The brain activity of pain is an objective fact
That the brain is not quiescent when experiencing pain is an objective fact. But no one knows precise descriptions of the full gamut of atomic configurations which implement pain.
Please check out multiple realisability.
Because of that, none can genuinely tell whether an advanced robot has genuine qualia. That includes you, although you are inclined to think that your subjective intuitions are objective knowledge.
But the question of "do robots feel pain", is as interesting and meaningful as "are tables also chairs".
You accept multiple realisability for intelligence, but not for consciousness. That is arbitrary.
But no one knows precise descriptions of the full gamut of atomic configurations which implement pain.
Sure, but what does that have to do with anything? Does "objective" mean "well understood" to you?
multiple realisability
There are multiple representations of pain the same way that there are multiple representations of chair.
It is ridiculous how much of this debate is about the basic problem of classification, rather than anything to do with brains. Flawed reasoning starts with a postulate that "Pain" exists and then as...
(This post grew out of an old conversation with Wei Dai.)
Imagine a person sitting in a room, communicating with the outside world through a terminal. Further imagine that the person knows some secret fact (e.g. that the Moon landings were a hoax), but is absolutely committed to never revealing their knowledge of it in any way.
Can you, by observing the input-output behavior of the system, distinguish it from a person who doesn't know the secret, or knows some other secret instead?
Clearly the only reasonable answer is "no, not in general".
Now imagine a person in the same situation, claiming to possess some mental skill that's hard for you to verify (e.g. visualizing four-dimensional objects in their mind's eye). Can you, by observing the input-output behavior, distinguish it from someone who is lying about having the skill, but has a good grasp of four-dimensional math otherwise?
Again, clearly, the only reasonable answer is "not in general".
Now imagine a sealed box that behaves exactly like a human, dutifully saying things like "I'm conscious", "I experience red" and so on. Moreover, you know from trustworthy sources that the box was built by scanning a human brain, and then optimizing the resulting program to use less CPU and memory (preserving the same input-output behavior). Would you be willing to trust that the box is in fact conscious, and has the same internal experiences as the human brain it was created from?
A philosopher believing in computationalism would emphatically say yes. But considering the examples above, I would say I'm not sure! Not at all!