A lot of people have wrote about the ethical considerations and to me they make no sense. Since when did our generally accepted ethics say that imposing suffering onto a conscious being is bad, but non-conscious beings is fine? This is the completely wrong correspondence because there's counter-arguments for both sides. You wouldn't harm a puppy, even though it's (probably?) not conscious, and I personally wouldn't care to cause a computer program to suffer, even if it claims to have some form of consciousness.
You found the wrong form of the word. There's the medical consciousness found in the dictionary, as in, "He is asleep so he has lost consciousness," and there is the metaphysical consciousness as in "does a fish have consciousness?" The latter is what people refer to in ethical debates, the former is more of a medical term.
I guess we slip into that because inanimate objects are ok to manipulate as we wish without concern. It's a gentle slope from there up to humans, and somewhere along the line it becomes problematic.
I see what happened there: sneaking that word 'being' to imply value and consciousness and then contradict that. You can reach any conclusion when the argument includes a contradiction?
Plants, bugs, and fish are all "beings" despite having varying degrees of consciousness and ethical allowability-of-harm. But fine. Whatever, my bad. Replace "being" with "entity" and my question still stands.
Sorry, I thought that was a critical distinction, my bad.
The hard part of this conversation is that 'consciousness' in other than the 'knocked unconscious' sense is a slippery concept. So we're all arguing from different assumptions.
