"if the simulation is accurate, then the person you're simulating is conscious" Not necessarily. You can't treat a human as a black box, and then use inputs an

"if the simulation is accurate, then the person you're simulating is conscious" Not necessarily. You can't treat a human as a black box, and then use inputs and outputs to definitively draw conclusions about what's going on inside the black box. You could potentially have two black boxes that give identical outputs for the same inputs, yet have completely different mechanisms inside for arriving at those outputs. For example, say you have someone who's very good at arithmetic able to multiply two numbers. You put him inside one black box and a pocket calculator inside another. You give each box two numbers and they both output the product. Both black boxes will give you identical outputs for any given input. You know the box with the person inside is conscious, but this is not enough information to conclude the other black box is conscious. "Consciousness" is not a descriptor of the outputs of a system. Consciousness is a descriptor of how it processes the inputs to arrive at the outputs. There is a thought experiment in psychology related to the subject called the p-zombie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie. "Such a zombie would be indistinguishable from a normal human being but lack conscious experience, qualia, or sentience. For example, if a philosophical zombie were poked with a sharp object it would not inwardly feel any pain, yet it would outwardly behave exactly as if it did feel pain." You're basically arguing that it's impossible for a p-zombie to exist. That is the view some people hold, but arguing for that case is a lot more complex than simply saying its a tautology