alt Hacker NewsCategory error started at "we should not treat humans with impaired cognitive abilities as equals".
Yes, there's a good chance that whatever combination of metrics gets accepted to draw the consciousness/moral weight boundary in the future, it'll have some overlaps like in that infamous quip about "smartest bears" and "dumbest tourists". Applied to a spot measurement, it'll likely put some subset of people - drunk, cognitively impaired, sleeping, children under N months, etc. - below the "conscious/sentient" threshold, and below some animals.
Which is why such criteria only make sense at population lifetime level, not individual level. That's both aggregate and temporal ranges. Temporal, because children grow up, drunk people sober, impaired people may get better and may have been better in the past. Aggregate, because once you go down to individual level, you invite most horrible crimes ever committed.
A baby's brain is in super-sponge mode. They lack experience and control. Just because they don't yet speak doesn't mean they would not have something to say.
That a drunk person shouldn't make critical decisions and nor should a toddler is different than equating a baby's experience to someone asleep or in a coma.
My 2yo had memories from over a year prior. She would bring up things that surprised us. She later forgot that stuff, but she always had a larger window of experience to pull from than we expected.
Treating kids like coma patients ignores that experience and window of memories. You bet your ass you could traumatize / condition a baby to fear. You cant do that to someone in a coma. I doubt you can condition someone purely in their sleep too fwiw.
We should assume a rich experience until proven otherwise.