But what is the epistemological status of these questions? That’s what I’m concerned with, not whether children can understand and be fascinated with these questions.
Unless you're religious, the epistemic status of "do dogs go to heaven?" is obviously "no" (or "we have no way of knowing"). If you think the answer to "can robots experience qualia?" is equally trivial, then just say so, instead of going on some spiel about how actually the question is unclear and nonsensical when it pretty obviously isn't.
If I can't be 100% sure that people feel in the same way that I do, then asking that same question for robots is totally pointless.
>If I can't be 100% sure that people feel in the same way that I do, then asking that same question for robots is totally pointless.
I don't see how that at all follows.
The question is simply "Will robots feel just like you do, or will they merely be pretending?" - it's something any child could understand. Answers could be something like "No, because they lack X", "Yes, but only those that have X" or "Yes, everything does (panpsychism)".
Do you care about potential AI suffering? If you care about animal suffering, the answer to the question would have pretty obvious and major ethical implications.
Now, I'm not convinced that humans can ever determine an answer, so I can understand thinking it's just navel gazing, but I imagine the same applies to knowing what happened before the big bang. I think it's quite evident that this doesn't mean either question is malformed.