But surely in order to “feel things” you would need a nervous system right? When you feel pain from touching something very hot, it’s your nerves that are sending those pain signals to your brain… right?

On that case, on our meatsacks, yes. But there’s also emotional pain which can cause physical pain or other effects too and that doesn’t require nerves at all. Also there’s nothing stopping from an AI robot to have nervous system too, it would just have different kind of sensors and a CAN bus or something instead of organic stuff. There’s already co-operation robots on factories which have sensors to detect if they are touching something in order to keep humans safe and from there it’s not too far fetched to program it to feel “pain” if forces are big enough.

And that all boils down to on how you define consciousness, feelings, pain response and all that stuff. “Behold! I’ve brought you a man!” I yell while holding a chiken.