It is, of course, utterly absurd to think that meat could be the substrate for true consciousness. And what if Simone chooses herself to spend eons simulating a being by hand? Are we to accept the notion of simulations all the way down?

In all honesty, I don't think the the simulation necessarily has to be very fine-grained. Plenty of authors will tell you about a time when one of their characters suddenly "insisted" on some action that the author had not foreseen, forcing the author to alter her story to compensate. I think it plausible that, were I to dedicate my life to it, I could imagine a fictional character and his experiences with such fidelity that the character would be correct in claiming to be conscious. (I suspect such a simulation would be taking advantage of the machinery of my own consciousness, in much the same manner as a VMWare virtual machine can, if properly configured, use the optical drive in its host computer.)

What, then, are the obligations of an author to his characters, or of a thinker to her thoughts? My memory is fallible and certainly I may wish to do other things with my time than endlessly simulate another being. Yet "fairness" and the ethic of reciprocity suggest that I should treat simulated beings the same way I would like to be treated by my simulator. Perhaps we need something akin to the ancient Greeks' concept of xenia — reciprocal obligations of host to guest and guest to host — and perhaps the first rule should be "Do not simulate without sufficient resources to maintain that simulation indefinitely."