Let's imagine you're talking to an avatar representation of an agent in a VR setting. All you have to go on information-wise is the conversation you can have with the agent and your observation of the agent's behavior.

if that agents behavior is indistinguishable from another agents who you know to be 'real', and you cannot inspect the internal state of that agent to determine how it is deriving its responses, then there is, from your perspective, no difference between the two. They are equivalent.

If this were false, then every other mathematical equivalency would be false as well, which is not a true statement.

Therefore, your statement must be false, merely due to the fact that we are conscious.

Consciousness is the last holdout of 'specialness' we have so of course we are gonna hold onto it like crazy but the truth is that the consciousness that animates the vehicle is not 'special' - it just is - but everything is contained within it.

It is far easier to argue that the vehicle is 'special' - after all it is the recipient of a billion years of selection - than the consciousness.

It is exactly the fact that consciousness simply IS and IS EVERYWHERE that makes it so wondrous, not that it's 'special'. We are IT'S products, not the other way around.