It's not the same. The button pushers are deliberately tricking themselves. I have thought carefully and concluded that something is actually true. The fact that I find that truth satisfying is secondary.
If you experience the feeling of love, does it matter whether it's directed toward another human or toward a mannequin? I think so, and I have a system of values in which to frame that difference. If you think that we're only atoms, then a feeling is just a feeling.
What you just said PRESUMES that a feeling is just a feeling, then implies that believing otherwise is silly. That's not an argument; it's a snub.
My argument was that you can't have it both ways. If "the universe is all there is" as Carl Sagan has said, then the rest of his statements in the intro to Cosmos that spiritualize our discovery of it are rubbish. If you're going to be a strict materialist, you have to say that curiosity and censorship, love and rape, heroism and murder are all equal and irrational: just complex movements of some atoms that will one day be cold and motionless.
Of course, I don't believe that. But I have a framework of thought that allows for intrinsic value. Which is why I have reason to reject a "utopia" of perfect earthly happiness if it has no moral basis.