Good points in the article, and I agree with your conclusion.

To this remark about consciousness though, I'd like to suggest that we actually do probably know the answer.

I'd argue that we can think of human and animal bodies essentially as machines that generate consciousness. Which means that there's no reason it wouldn't be possible to generate, or synthesize, consciousness via other physical processes besides animal bodies.

But it seems like it would be inaccurate to call such consciousness "simulated". Because if you're truly synthesizing consciousness, then it would be just as real as any other "naturally occurring" consciousness.

If you put a fish in a tank, and control the temperature, lighting, etc., and put it in a room without windows, the fish wouldn't have any idea whether it was night or day or snowy or warm outside. But it would still be on our same plane of consciousness. You could say that you’re “simulating” the fish’s reality, but you aren’t simulating the fish itself.

And I think that's how synthesized consciousness would work too. You could build a machine that generates a local sentience, and you could manipulate the environmental inputs that contribute to its perceptions, but it would still be a real consciousness living in the same universe as us.