If feel only fits your narrow, human centric definition of it, then of course machines can't feel pain. There isn't much point in having a discussion if the dis

If feel only fits your narrow, human centric definition of it, then of course machines can't feel pain. There isn't much point in having a discussion if the discussion is about your understanding of a word though. If you go by the broader definition of feel, which includes "to have a sensation of something", then I'd argue that the line is far more blurred. If you accept that a rat is capable of feeling pain, then surely you must accept that a functionally identical machine with a neural network functionally the same as a rat's brain can also feel pain? There's no real fundamental physical reason stopping us constructing a computer which functions in the same way as a rat's brain does. Does the computer we constructed suddenly stop being a machine?