>Now take this to the extreme: replace all of these neurons with empty shells and route the computation to a billion people in the world to perform on pen and paper. Is it still conscious? If so, what if you removed the brain altogether and just performed the computations directly on paper, is the paper conscious?

Yes, absolutely consciousness would exist in all of those scenarios — but you couldn’t claim that any one “thing” such as the paper itself, would “be” conscious. The notion of a separate self is still fundamentally an abstraction placed on top of billions of neurons interlinked with a musculoskeletal system, through which quadrillions of new atoms are constantly cycling through. On a long enough scale you only have the psychological “gestalt“ of a human.

Even the sensation of “self” is still ultimately just another internal cognitive model, because ultimately everything else we perceive is also just an internal model of reality.

In your example, that internal “self” model would continue to exist within the abstract computationally-mediated consciousness-generating process.

Each conscious process exists in its own fully separate ontological space—because it is inherently subjective.