The argument is about causation or generation, not simulation. Of course we can simulate just about anything, I could write a program that just prints "Hello, I'm a conscious being!" instead of "Hello, World!".
The weather example is a good one: you can run a program that simulates the weather in the same way my program above (and LLMs in general) simulate consciousness, but no one would say the program is _causing_ weather in any sense.
Of course, it's entirely possible that more and more people will be convinced AI is generating consciousness, especially when tricks like voice or video chat with the models are employed, but that doesn't mean that the machine is actually conscious in the same way a human body empirically already is.
