I felt like this draft paper by Anders Sandberg was a well-thought-out essay on the morality of experiments on brain emulations. Is there anything you disagree with here, or think he should handle differently?
http://www.aleph.se/papers/Ethics%20of%20brain%20emulations%20draft.pdf
First, the "objective" part of pain is known as nociception and can likely be studied in real or simulated organisms. The subjective part of pain need not be figured out separately from other qualia, like perception of color red.
Second, not all pain is suffering and not all suffering is pain, so figuring out the quale of suffering is separate from studying pain.
I think we have to work on formalizing qualia in general before we can make progress in understanding "computational suffering" specifically.
I find philosophizing without the goal of separating a solvable chunk of a problem at hand a futile undertaking and a waste of time. The linked paper does a poor job identifying solvable problems.
You were so busy refuting me you still didn't answer this question: what kind of a definition of suffering would satisfy you? So that people could talk about it without it being a waste of time, y'know.
In the future? Yes. Right now? No. We have no idea what kind of computation happens in the brain when someone experiences pain. Just because it has a name doesn't mean we have clue.
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