What's special about doing the math that makes consciousness "come alive"? Suppose I take billions of years and trillions of trees to do a bunch of math on pencil and paper to simulate one minute of your experience, and thus there is an actual experience of that limit. Then I put my pencil down, forever. Do you cease to exist? Do you then start existing again when, trillions and trillions of years later, I say fuck it and continue doing the math?

What is it about the process of calculation that causes conscious experience?

Because if you are skeptical that the math actually has to be done in order for the experience to happen, then what you're really looking at is the mathematical universe hypothesis.

That is, assuming you hold fast to the assumption that the universe is physically deterministic and that consciousness is a mere epiphenomenon of the deterministic activity of atoms and molecules and has no reality of its own (and therefore that the fact that we are discussing consciousness via a physical medium does not imply that there is any such thing as a spiritual force that can have an effect on the physical world).