I do understand your point, it's been summarised well by Searle in the Chinese Room thought experiment.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room
Now, could you convince me that I'm "conscious" in some way that means I could not be simulated by a Chinese Room? I just don't know what this "consciousness" is if not a mere black box that responds in the affirmative when asked "are you conscious?"
No you really are just hung up on what is life. I'm saying that we would have created that robot's consciousness, it's desires, needs, it's entire identity is "fake", though to the robot it would not be, because nothing created our identities, it does mean that they are ours, until a creator is found I guess.
Regardless of the mechanism through which the desire is put there, if the desire is real, the desire is real. Imagine we created microscopic synthetic life and then managed its environment long enough that we saw it evolve along very very similar paths as we did in terms of body form and neurological processes. Imagine we eventually managed to produce something that talked and acted like us. Would such a creation, engineered through managed evolution, possess real desires?
Circumstances of something's creation are sort of irrelevant except in what they can tell us about that thing at present.
Imagine you create your Wife/Husband, it's just a doll, but if you flip a switch, it will move and act like any other person you met, but you create it's identity, you give it it's desires and needs, you fill it with "thoughts" and make it believe those feelings and identity is it's own... How do you feel about this Being, being real?
If a neuron in a brain and one in a neural network both perform the same action when confronted with the same stimuls, in what way are they different?
If you replaced parts of your own biological hardware with neural prosthesis that performed identically, would you cease to be a real person? If so, at what replacement threshold?
At the point where you are telling a chip that "this is your personality, now do this". It's actually pretty simple. As you replace parts of the brain of a person, eventually you replace the person with something that simulates that person.
What if there were a Boltzmann Brain identical in form to a highly sophisticated AI created by humans? It's a natural product of the universe but there is nothing mechanically different from a very sophisticated bit of electronics running a complex program. How does that affect your argument that humans are special? Are Boltzmann Brains also special? If so, why?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boltzmann_brain
Like I said, my argument is that if we put the desire there, it's our desire, not the robots. If you created a robot to love you, and it does that, is it the robot's choice to love you? and yeah that brain would be "real" I'm not arguing that we are "real" or "illusions", I'm arguing that the robot's identity is artificial or "fake" because we created the identity.