If you take the view that consciousness may simply require a sufficient degree of complexity (electronic or otherwise), it gets even more murky.
Especially so when you're trying to pin down the facets of cognitive machinery required to experience suffering. Memory in particular adds an interesting dimension to the question.
Not that it was anything groundbreaking, but HBO's Westworld did a decent job of exploring this. Granted, it did so using fictional human-level analogs.
With the state AI in its infancy today, the ethical considerations surrounding insects may offer more insight. I found this article extremely fascinating:
Interesting article! I always find it really irritating to see arguments of the form "X creature doesn't have Y biological feature therefore it cannot have Z experience that humans have (even though we can't explain why humans have experiences at all)." That's how you get horrifying and nonsensical things like performing surgery on babies without anaesthetic because "they can't actually feel pain" even though they're exhibiting every sign of it.
Westworld is also dramatized to make for interesting TV. For example, deaf people without a voice in their head would not be conscious by their definition.
Consciousness, and suffering, are biological concepts. Computer code running algorithms on microprocessors aren't going to experience these things.
I wasn't suggesting Westworld was some comprehensive scientific study of the matter. Rather, that it did a decent job exploring the relationship between suffering and memory, and some of the complexities that entails. For example, memory wipes intended to reduce suffering inadvertently creating more suffering via the unsettling emotional side effects involved.
>Consciousness, and suffering, are biological concepts. Computer code running algorithms on microprocessors aren't going to experience these things.
You seem so confident in this being the case. Who is to say cognition cannot exist on silicon?
If you accept the supposition that cognition is a requium for emotion, and emotion is a requium for suffering, then a digital organism need not have the pain receptors of its biological counterpart in order to experience suffering.
