>The implied answer is of course, one is water falling from the sky and one is a machine.
Lets say you're in a room a good distance from the window. Suddenly you hear what sounds like thunder and rain falling. From a distance it appears that it's raining outside.
Is the rain real? Or is it simulated on a screen well enough you can't tell?
You have input output devices just like a computer. They don't see reality, they filter out huge amounts of data and your brain just interprets it. If our machines get good enough we may be able to blast signals directly to the brain that say it's raining and the brain wouldn't have any idea if it was simulated or not. Much in the same way it feels like we exist and not a 3d hologram an infinite distance away (or whatever other weirdness physics may or could do).
So how do we get from "machines may get really good at faking things to human perception" to "machines themselves can have human-like (or 'better') perception"?
The question is so-called consciousness arising out of machines, not machines deceiving human consciousness.
Even then, that deception still doesn't prove equivalency of simulated and real things, unless we're adopting an extreme and self-contradictory subjectivist epistemology.
People seem to way overcomplicate consciousness, especially in machines.
Where does a running video game exist? It's a simulation in the hardware. Where is the consciousness in a human brain, again it's electrical signals in our brain.
At the end of the day a system is what it does. Once it starts simulating the human mind in ways that appear human then we're at the point of saying a plane has to flap its wings or it's not flying.
Lets say you're in a room a good distance from the window. Suddenly you hear what sounds like thunder and rain falling. From a distance it appears that it's raining outside.
Is the rain real? Or is it simulated on a screen well enough you can't tell?
You have input output devices just like a computer. They don't see reality, they filter out huge amounts of data and your brain just interprets it. If our machines get good enough we may be able to blast signals directly to the brain that say it's raining and the brain wouldn't have any idea if it was simulated or not. Much in the same way it feels like we exist and not a 3d hologram an infinite distance away (or whatever other weirdness physics may or could do).