What would be the harm?

[bennyboy]

No, it doesn't, any more than the flow of electricity has value to a computer.  The computer doesn't give a shit if it is powered-up or not; it is OUR imposition of world view from which we derive a sense of function, and therefore of the goals of function, and therefore of the value of this or that state in serving those functional goals.  We desire to type out our philosophical ideas, rather than to look at a blank screen.

The computer may not be able to apprehend value, but electricity still has a value to a computer as a necessity of it's operation.  Conditional/universal.  In the same way, it may be a that a person is incapable of apprehending value, but that won;t mean that the thing being considered doesn't have it.

Then I don't agree with your definition of the word "value." Power is not necessary to a computer's operation, as a computer is operating perfectly fine just sitting there being a collection of metal and plastic particles. It's only if an outside observer wants the computer to DO something that there's any value to the power.

And this is a non-trivial point. All the things we're talking about have an underlying attribute about item cohesion. We conceptualize a brain as a unified arrangement of materials which has a certain function, and conceive of the idea that disruptions to this function (say by blowing parts of it onto your ceiling) represent a harm.

But the materials in the brain are elemental, and contain no brain-ness to them. There's no particular need for those elements not to be burned, fed to worms, or otherwise repurposed. What's the harm in anything, if the Universe perfectly conserves energy? The answer is in our experience of things: we prefer certain configurations of material to others-- brain material inside a head, processing food and saying "Yummy, daddy!"

There's literally nothing which we say has value that didn't get that value FROM US, i.e. from our world view, and our feelings about things in our world. Not a thing.