It doesn't seem so easy, because if you can easily dismiss a collection of digital neurons then why is it so hard to dismiss a collection of biological neurons as being conscious?

The best way I have found to think about this is that consciousness is a property of a collection, like temperature. One atom does not have a temperature but if you have enough of them together then it's a useful enough property to talk about. Similarly, one human neuron does not have consciousness but if you put enough of them together then they do.