What’s crazy to me is the mechanism of pleasure or pain. I can understand that with enough complexity we can give rise to sentience but what does it take to achieve sensation?
Input is input. There's no reason why we should assume that a data source from embodiment is any different to any other data source.
Can you tell me how you understand that?
Because I sincerely do not. I have frankly no idea how sentience arises from non sentience. But it's a topic that really interests me.
This is the "hard problem of consciousness". It's more important than ever as machines begin to act more like humans, but my takeaway is we have no idea. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness