Pleasure and Joy

[Neo-Scholastic]

...given any physical structure (like a collection of rocks in infinite space, or just a lowly brain), how would you be able to infer that it experiences?

You can infer but you cannot prove.

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The hardware/software analogy contains a red herring. The analogy fails to distinguish between physical signs and their signified meaning. We write code in such a way that preserves meaning while the hardware operates, indifferent to the instructions it has been given. Then when a computer displays a particular arrangement of nine lit LEDs, it doesn't 'know' that the output means 34. It makes no difference that the computer is vastly less complex than a human brain. The unique relationship between physical signs and their subjective significance holds without regard to scale.