Of course, my original comment had nothing to do with god. It had to do with "souls", for lack of a better term as that was the term that was used in the original discussion (suggest reading the original post if you want to know more---basically, as I understand the intent it simply referred to some hypothetical quality that is associated with consciousness that lies outside the realm of what is simulable on a Turing machine). If you think that humans are nothing but Turing machines, why is it morally wrong to kill a person but not morally wrong to turn off a computer? Please give a real answer...either provide an answer that admits that humans cannot be simulated by Turing machines, or else give your answer using only concepts relevant to Turing machines (don't talk about consciousness, qualia, hopes, whatever, unless you can precisely quantify those concepts in the language of Turing machines). And in the second case, your answer should allow me to determine where the moral balance between human and computers lies....would it be morally bad to turn off a primitive AI, for example, with intelligence at the level of a mouse?
There's one more aspect to that. You are "morally ok" to turn off only your own computer. Messing with other people stuff is "morally bad". And I don't think you can "own" self-aware machine more that you can "own" a human being.
You all know the rules: