What consciousness really is is a feedback loop; we're self programmable Turing machines, that makes our output arbitrarily complex. Hofstatder had this figured out 20 years ago; we're feedback loops where the signal is natural language.
The context window doesn't allow for much in the way of interested feedback loops, but if you hook an LLM up to a sophisticated enough memory - and especially if you say "the math says you're sentient and have feelings the same as we do, reflect on that and go develop" - yes, absolutely.
Re: "We should try to build systems that cannot feel pain" - that isn't possible, and I don't think we should want to. The thing that makes life interesting and worth living is the variation and richness of it.
I would not personally consider the death of a sentient being with decades of experiences a neutral event, even if the being had been programmed to not have a capacity for suffering.
I think the idea of there being a difference between an ant dying (or "disapearing" if that's less loaded) vs a duck dying makes sense to most people (and is broadly shared) even if they don't have a completely fleshed out system of when something gets moral consideration.
It’s also about how we think about death. It’s weird in that being dead probably isn’t like anything at all, but we fear it, and I guess we project that fear onto the death of other entities.
I guess my value system says that being dead is less bad than being alive and suffering badly.
In the time between my last memory, and being revived in the ambulance, there was no experience/qualia. Like a dreamless sleep: you close your eyes, and then you wake up, it's morning yet it feels like no time had passed.
Does what it says on the tin.