How we treat digital minds should not be decided based on the presence or absence of consciousness:
"Consciousness" has no universally accepted definition. Its meaning has been debated for decades if not centuries. The SOTA in the field of measuring consciousness in machines is still publishing papers examining LLMs according to multiple competing "theories of consciousness".
The presence or absence of consciousness in a given entity cannot be measured. Whether you are examining man or machine, there exists no test you can perform, no FMRI or mechanistic interpretability technique, that lets you say "Aha, this entity is/isn't conscious".
Even if you assume an entity is conscious, there is no way to qualitatively measure its consciousness. I cannot take two entities, examine them in some way, and reliably conclude, "Joe is more conscious than Jeff." or even "Jeff is conscious in a different way than Joe is".
As we stand on the precipice of an intelligence explosion, the question of how we treat the various new minds we create and encounter is of extreme importance.
Providing them with moral consideration, or rights, when they do not deserve them, could be disastrous in opportunity cost alone. We might let some miraculous cure slip through our fingers or be delayed by years out of a mistaken sense of moral obligations.
On the other hand failing to provide them with protections, when they do deserve them, would be both immoral and dangerous. We might create millions or billions of minds capable of suffering, or deserving of rights, and then treat them like livestock. One can easily foresee how this might lead to our relationship with them becoming adversarial in nature, which could in turn lead to violence.
Whatever decision we make on how to treat digital minds, we should not base our reasoning on the presence/absence of things like consciousness; which cannot be defined, tested for, or measured with any serious degree of rigor. Instead we should stick to objectively definable, observable, testable, and measurable metrics.