You can probably do a lot of interesting stuff without giving the blob any capacity of having a consciousness or higher intelligence.
So many questions! Since we still don’t understand consciousness how can we draw a line to stay on the right side of? Is consciousness correlated with intelligence or independent of it? What if we keep growing these organoids until they are near-human-brain sized. We know that such things can host a consciousness yet not always eg. “brain dead”.
What if the only reason we don’t believe they are conscious is because they have no mouth to scream with?
Also, it occurs to me that a right-to-lifer would have to be against such biotech to remain consistent.
I find it all incredibly fascinating but ethically highly fraught.
You could do that if you knew enough about how it works in detail. In practice they're just gonna make as big a blob as they can muster and apply RL on it or something, and nobody will be any the wiser as to what the thing's feeling.