Are you saying that, in some abstract sense, that actually pouring the cup may be isomorphic to running a perfect simulation of pouring the cup?

Genuinely curious about your statement that its an illusion / arbitrary distinction, to figure out if there's a gap in my thinking / reasoning. To me there's a clear distinction between the actual thing happening via physical dynamics vs. us (humans) having creating a discretized abstraction (binary computation) on top of that and running a process on that abstraction.

Maybe there's some true computational universality where the universes dynamics are discrete (definitely plausible) and there's no distinction between how a processes dynamics unfold: i.e. consciousness binds to states and state transitions regardless of how they are instantiated. I did use to hold this view , but now I'm not so sure.