but it's not likely to be a useful stance if we ever engage with extraterrestrial lifeforms.
It depends on the lifeform. Certainly if it doesn't have nociceptors and a nervous system of some kind (e.g. an alien tree) then yeah, probably I don't think it feels pain.
If it has, say, alien nociceptors and nervous system, then plausibly one can say that it feels pain, but it also seems plausible to me that its qualia would be extremely different. We can expect more similar qualia the more similar the critter.
I have. Trees have what you might call "reward circuits," but don't feel pain. LLMs have what you might call "reward circuits," but don't feel pain. Humans have what you might call "reward circuits" and do feel pain. Dogs, elephants, and other mammals have what yo might call "reward circuits" and almost certainly feel pain. The further you get away from that the less confident I get in my prognostications because the creatures become more and more different; I'm not really sure that bugs feel pain, but it seems likely to me that birds do.
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