Thus arguing whether fetus is conscious is a bad, bad idea, from the scientific point of view: there is no way to tell until we have a generally accepted model which agrees with all the obvious cases, and we do not have one yet.

Speak for yourself. It's a solved problem in some circles, or nearly so.

EDIT: I think people grossly misunderstood what I meant here. I was countering the "we do not have one yet" part of the quote, not anything to do with fetuses. What I meant was that explanations of "consciousness" (by which I am talking about the subjective experience of existing, perceiving, and thinking about the world) is most often a mysterious answer to a mysterious question. A causal model of consciousness eliminates that mystery, and allows us to calculate objectively how "conscious" various causal systems are.

As EY explains quite well in the mysterious answers sequence, free will is a nonsense concept. Once you understand the underlying causal origin of our perception of free will, you realize that the whole free will vs determinism debate is pointless bunk. So it goes with consciousness: once you understand its underlying causal nature, it becomes obvious that the question "at what point does X become conscious" doesn't even make sense.

Of course that doesn't stop philosophers from continuing to debate free-will vs determinism or the nature of consciousness. I think some contention must lie in what "generally accepted" means, and if we should care about that at all. If I discover an underlying physical or organization law of the universe that always holds, e.g. Newton's law of gravity or Darwin's natural selection, does not being "generally accepted" make it any less true?

(We probably need a sequence on consciousness...)