I believe the word “consciousness” is used in so many confused and conflicting ways that nobody should mention “consciousness” without clarifying what they mean by it. I will substitute your question with “How should we morally value emulations?”.
Personally, if an emulation behaved like a human in all respects except for physical presence, I would give them the same respect as I give a human, subject to the following qualifications:
I don’t believe multiple emulations with very similar memories should not be treated the same as an equal number of humans.
I don’t believe emulations should be given voting rights unless there is very careful regulation on how they are created; otherwise manufacturers would have perverse incentives. [edit: Actually, what should be regulated is not when they can be created, but when they can be given voting rights.]
Similarly, a careful look at practical considerations must be given before granting emulations other civil rights.
If this situation actually occurs in my lifetime, I would have access to more details on how emulations and society with emulations work. This information may cause me to change my mind.
If emulations behave in noticably different ways from humans, I would seek more information before making judgements.
In particular, according to my current moral intuition, I don’t give an argument of the form “This emulation behaves like just like a human, but it might not actually be conscious” any weight.
I think it is a mistake to focus on these kinds weird effects as “biological systems using quantum mechanics”, because it ignores the much more significant ways quantum mechanics is essential for all the ordinary things that are ubiquitous in biological systems. The stability of every single atom depends on quantum mechanics, and every chemical bond requires quantum mechanics to model. For the intended implication on the difficulty of Whole Bird Emulation, these ordinary usages of QM are much more significant. There are a huge number of different kinds of molecular interactions in a bird’s body and each one requires solving a multi-particle Schroedinger equation. The computation work for this one effect is tiny in comparison.
As I understand, the unique thing about this effect is that it involves much longer coherence times than in molecular interactions. This is cool, but unless you can argue that birds have error-correcting quantum computers inside them, which is incredibly unlikely, I don’t think it is that relevant to AI timelines.