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If I cut my arm off, I'm "murdering" trillions of organisms. Is that immoral?

I think suffering is only possible to much more complex organisms. You can't mourn if you don't remember for example.

In the case of abortion, you have one being (the fetus) that isn't yet fully formed and capable of living on its own and another being (the mother) who is potentially harmed by the first being's life. Yes, it is a morally complex situation.

We don't know when the first being becomes conscious. But we know the second being is conscious. And we know the consequence of treating the fetus as a being with full rights is to deprive the mother of her rights, frequently her right to life.

Frankly, I have first hand experience with this I strongly doubt many abortion opponents have. If not for abortion, my wife would probably be dead after our wanted pregnancy turned out to be non-viable. We aborted our son while he was still alive, because if we hadn't she could have gotten sepsis as he slowly died and rotted in her belly.

People who treat abortion as a black and white moral issue the way you appear to be doing have now banned it where I live, which means my wife and I cannot risk having more children, given our history of loss. (Of which the one I described above is only a small piece.)

Abortion is morally grey. There are few other ethics cases where there is such a direct conflict between the rights of an existing being and the rights of a potential being. The only reasonable way to handle that is to allow each individual to make their own moral judgement and choice.

Consciousness emerges and is maintained in the context of other people - and not just individuals but communities whose language, techniques of adaptive living (i.e.: traditions), and storytelling about the word, are carried intra-individually within clan and affiliate groups. In the postmodern era those communities can be parasocial or virtual to an extent, fictive or reenacted, but they're not optional for the continued coherence of self.

There is no 'I' except in relation to the other, moreover the self doesn't become fully individuated without being witnessed and held by the other - caregivers in early childhood, friends in adolescence, social roles in adulthood.

All of this would be impossible if our phenomenology wasn't broadly similar. All societies have identified social roles for those few whose inner world isn't commensurate with the collective - in modernity we call them schizophrenics.

I think that's a false dichotomy; third option is that everyone is different.

Also notice I suggested that I might be "only" a model that doesn't even realise it's a model. I sure know I can make models pretend to be specific people, so it's not unreasonable for me to wonder if I can make a model trained on my own public data, at which point it becomes reasonable to wonder (if you assume for the sake of argument that the model is indeed conscious, who knows, roll with it) if that model might post something under the experiential delusion that it's A Real Boy.

Would my digital twin know it wasn't the original? What question could it ask itself that upon introspection would reveal the truth?

> It is clear that everyone else responds to pain in much the same way, everyone else responds to lack of food, water, social interaction, love, etc In much the same way, etc.

Pain, no. I can switch mild pain off at will. I know people into BDSM, who confuse me massively by enjoying it. I know someone who appears to lack the qualia (not the nerve response, just the qualia) of direct pain. The are also people I see in the news occasionally with literally no pain nerves, and they regularly injure themselves as a direct consequence of this, so no, broken bones isn't as good an example as you think it is.

(Edit: and another example in the opposite direction, I've also met someone disabled by pain that has no apparent cause).

Food and water, well, my mother had Alzheimer's and what killed her in the end was forgetting how thirst worked. When my dad got bowel cancer and his lower intestines removed, he almost destroyed his kidneys because his thirst reflex didn't come close to the impact of the now-missing moisture absorption. But it doesn't even require end-of-life illnesses to encounter such issues: a decade ago in a different country, I used to know someone who regularly didn't drink enough fluids because they didn't feel thirst, and got kidney stones as a result.

Food is also a common oddity. I'm currently dieting, my hunger is more of a suggestion; yet the need to lose weight comes from the fact that I've previously been ravenous.

Social interactions: I'm an introvert with a handful of connections, and ex of mine connects to so many people so easily that during the pandemic, her online birthday video call had about 90 minutes of her welcoming new people and telling everyone in one sentence how they were connected. I think she invited more people to that than I can actually name from my life.

> if we operated like we didn't know if other people were conscious to the same degree we were, then we would behave abhorrently

We do behave abhorrently.

You mention animals in the opening paragraph: if animals are as conscious as humans, then meat has the moral standing of industrialised murderous cannibalism, and even dairy has the moral standing of industrialised nonconsensual impregnation.

Fear of this possibility is why I am vegetarian, and why I repeatedly attempt veganism.

We're also pretty bad with out-group humans, though to a much lesser degree. It's why we're willing to go to war, and why most of us demonstrably don't care all that much about civilians dying so long as they aren't of our own nationality — How many genocides happened since 2000? I think most of us don't know the names of the groups, let alone the individuals.

> or that maybe even you are not conscious, you do not actually behave this way in practice

LLMs do not necessarily behave, though they may be so trained, as if they think they are not conscious.

Likewise a VHS tape of Brent Spiner in the 80s and 90s wearing white face paint: the actor is (of course I assume that), but the VHS itself isn't despite displaying the real human actor demonstrating these behaviours.

It tells me nothing about the underlying nature either way.

I’d separate “experiencing” from how it works here. It doesn’t have to be more lucid, all these people similar to you may not experience it and may only “work” properly, while you both work and experience. In this, you also may lose it anytime and the body you have wouldn’t even notice.

As of how unique you are, well, you may have it and they may not. You can’t tell due to “wouldn’t notice” part. You (both body and it) can only insanely loop back, converge on it for a while right now, until routine gets you again. Imagine a book about a guy who reads that same book. That’s the theme here. The author decides to never go back to this fourth-wall break and that’s it. Or he just stops writing in the middle of a sentence. Or something else. Whatever he does, the guy in the book has zero choice, despite realizing all of it clearly.

it really falls apart quickly - if we operated like we didn't know if other people were conscious to the same degree we were, then we would behave abhorrently

Only if the “work” part tends to this and loops back enough. Which is unusual for humans. People barely ask themselves questions about consciousness, and many actively(!) avoid the talks. You may think that free bodyless geneless part of “you” is something that makes decisions, but does it?

But the unfalsifiability of consciousness only points to the hardness of the problem and the current limitations of science, not the importance of understanding consciousness and its implications.

Put another way, even if science can’t currently tell us anything solid about consciousness, the implications of what it can’t tell us are still highly relevant to the kinds of science we do, e.g. we still treat other humans as if they’re conscious and this forms the basis for most ethical decision making.