Thanks for your contribution. I've posted a comment elsewhere in the thread that touches upon what I think about this. It may be that what makes 'pain' and 'suffering,' and perhaps then their corollary positives like 'pleasure' important is the subjective and conscious experience of those things. Those are fundamental to the way that we as humans understand them, but if you remove that element of it, it may be that we are observing something like 'pseudo-pain' or 'pseudo-pleasure.' It looks like that from the outside, and certainly our first intuition as an empathetic species is to assume it is, but maybe it's just not a comparable experience? Or if it is, to what degree? Does it outweigh other competing interests when not considered in isolation?

Really though, thank you for sharing. As I was drafting my longer comment I had this one in mind as well.