[I'm having an almost identical discussion in another post and I thought you'd love to read @heretickitten's response, which is like your own, and I love the way it's worded:]

No, I'm saying that consciousness doesn't really exist. The illusion is just a bubble surrounding a machine.

We are already living in the illusion. What IS consciousness? It's hard to define, right?
It's just the idea of taking in sensory information and processing it, isn't it?

It's mechanical and stilted. Smarterchild, that old chat AI, is like the most thin bubble. A few words, and you realize it's just a machine. Pop.

Cleverbot is a bit better, the bubble of consciousness illusion is thicker. You might be fooled for a bit. Even it might be fooled, from its own perspective. But with prodding... Pop.

Introduce: The Human Machine. Me or you.

How mechanical are we? Of course it seems complex, just complex enough to fool us into thinking we're free-willed or something, or that we're not a machine. But we can't see the code that we're running on. The system architecture is too complex to fully comprehend.

Yet, it is still a machine. That means our consciousness is just another bubble, and if poked enough, it could pop, revealing that we are just mechanical beings, and that the real pilot is our genetic code. Not the brain.

Pop.