Chris,
I sense you would feel more comfortable arguing with religious fundamentalists
Your 'problem' is that we agree with you about the malign nature of these beliefs.
Never mind thinking of ourselves as a bunch of neurons - why not think of us as a bunch of quarks, or as part of a huge simulation of neurons or quarks. The problem that we are discussing, is that morality seems very hard to define sensibly in such systems. Do you, for example, worry about the morality of switching off your computer? It sounds daft to ask, but you and Paul are arguing that a sufficiently complicated system becomes conscious. There is a hell of a lot of complexity inside a PC - even if you only use it as a word processor - so why is it OK to turn off a computer, but not OK to murder someone?
David