And even if consciousness is an emergent property of the structure of the brain, how could we have a simulated brain report that it is experiencing consciousness when we cant define what it is in the first place?
it's not something that is even worth discussing. of course if you made an emulated version of a brain in a VR with the same structure and neurological action and it reported consciousness, then it would be conscious, of course, yes. This is like asking whether NES games can "really" be running in a browser, even if the browser is emulating an NES system and includes the code of the original cartridge. Is the game "really" running? Can you "really" play it? Meaningless questions. If the VR person with the same brain topology as a human and hundreds of billions of neurons reports consciousness then of course it has it. why would being emulated suddenly make it different from all 7 billion humans running natively in the world, especially if theoretically it could be compiled from the same source code (which we have a copy of, DNA was sequenced in full in the 90s).
Since my comment was about a thousand years out, there's no question and we don't need to discuss these things. It's open and shut. I don't need to give any citations.
I find it amusing that you think a topic as widely studied and disputed as consciousness is "open and shut" because of some assumptions that you choose to make. Nonetheless, I do appreciate hearing your perspective so thank you.
I completely discount this possibility and think it's not worth discussing. So, you are right that my mind is very closed to any alternatives to what I've stated, though as in your example of an antenna, we could describe such alternatives rigorously. Not worth our time. (IMO). Thanks for the replies.