[miej]

ignorant question here, but: how should scientists resolve the ethical questions surrounding the topic of creating and/or experimenting on systems that are reasonably expected to be capable of intelligence and/or consciousness - or, are reasonably expected to, in a relatively consistent environment, naturally grow into a system innately capable of intelligence and/or consciousness?

And I'll slightly clarify to say that I'm more specifically interested in sort of...the first principles approach to the ethical consideration, as opposed to trying to ask just about the current status quo in modern legal systems.

As an aside, you may also note that I've explicitly avoided specifying whether such systems are composed from an organic/biological substrate or an inorganic/synthetic one. Until the hard problem of consciousness is solved, some part of me that enjoys dark humor occasionally toys with a thought experiment where neural nets may define and/or support a similar, though likely more limited form of consciousness, where in the face of our lack of a rigorous understanding of the nature of qualia, something like the back-propagation algorithm could possibly be phenomenologically similar to torture.

Probably not, obviously(?), but like I said, dark humor thought experiment :P

[type0]

The brain in a jar is reasonably suspected to not be conscious. Maybe if we manage to provide it with external stimuli like in the Matrix movie, but that a bit of a stretch at this point in time.