[vokep]

Who says neural networks aren't in pain when their fitness (reward function) is subtracted from? or happy or orgasmic when the function is bumped up?

Pain/pleasure seem to have easy enough analogue to at least something like a reward function, but what really gets me is colors. I feel like if honestly considered, the word "color" is all that's necessary to disprove materialism. Color is. How? Dunno.

[PeterisP]

Perceptions and feelings are real as you both experience them and could measure their signals in the brain, if you would have the proper tech to do that. And filtered, processed perceptions exist as well. In a "pipeline" in some brain - no matter if biological or artificial - somewhere in the middle you have processed signals of sensor input that have a complex meaning that has only some relation to the actual physical world "seen" by the sensors. Things like color and motion seem one of those; for an intuitive understanding it seems very close to the distill.pub analyses of what some specific middle-neurons in a convnet see.