The fact that nearly all people strongly believe "pain is bad (in some circumstances)" plays a critical role in justifying the proposition "pain is bad (in some circumstances)". It's my view that the belief actually plays a much more important role in justification than any other fuzzier notions about "the experience"; if you did away with the belief, then many justifications would fail.
While I don't think you're obliged to reject it, a belief founded in self-ratification is meaningfully less stable and generalisable than one founded in theory-evidence agreement.
I think we generally "feel"motivated beliefs are more robust than they really are, and this applies to "pain is bad" kinds of beliefs.
Whether or not LLMs have experiences, it's clear that they believe somethings and disbelieve others.
Beliefs about the moral significance of pain for LLMs are clearly less robust than beliefs about the same for people or even animals - both among LLMs and among people.
If a stable consensus that LLMs can suffer in a way that matters ever came about, I would expect it to be the result of plausible extrapolation of existing views together with those views being instrumentally useful across a range of situations.This may happen, but it is not a given - for example, robots are vastly more repairable than people, and so belief in robot suffering is not particularly instrumentally useful.
I think the constituent claims are obvious-ish. I think one idea that isn't totally obvious is that "belief in pain badness as a cognitive reflex" underpins "belief in pain badness as a considered view". I think typically we view reflexes and beliefs as different kinds of things, but here I think reflex-like beliefs are fairly entangled with considered beliefs. To be clear I don't think this just happens with views about pain - I think motivated belief is quite common - but I think it does look likely to apply to pain (as well as other things).