"Instead of a measurable, quantifiable thing that exists independently out in the world, we suggest that intelligence is a label." Thought experiments lead me

"Instead of a measurable, quantifiable thing that exists independently out in the world, we suggest that intelligence is a label." Thought experiments lead me to the conclusion that the same is true of consciousness. I make the analogy to how the essay, What Color Are Your Bits? which argues that copyright is "out of band" (my summary) from the actual bits of data. I think the property of a system having consciousness is, like copyright of data, neither intrinsic nor an epiphenomenon but rather at least partially a status of how we regard it. The thought experiment goes thus: Assume it's possible to simulate a conscious brain with a deterministic program. (Already a big ask for some, but this is one of the axioms of my argument so bear with me.) Assume that if embodied the simulation would be indistinguishable from the original person, but also if not embodied it could be interacted with in a simulated environment. If it is deterministic, that means if you re-ran the simulation with same data , inputs, and timing, all would proceed identically. Is the simulation conscious again while replaying it along a fixed path? Suppose you memoized portions of the computation. How much of the brain could you memoize before you no longer consider it conscious? Suppose you could, instead of memoizing "in breadth", instead use memoization to skip steps of the consciousness without changing the outcome. How many in-between states could you gloss over while still considering the simulation conscious? Suppose you divided the simulation among multiple computers, without changing the outcome. If you accept the original premise, you may have little trouble accepting a distributed system with a fast network is also capable of hosting a conscious mind. However as we said this replay is deterministic, there's nothing stopping nodes from substituting internal playback of pre-recorded network packets for actually communicating on the network. Are you prepared to call it a simulation of consciousness if a "distributed system" of nodes each internally simulating all of it, in portions, while all remaining silent and not sending any network packets between them? My point with all of these variations is not to say which is or isn't conscious, it's to argue there is no clear dividing line. One could come up with moral arguments about which of these scenarios it's unethical to keep trapped in this experimental setup versus which are the mere image of a thing and not the thing itself, but that's my point: it's only a moral/ethical dilemma and not a physical or informational state change between non-conscious and conscious. The "universe doesn't care;" consciousness is not a conserved property.