What if there is a rule in the simulation preventing intelligences created by simulants from becoming sentient?

I suppose you can point at all the artificial simulants and their sentience, but as pointed out in a sibling comment, so what.

What if the simulation is actually being "run" inside an entity or organism that was the natural product of its environment?

Still, human intelligence would be simulated within that, presumably. So the platform might not be the obvious one, but the software would still be theoretically possible.

That, or there's some interface to that platform that provides a source of intelligence. Maybe we're nothing more than Docker containers running on God's hardware.

So, like a dream?

Is there a difference between a conscious being and a being who has been programmed to believe it has a conscience?

I'm no expert on philosophy, but I feel like consciousness is a subjective experience. So externally there would be no difference, but I'm pretty sure I'm conscious.

Of course, I've also heard of the illusion of consciousness, but that's where my brain explodes.

But what if consciousness itself is simulated. The problem here is that a simulation would have to adhere to a set of programmatic rules meaning that the only way consciousness could arise as we like to think we know it, is via some weird unintended side effect.

The question would be mooted.

How?