You are still not reading with the intention to understand. You are so certain you understand already that you aren’t bothering to really read and understand the words of the person you are “communicating” with. This is extremely tedious, and if it continues this conversation will end. Please fix this dreadful conversational habit of yours and begin responding to me using the concepts that I am using if you wish this exchange to continue.

There does not need to be any witnessing subject to an organism experiencing pain. Based on what science tells us about the world, everything could be operating just the way it is operating without a conscious witness to it: pain, pleasure, laughter, philosophy, art, film, the whole bit. And you’d never know the difference except for the fact that humans talk about there being a witness to their experience and you know from your own experience that they’re telling the truth. We don’t even know that animals are conscious in the way I use that term, because we can’t ask them; they could theoretically just be complex stimulus-response meat machines with no conscious witness to their experience.