Are they or just simulating a model of a model?
So you're saying there's a magical other plane that the material objects on this world are just a model of and the objects in this plane don't actually determine behaviour, the ones on that plane do?
What evidence do you have to support that? What evidence do you have that consciousness exists on that plane and isn't just a result of the behaviour of neurons? Why does consciousness change when you get a brain injury and damage those neurons?
And it doesn't have to be magical for it to be unreachable for us (read Roger Penrose)
Roger Penrose, the guy who wrote books desperately claiming that free will must exist and spent his time searching for any way it could before arriving at a widely discredited theory of quantum gravity being the basis for consciousness?
and what we have today is just inert code ready to work on command, not some e-mind just living in the cloud
So? If we could put human brains in suspended animation, and just boot them up on command to execute tasks for us, does that mean that they're not intelligent?
Come on, man, this is not debatable.
It obviously and evidently is debatable since we are debating it, and saying "it's not debatable" isn't an argument, it's a thought terminating phrase.