Say we discover (somehow) that it's actually impossible to simulate a human-level conscious mind on inorganic substrate. What did we discover?
(e.g. we're running in a simulation, and a resolution limit prematurely halts Moore's Law; etc)
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depends what you mean by "impossible"—if we just can't figure out how to do it, for a long while people would simply say that we're missing some sort of "secret sauce," perhaps some yet undiscovered quantum phenomena...eventually though, theists would probably feel vindicated?
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It's interesting to ponder what must be true of a scenario in which we don't figure it out in ten thousand years, and also of one in which we discover (positively) that it's physically impossible.
This is largely the topic of Daniel Dennet’s “Consciousness Explained”. The Neuroscience in it is dated, but the philosophy is still relevant.
Or it could just be that human-level intelligence is inadequate for making any progress in that direction. Hopefully, AGI might have better crack it (unless building AGI turns out also to be something beyond the human level of intelligence)
Even if hypothetically AGI research somehow fails to make progress bio-research could march on and arrive at customizable, scalable neocortices in a vat. That would be quite a loophole of our simulation overlords gating compute based on chemistry.