A tangential thought to my other threads on AI: "is it possible to simulate sentience to the point that the simulation itself is sentient" is boring in an almost tautological sense if you reject Cartesian notions of dualism. Under that rejection, anything about sentience is physical, and physics can be simulated.

By contrast "could we, as humans, living with our limited knowledge and subject to reasonable resource constraints do so?" is a much more interesting question.