Different theories of intelligence suggest different things on whether or not simulating consciousness is possible. No matter what one believes, some of the latest advancements in technology prove that brains, of at least simpler creatures than humans, are simulatable.
There exists a worm, called the C. Elegans that is one of the simplest organisms observable with the naked eye. It is about 1mm in length and has around 300 neurons. The Elegans worm has long been used as a sort of test organism for science, and for example was the first organism to have its whole genome sequence. As a result, scientists know a lot about it.
Some researchers at Cambridge were able to create a program that simulates all 300 neurons of the worm, and they placed this program in the body of a lego robot. The robot was able to avoid obstacles and move, exactly as the worm did, without any other programming telling it what to do.
In the same vein, J. Kevin O'Regan wrote an article on how to build a conscious robot that has the ability to feel. He believes that consciousness is entirely physical, and supports the physicalist theory of consciousness. He proposes that what we mean when we say we “feel” something is called “access consciousness”, or that we are aware that something exists and that we are ready to make use of it. He calls this the “easy” problem of consciousness, and that it is very easy to make robots which know things exist and can use them, like a bot that plays chess. He proposes that what we call conscious experiences, the “hard” problem of consciousness, is a two-tiered system, when the organism/robot/etc. is access conscious of it being access conscious. He believes that it is possible for a robot to simulate this, and thus consciousness is entirely physical.
Critique of this theory
The source’s two-tiered idea of consciousness is very interesting and at least partially valid, drawing from my own experiences. However it is actually fairly easy to write a program that is able to access its ability to access the ability to make use of things. In functional and object oriented programming models this is how many basic tasks get done. In software development, that is called method abstraction and encapsulation. At the end, it sort of offhandedly remarks that the program should also have a sense of self and be able to refer to itself, which is also common. In Java, there is a keyword this that refers to the current class (collection of code and data, or a segment of a program). I do not think that these programs are conscious, because if that were the case nearly every computer program would be conscious, and therefore the model of consciousness he proposes is flawed.
Citation
O'Regan, J. "How To Build A Robot That Is Conscious And Feels." Minds & Machines 22.2 (2012): 117-136. Academic Search Complete. Web. 3 Dec. 2015.