From the eliminative materialist perspective we should hence be cautious about ascribing or not ascribing suffering to software, since we do not (yet) have a good understanding of what suffering is (or rather, what the actual underlying component that is morally relevant, is).
They acknowledged it.
I felt like this draft paper by Anders Sandberg was a well-thought-out essay on the morality of experiments on brain emulations. Is there anything you disagree with here, or think he should handle differently?
http://www.aleph.se/papers/Ethics%20of%20brain%20emulations%20draft.pdf