How can a simulation be human when it isn't human? It's a simulation. A human is a human, a simulation is not. Anything that is not a human, is not a human and can never be a human.

And there absolutely is something essential to the concept of being human that we are entirely incapable of replicating artificially. In fact as far as I know we are incapable of synthesizing any kind of life whatsoever. We can't even create the simplest type of living cell imaginable.

So to claim that we could just create consciousness, a fundamental property of this "life" thing that we don't properly understand, within a piece of rock is beyond naive. We don't even know what it is or how it is.