The problem I think is just that, to me, they both sound to me like perfectly reasonable (if vague) descriptions of complex, sentient human pain.

1 sounds to me like an attempt to capture output in the form of a flowchart. It's like trying to describe the flocking behavior of birds by reference to the Boids cellular automaton -- and insisting not that there are similar principles at work in how the birds go about solving the problem of flocking, but that birds literally run an instance of Boids in their heads and that's all there is to their flocking behavior.